A bandersnatch is twice the size of a brontosaur. Its skeleton is flexible but has no joints; the only breaks in its smooth white skin are the tufts of sensory bristles on either side of its tapering blank head. It moves on a rippling belly foot. Bandersnatchl live In the lowlands of Jinx, browsing off the gray yeast along the shorelines. You’d think they were the most helpless things In known space .. until you saw one bearing down on you like a charging mountain. Once I saw an ancient armored car crushed flat across a lowlands rock, straddled by the broken bones of the beast that ran It down.

“The Handicapped,” 1968

BRENDA

2656 AD, MARCH (FIREBEE CLOCK TIME)

Human-settled worlds all look alike from high orbit. Terry thought that the CoDominium explorers must have had it easy.

Aiderson jump. ZZZTT! One white pinpoint among myriads. has become a flood of white light. Nerve networks throughout ship and crew are strummed in four dimensions. Wait for the blur to go away. You had a hangover this bad, once. It lasted longer.

Now search the ecliptic a decent distance from the sun. Look for shadows in the neudar screen: planets. Big enough? Small enough? Colors: blue with a white froth of clouds, if men are to breathe the air. Is there enough land? How big are the icecaps? Three or four months to move close, and look.

Nuliajuk’s icecaps had covered half the surface. If they ever melted, Nuliajuk would be all water. A cold world. Nobody else would settle, but what about Eskimos? So Terry Kakumee’s ancestors had found a home, four centuries ago.

Tanith had no icecaps at all, and almost no axial tilt. Half land, but plenty of rainfall: the equatorial oceans boiled where they were shallow enough. Salt deserts around the equator. Swamps across both poles. Transportees had settled the north pole.

Terry Kakumee floated against the big window at Firebee’s nose. It was sixteen years since he’d seen Tanith.

Tanith was a growing crescent, blue with white graffiti, and a blazing highlight across the northern pole. Summer. One serious mountain, The Warden, stood six kilometers tall. It had been white-tipped in winter. Dagon City would be in the foothills, south.

The clouds were sparse. The city itself didn’t show, but he found a glare-point that had to be the old spaceport.

Brenda’s farm would be south of that.

Sharon Hayes drifted up behind him. ‘I’ve been talking to the Dagon Port Authority. One George Callahan, no rank given, tells me they don’t have much in the way of repair facilities, but we’re intensely welcome. I’ve got a dinner date.”

“Good.” On a world this far from what civilization was left near Sparta, the population would feel cut off. Ships would be welcome. “What about fuel?”

“They can make liquid hydrogen. There’s a tanker. Callahan gave me a course down. Four hours from now, and we’ll have to lower Firebee’s orbit. Time to move, troops. Are we all going down?”

She meant that for Charley. Charley Lame (cargo and purser) was almost covered in burn scars. His face was a smooth mask. There was an unmarred patch along his jaw that he had to shave, and good skin in strips along his back and the backs of his arms and legs, and just enough unburned scalp to grow a decent queue. Sometimes he didn’t want to face strangers. He said, “Somebody’d better stay on duty, Captain Sharon. Did you ask about outies?”

“They haven’t been raided since the Battle. They do have a couple of high-thrust mining ships. Charley, I think Firebee’s safe enough.”

Charley let out a breath. “I’ll come. I can’t be the only war vet on Tanith. There was— I wonder—”

“Brenda,” Terry said.

“Yeah. I wonder about Brenda sometimes.”

“I wonder too.”

2640A, NOVEMBER (TANITH LOCAL TIME)

Lieutenant Kakumee had been Second Engineer aboard the recon ship Firebee during the destruction of the Sauron Second Fleet. The enemy’s gene-tailored warriors were dead or fled, but they had left their mark. Damaged ships were limping in from everywhere in Tanith system. Firebee would orbit Tanith until she could be refitted or rifled for parts.

Firebee’s midsection was a blob of metal bubbles where the Langston Field generator had vaporized itself and half melted the hull around it. It was the only hit Firebee bad taken. Charley Lame had been caught in the flare.

They’d taken him to St. Agnes Hospital in Dagon City.

“The sky’s full of ruined ships,” Terry told him. “Most of them have damaged Langston Field generators. First thing that goes in a battle. We’ll never get replacements.”

Charley didn’t answer. He might have heard; he might have felt the touch of Terry’s hand. He looked like a tremendous pillow stuck with tubes in various places.

“Without a Langston Field we don’t have a ship. I’d give Firebee a decent burial if I could get her down. You’ll be healed a long time before any part of her flies again,” Terry said. He believed that Charley would heal. He might never look quite human again, and if he walked he’d never run; but his central nervous system wasn’t damaged, and his heart beat, and his lungs sucked air through the hole at one end of the pillow, while regeneration went on inside.

Terry heard urgent voices through the door. Patients healthy enough for curiosity stirred restlessly.

“Something’s going on.” Terry patted the padded hand. “I’ll come back and tell you about it.”

At first glance she wasn’t that badly hurt.

She was slumped in an armchair in the lobby. Half a dozen people swarmed about her: a doctor, two nurses, two MPs and a thick-necked Marine in a full leg cast who was trying to stay out of the way and see too. She was wearing a bantar cloth coverall. It was a mess: sky-blue with a green-and-scarlet landscape on the back, barely visible under several pounds of mud and swamp mold.

Bantar cloth had been restricted to Navy use up to eighty years ago. It was nearly indestructible. It wasn’t high style, but farmers and others in high-risk jobs wore bantar cloth at half the price of a tractor. Whatever had happened to the woman, it would have been worse without that.

She had black ancestry with some white (skin like good milk chocolate, but weathered by fatigue and the elements) and oriental (the tilt of the eyes). Thick, tightly coiled black hair formed a cushion around her head. It carried its own share of mud. A nasty gash cut through the hair. It ran from above her left eye back to the crown of her head. A nurse had cleaned it with alcohol; it was bleeding.

She drained a paper cup of water. A doctor—Charley’s doctor, Lex Hartner—handed her another, and she drained that too. “No more,” Hartner said. “We’ll get you some broth.”

She nodded and said, “Uh.” Her lip curled way up on the left. She tried to say something else. Stroke? Nonsense, she couldn’t be past thirty. The head wound—

Poor woman.

Hartner said, “We’ll get that soup into you before we look you over. How long were you out there?”

“Wumble.” Her lip curled up; then half her face wrinkled in frustration. The other half remained slack. She held up one finger, then lifted another.

“A week or two?”

She nodded vigorously. Her eyes met Terry’s. He smiled and turned away, feeling like an intruder. He went back to talk to Charley.

2656, JUNE (TANITH LOCAL TIME)

The wrecked ships that had haloed the planet after the Battle of Tanith were long gone. Shuttle #1 descended through a sky that seemed curiously empty.

What had been the Tanith spaceport still glared like a polished steel dish. Seen from low angle the crater became a glowing eye with a bright pupil.

The big Langston Field dome had protected Dagon City during the battle. The smaller dome at the spaceport had absorbed a stream of guided meteors, then given all of the energy back as the field collapsed.

A new port had grown around the crater’s eastern rim. Terry and Charley, riding as passengers while Sharon flew, picked out a dozen big aircraft, then a horde of lighter craft. The crater must make a convenient airfield. The gleaming center was a small lake. Have to avoid that.

Both of Firebee’s shuttles had lost their hover capability. They’d been looking for repair facilities for six years now. Shuttle #1 came in a little fast because of the way the crater dipped, coasted across and braked to a stop at the rim.

Tanith was hot and humid, with a smell of alien vegetation. The sun was low. Big autumn-colored flutterbys formed a cloud around them as they emerged. These were new to Terry. He’d never seen a Tanith summer.

They had drawn a crowd of twenty-odd, still growing. Terry noticed how good they looked: shorter than average, but all well muscled, none obtrusively fat. A year in Tanith’s 1.14 gravity made anyone look good. The early strokes and heart attacks didn’t show.

Terry was a round man; he felt rounder by contrast. Sharon Hayes fit right in. She was past fifty, and it showed in the deep wrinkle patterns around eyes and mouth; but regular exercise and a childhood in Tanith gravity had kept her body tight and muscular.

The airport bar was cool and dry, and crowded now.

George Callahan was a burly man in his forties, red hair going gray, red fur along his thick arms. He and Sharon seemed to like each other on sight. They settled at a smaller table, and there they dealt with entry forms on Callahan’s pocket computer. (Cargo: a Langston Field generator big enough to shield a small city. Purpose of entry: trade.)

Terry and Charley drank at the crowd’s expense and tried to describe sixteen years of interstellar trading.

Terry let Charley do most of the talking. Let him forget the fright mask he wore. “Yes we are heroes, by damn! We saved Phoenix from famine two years ago.” He’d tried to hold his breath when Firebee’s Langston Field generator blew up, but his voice still had a gravelly texture. “We’d just come from Hitchhiker’s Rest. They’ve got a gene-tailored crop called kudzu grain. We went back and filled Firebee with kudzu grain, we were living in the stuff all the way back, and we strewed it across the Phoenix croplands. It came up before twenty-two million people quite ran out of stores. Then it died off, of course, because it isn’t designed for Phoenix conditions, but by then they had their crops growing again. I never felt that good before or since.”

The barmaids were setting out a free lunch, and someone brought them plates. Fresh food! Charley had his mouth full, so Terry said, “It’s Hitchhiker’s Rest that’s in trouble. That kudzu grain is taking over everything. It really is wonderful stuff, but it eats the houses.”

He bit into a sandwich: cheese and mystery meat and tomatoes and chili leaf between thick slices of bread. Sharon was working on another. She’d have little room for dinner . . . or was this lunch? The sun had looked like late afternoon. He asked somebody, “What time is it local?”

“Ten. Just short of noon.” The woman grinned. “And nights are four hours long.”

He’d forgotten: Dagon City was seven hundred kilometers short of the north pole. “Okay. I need to use a phone.”

“I’ll show you.” She was a small brunette, wide at hips and shoulders. When she took Terry’s arm she was about his height.

Charley was saying, “We don’t expect to get rich. There aren’t any rich worlds. The war hurt everybody, and some are a long time recovering. We don’t try to stop outies. We just go away, and I guess everyone else does too. That means a lot of worlds are cut off.”

The brunette led him down a hall to a bank of computer screens. He asked, “How do I get Information?”

“You don’t have a card? No, of course not. Here.” She pushed plastic

into a slot. The screen lit with data, and Terry noticed her name: Maria Montez. She tapped QQQ.

The operator had the look of bony Spartan aristocracy: pale skin, high cheekbones and a small, pursed mouth. “What region?”

“I don’t know the region. Brenda Curtis.”

The small mouth pursed in irritation. (Not a recording?) Terry said, “Try south-south. Then west.” Brenda had inherited the farm. She might have returned there, or she might still be working at the hospital.

“South-south, Brenda Curtis.” The operator tapped at her own keyboard. “Six-two-one-one-six-eight. Do you have that?”

She was alive! “Yes. Thank you.” He jotted it on his pocket computer.

Maria was still there . . . Naturally she’d want her card back. Did he care what she heard? He took his courage in both hands and tapped out the number.

A girl answered: ten years old, very curly blond hair, cute, with a serious look. “Brenda’s.”

“Can I talk to Brenda Curtis?”

“She’s on the roof.”

“Will you get her, please?”

“No, we don’t bother her when she’s on the roof.”

“Oh. Okay. Tell her I called. Terry Kakumee. When should I call back?”

“After dinner. About eighteen.”

“Thanks.” Something about the girl . . . “Is Brenda your mother?”

“Yes. I’m Reseda Anderssen.” The girl hung up.

Maria was looking at him. “You know Brenda Curtis?”

“I used to. How do you know her?”

“She runs the orphanage. I know one of her boys. Not hers, I mean, but one of the boys she raised.”

“Tell me about her.”

Maria shrug-sniffed. Maybe talking about another woman wasn’t what she’d had in mind. “She moved to a swamp farm after the Battle of Tanith. The City paid her money to keep orphans, and I guess there were a lot of them. Not so many now. Lots of teenagers. They’ve got their own skewball team, and they’ve had the pennant two years running.”

“She was in bad shape when I knew her. Head wound. Does her lip pull up on one side when she talks?”

“Not that I noticed.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m glad she’s doing okay.”

Thinking of her as a patient might have put a different light on things. Maria took his arm again. They made an interesting match, Terry thought. Same height, both rounded in the body, and almost the same shade of hair and skin. She asked, “Was she in the Navy? Like Mr. Lame—”

“How did she get hurt?”

“Maria, I’m not sure that’s been declassified. She wasn’t in the Navy, but she got involved with the Sauron thing anyway.” And he wouldn’t tell her any more.

2640A, NOVEMBER (TANITH LOCAL TIME)

He’d taken Dr. Hartner to dinner partly because he felt sorry for him, partly to get him talking.

Lex Hartner was thin all over, with a long, narrow face and wispy blond hair. Terry would always remember him as tired. . . but that was unfair. Every doctor on Tanith lived at the edge of exhaustion after the battle of Tanith.

“Your friend’ll heal,” he told Terry. “He was lucky. One of the first patients in after the battle. We still had eyes in stock, and we had a regeneration sleeve. His real problem is, we’ll have to take it off him as soon as he can live without it.”

“Scars be damned?”

“Oh, he’ll scar. They wouldn’t be as bad if we left the sleeve on him longer. But Napoleon’s coming in with bum cases—”

“Yeah. I wouldn’t want your job.”

“This is the hardest part.”

It was clear to Terry: there was no way to talk Lex into leaving Charley in the sleeve for a little longer. So he changed the subject. “That woman in the hall this morning—”

Lex didn’t ask who he meant. “We don’t have a name yet. She appeared at a swamp farm south of here. Mrs. Maddox called the hospital. We sent an ambulance. She must have come out of the swamps. From the look of her, she was there for some time.”

“She didn’t look good.”

“She’s malnourished. There’s fungus all over her. Bantar cloth doesn’t let air through. You have to wear net underwear, and hers was rotted to shreds. That head wound gouged her skull almost through the bone. Beyond that I just can’t tell, Terry. I don’t have the instruments.”

Terry nodded; he didn’t have to ask about that.

There had been one massive burn-through during the Battle of Tanith. Raw plasma had washed across several city blocks for three or four seconds. A hotel had been slagged, and shops and houses, and a stream of flame had rolled up the dome and hovered at the apex while it died. The hospital had lost most of its windows . . . and every piece of equipment that could be ruined by an electromagnetic pulse.

“There’s just no way to look inside her head. I don’t want to open her up. She’s coming along nicely, she can say a few words, and she can draw and use sign language. And she tries so hard.”

All of which Terry told to Charley the next day. They’d told him Charley wasn’t conscious most of the time; but Terry pictured him going nuts from boredom inside that pillow.

2656, JUNE (TANITH LOCAL TIME)

The bar had turned noisy. At the big table you could still hear Charley. “Boredom. You spend months getting to and from the Jump points. We’ve played every game program in ship’s memory half to death. I think any one of us could beat anyone on Tanith at Rollerball, Chance, the Mirror Game—”

“We’ve got a Mirror Game,” someone said. “It’s in the Library.”

‘‘Great!’’

Someone pushed two chairs into the pattern for Maria and Terry. Charley was saying, “We did find something interesting this trip. There’s a Sauron ship in orbit around EST 1310. We knew it was there, we could hear it every time we used the jump points, but EST 1310 is a flare star. We didn’t dare go after it. But this trip we’re carrying a mucking great Langston Field generator in the cargo hold . .

Captain Sharon looked dubious. Charley was talking a lot. They’d pulled valuable data from the Sauron wreck, salable data. But so what? Tanith couldn’t reach the ship, and maybe they should be considered customers. And Brenda might hear. Let him talk.

“It was Morningstar, a Sauron hornet ship. The Saurons must have gutted it for anything they could use on other ships, then turned it into a signaling beacon. They’d left the computer. They had to have that to work the message sender. We disarmed some booby traps and managed to get into the programming . .

People drifted away, presumably to run the airport. Others came in. The party was shaping up as a long one. Terry was minded to stay. He’d maintained a pleasant buzz, and Brenda had waited for sixteen years. She’d wait longer.

At seven he spoke into Maria’s ear. “I’d be pleased to take you to dinner, if you can guide me to a restaurant.”

She said, “Good! But don’t you like parties?”

“Oh, hell yes. Stick with the crowd?”

“Good. Till later.”

“I still have to make that phone call.”

She nodded vigorously and fished her card out of a pocket. He got up and went back to the public phones.

2640A, NOVEMBER (TANITH LOCAL TIME)

When Firebee’s Shuttle #2 came down, there had been no repair facilities left on Tanith. There was little for a Second Engineer to do.

Napoleon changed that. Napoleon was an old Spartan troopship arriving in the wake of the Battle of Tanith. Word had it that it was loaded with repair equipment. Now Napoleon’s shuttles were bringing stuff down, and Napoleon’s purser was hearing requests from other ships in need of repairs.

Captain Shu and the others would be cutting their own deals in orbit. Terry and Charley were the only ones on the ground. Terry spent four days going through Shuttle #2, listing everything the little GO craft would need. When he went begging to Napoleon’s Spartan officers, he wanted to know exactly what to ask for. He made three lists: maximum repairs if he could get them, the minimum he could settle for, and a third list no other plaintiff would have made. He hoped.

He hadn’t visited Charley in four days.

The tall dark woman in the corridor caught his attention. He would have remembered her. She was eight inches taller than Terry, in a dressing gown too short for her and a puffy shower cap. She was more striking than beautiful: square-jawed and lean enough to show ribs and hip bones where the cloth pulled taut.

She caught him looking and smiled with one side of her face. “He’o! I member you!” Her lip tugged way up on the left.

“Oh, it’s you,” Terry said. Six days ago: the head wound case. “Hey, you can talk! That’s good. I’m Terry Kakumee.”

“Benda Curris.”

It was an odd name. “Benda?”

“Br, renda. Cur, tiss.”

“Brenda. Sorry. What were you doing out there in the swamps?” He instantly added, “Does it tire you to talk?”

She spoke slowly and carefully. “Yes. I told my story to the Marines and Navy officers and Doctor Hartner. I don’t like it. You wo-wouldn’t like it. They smiled a lot when we all knew I wasn’t pregnant.” She didn’t seem to see Terry’s bewilderment. “You’re Charley ‘s friend. He’s out of the re-gener-ation sleeve.”

“Can he have visitors?”

“Ssure. I’ll take you.”

Charley wasn’t a pillow any more. He didn’t look good, either. Wasted. Burned. He didn’t move much on the water bed. His lips weren’t quite mobile enough; he sounded a bit like Brenda. “There are four regeneration sleeves on Tanith, and one tank to make the goo, and when they wear out there’s nothing. My sleeve is on a Marine from Tabletop. Burn patient, like me. I asked. I see you’ve met Brenda?”

“Yeah.”

“She went through a hell of an experience. We don’t talk about it. So how’s the work coming?”

“I’ll go to the purser tomorrow. I want all my ducks in a row, but I don’t want everyone getting their requests in ahead of me either. I made a list of things we could give up to other ships. That might help.”

“Good idea. Very Eskimo.”

“Charley, it isn’t really. The old traditions have us giving a stranger what he needs whether we need it or not.”

He noticed Brenda staring at him. She said, “How strange.”

He laughed a little uncomfortably. “I suppose a stranger wouldn’t ask for what the village had to have. Anyway, those days are almost gone.”

Brenda listened while they talked about the ship. She wouldn’t understand much of it, though both men tried to explain from time to time. “The Langston Field is your reentry shield and your weapons shield and your true hull. We’ll never get it repaired, but Firebee could still function in the outer system. I’m trying to get the shuttles rebuilt. Maybe we can make her a trader. She sure isn’t part of a Navy anymore.”

Charley said, “The Tanith asteroids aren’t mined out.”

“So?”

“Asteroids. Metal. Build a metal shell around Firebee for a hull.”

“Charley, you’d double her mass!”

“We could still run her around the inner system. If we could get a tank from some wrecked ship, a detachable fuel tank, we’d be interstellar again.” His eyes flicked to Brenda and he said, “With more fuel we could still get to the Jump points and back. Everything’d be slower, we couldn’t outrun anything. . . have to stay away from bandits. .

“You’re onto something. Charley, we don’t really want to be asteroid miners for five years. But if we could find two good tanks—”

“Ahhh! One for a hull. Big. Off a battleship, say.”

“Yeah.”

“Terry, I’m tired,” Charley said suddenly, plaintively. “Take Brenda to dinner? They let her out.”

“Brenda? I’d be honored.”

She smiled one-sided.

November was twelve days long on Tanith, and there wasn’t any December. Every so often they put the same number on two consecutive years, to stay even with Spartan time.

In November Dagon City was dark eighteen hours out of twenty-one-plus. The street lighting was back, but snatchers were still a problem. Maybe Terry’s uniform protected him; and he went armed, of course.

He took her to a place that was still passable despite the shortages.

He did most of the talking. She’d never heard of the Nuliajuk migration. He told her how the CoDominium had moved twenty thousand Eskimos, tribes all mixed together, to a world too cold for the comfort of other peoples.

They’d settled the equator, where the edges of the icecaps almost met. They’d named the world for a myth-figure common to all the tribes, though names differed: the old woman at the bottom of the sea who brought game or withheld it. There was native sea life, and the imported seals and walruses and bears throve too. Various tribes taught each other their secrets. Some had never seen a seal, some had never built an igloo.

The colony throve; but the men studied fusion and Langston Field engineering, and many wound up on Navy and merchant ships. Eskimos don’t really like to freeze. The engine room of a Navy ship is a better place, and Eskimos of all tribes have a knack with tools.

Nuliajuk was near Sol and Sparta. It might still be part of the shrinking Empire, but Terry had never seen it. He was a half-breed, born in a Libertarian merchant ship. What he knew of Nuliajuk came from his father.

And Brenda had lived all her life on a Tanith farm. “I took my education from a TV wall. No hands-on, but I learned enough to fix our machines. We had a fusion plant and some Gaineses and Tofflers. Those are special tractors. Maybe the Saurons left them alone.”

“Saurons?”

“Sorry.” Her grimace twisted her whole face around. “I spent the last four days talking about nothing else. I own that farm now. I don’t own anything else.” She studied him thoughtfully. Her face in repose was symmetrical enough, square-jawed, strong even by Tanith standards. “Would you like to see it?”

“What?”

“Would you like to see my farm? Can you borrow a plane?” They set it up for two days hence.

2656, JUNE (TANITH LOCAL TIME)

Brenda’s face lit when she saw him. “Terry! Have you gotten rich? Have you saved civilization? Have you had fun?”

“No, yes, yes. How are you?”

“You can see, can’t you? It’s all over, Terry. No more nightmares.” He’d never seen her bubble like this. There was no slur in her voice . .

but he could see the twitch at the left side of her mouth. Her face was animated on the right, calmer on the left. Her hair bloomed around her head like a great black dandelion, teased, nearly a foot across. The scar must have healed completely. She’d gained some weight.

He remembered that he had loved her. (But he didn’t remember her having nightmares.)

“They tell me you opened an orphanage.”

“Yeah, I had twenty kids in one schlumph,” she said. “The city gave me financing to put the farm back on its legs, and there were plenty of workmen to hire, but I thought I’d go nuts taking care of the children and the farm both. It’s easier now. The older kids are my farmers, and they learn to take care of the younger ones. Two of them got married and went off to start their own farm. Three are in college, and the oldest boy’s in the Navy. I’m back down to twenty kids.”

“How many of your own? I met Reseda.”

“Four. She’s the youngest. And one who died.”

“I guess I’m surprised you moved back to the farm.”

She shook her head. “I did it right. The children took the curse off the memories. So how are you? You must have stories to tell. What are you doing now?”

“There’s a party at the spaceport, and we’re the stars. Want to join us?”

“No. Busy.”

“Can I come out there? Like tomorrow, noon or thereabouts?”

He was watching for hesitation, but it was too quick to be sure. “Good. Come. Noon is fine. You remember how to get here? And noon is just past eleven?”

“And midnight is twenty-two twenty.”

“Right. See you then.”

He hung up. Now: summon the Library function on the computer? He wondered how much of the Sauron story was still classified. But a party was running, and a spaceman learned to differentiate: there was a time for urgency and a time to hang loose.

When he pushed back into the crowd, Maria grabbed his arm and shouted in his ear. “Mayor Anderssen!” She pointed.

The Mayor nodded and smiled. He was tall, in his late thirties, with pale skin and ash-blond hair and a wispy beard. Terry reached across the table to offer his hand. The Mayor put something in it. “Card,” he shouted. “Temporary.”

“Thanks.”

The Mayor circled the table and pulled up a chair next to him. “You’re the city’s guest while you’re down. Restaurants, hotels, taxis, rentals.”

“Very generous. How can we repay you?”

“Your Captain has already agreed to some interviews. Will you do

the same? We’re starved for news. I talked Purser Lame into speaking on radio.”

“Fine by me. I’m busy tomorrow, though.”

‘I got a call from a friend of mine, a Brenda Curtis. She says she used to know you—”

“I just called her a minute ago. Hey, one of her kids—”

“Reseda. My daughter. Brenda isn’t married, but she’s had four children, and she’s got something going with a neighbor, Bob Maddox. Anyway, she called to find out if I was getting you cards, which I already was.”

Terry’s memory told him that nuclear families were the rule on Tanith. “An unusual life-style,” he said.

“Not so unusual. We’ve got more men than women. Four hundred ships wrecked in the Battle. Lots of rescue action. Some of the crews reached Tanith and never went any further. We tend to be generous with child support, and there are specialized marriage contracts. Can you picture the crime rate if every woman thought she had to get married?”

Tanith had changed.

Maria handed Terry a drink, something with fruit and rum. He sipped, and wondered.

Brenda must have called the Mayor as soon as the little girl told her about his first call. He remembered an injured woman trying to put her life back together. She’d been in no position to do spur-of-the-moment favors for others. Brenda had changed too.

2640A, NOVEMBER (TANITH LOCAL TIME)

“We’re trying to save civilization,” Napoleon’s Purser lectured Terry. “Not individual ships. If Tanith doesn’t have some working spacecraft, it won’t survive until the Empire gets things straightened out. So. We’re giving you . . . Firebee?—if you want it. The terms say that you have to run it as a merchant ship or lose it. That’s if we decide it’s worth repairing. Otherwise. . . Well. We’ll have to give any working parts to someone else.”

Arrogant, harassed, defensive. He was dispensing other people’s property as charity. The way he used the word give— They discussed details. Terry’s third list surprised him. He studied it.

“Your drives are intact? Alderson and fusion both?”

“Running like new. They are new, almost.” Terry knew the danger here. Firebee was alive if her drives were alive. . . and some other ship might want those drives.

“Well. I don’t know anyone who needs these spares, offhand, except we’ll record these diagnostic programs. Very bright of you to list

these. Some of our ships lost most of their data to EMPs. Can I copy this list?”

“Yessir.”

“I can give you a rebuilt fusion zap. You’d never leave orbit without that, would you? We can re-core the hover motors on your #2 boat. Spinner for the air plant if you can mount it. Don’t tell me you can if you can’t. Someone else might need it. You could ruin it trying to make it fit.”

“I can fit it.”

“I dare say. Nuliajuk?”

“Half-breed. Libertarian mother.”

“Look, our engineers aren’t Esks or Scots, but they’ve been with us for years. So we can’t hire you ourselves, but some other ship—”

“I’d rather make Firebee fly again.”

“Good luck. I can’t give you any more.”

From the temporary port he went directly to the hospital. Lex Hartner was in surgery. Terry visited with Charley until Lex came out.

“Brenda Curtis invited me to visit her farm with her. Anything I should know? What’s likely to upset her?”

Lex stared at him in astonishment. He said, “Take a gun. A big gun.”

“For what?”

“Man, you missed some excitement here. Brenda said something to a nurse a couple of days after she got here. You know what happened to her?”

“She doesn’t want to talk about it.”

“She sure doesn’t, and I don’t blame her, but the more she said the more the Navy wanted. She’d have died of exhaustion if I hadn’t dragged her away a couple of times. She was kidnapped by two Saurons! They killed the whole family.”

“On Tanith itself?”

“Yeah, a landing craft got down. More like a two-seater escape pod, I guess. I haven’t seen pictures. It came down near an outback farm, way south. The Saurons killed off her family from ambush. They stayed on the farm for a month. She. . . belonged to one of them.” Lex was wringing his hands. Likely he didn’t know it. “We looked her over to see if she was pregnant.”

“I should think you bloody would! Can they still breed with human beings?” Rumor had it that some of the Sauron genes had been borrowed from animals.

“We won’t find out from Brenda. She’ shad a child, though. It probably died at the farm. She won’t talk about that either.”

“Lord. How did she get away?”

“One went off by himself. Maybe they fought over Brenda. The other one stayed. One day a Weem’s beast came out of the water and attacked them in the rice paddy. It clawed her; that’s how she got the head wound. When she got the blood out of her eyes the Sauron was dead and so was the Weem’s beast. So she started walking. She had to live for two weeks in the swamps, with that wound. Hell of a woman.”

“Yeah. You’re telling me there’s a Sauron loose on Tanith.”

“Yup. They’re hunting for him. She took the Marines to the farm, and they found the escape pod and the corpse. I’ve been doing the autopsy. You can see where they got the traits—”

“Animal?”

“No, that’s just a rumor. It’s all human, but the way it’s put together think of Frankenstein’s monster. A bit here, a bit there, the shape

changes a little. Maybe add an extra Y gene to turn it mean. I’m guessing there. The high-power microscope’s down.”

“The other one?”

“Could be anywhere. He’s had almost a month.”

“Not likely he’d stick around. Okay, I’ll take a big gun. Anything else I should know?”

“I don’t know how she’ll react. Terry, I’ll give you a trank spray. Put her out if she gets hysterical and get her back here fast. Other than that watch her. See if you think she can live on that farm. Bad memories there. I think she should sell the place.”

2656, JUNE (TANITH LOCAL TIME)

Dinner expeditions formed and went off in three directions. The cluster that took Terry along still crowded the restaurant. A blackboard offered a single meal of several courses, Spartan cooking strangely mutated by local ingredients.

The time change caught up with him as desserts arrived. “I’m running out of steam,” he told Maria Montez.

“Okay.” She led him out and waved at a taxi. The gray-haired driver recognized him for what he was. She kept him talking all the way to Maria’s apartment house. She wasn’t interested in planets; it was the space between that held her imagination.

On the doorstep Maria carefully explained that Terry couldn’t possibly presume on an acquaintanceship of one afternoon (though he hadn’t asked yet). She kissed him quickly and went inside.

Terry started down the steps, grinning. Customs differ. Now where the hell was he, and where was a taxi likely to be hiding?

So Brenda was alive and doing well. Friend of the Mayor. Running an orphanage. Four children. Well, well.

Maria came out running. “I forgot, you don’t have a place to stay! Terry, you can come in and sleep on the couch if you promise to behave yourself.”

“I can’t really do that, Maria, but if you’ll call me a taxi?”

She was affronted. “Why not?”

He went back up the steps. “I haven’t set foot on a world for four months. I haven’t held a woman in my anns in longer than that. Now, we heroes have infinite self-control—”

“But—”

“I could probably leave you alone all night. But I wouldn’t sleep and I’d wake up depressed and frustrated. So what I want is a hotel.”

She thought it over. “Come in. Have some coffee.”

“Were you listening?”

“Come in.”

They entered. The place was low-tech but roomy. He asked, “Was I supposed to lie?”

“It’s not a lie, exactly. It just, just leaves things open. Like I could be telling you we could have some coffee and then get you a taxi, and we could wind up sniffing some borloi, and . . . You could be persuasive?”

“Nuliajuks lie. It’s called tact. My mother made sure I knew how to keep a promise. She wasn’t just a Libertarian. She was a Randist.”

Maria smiled at him, much amused. “Four months, hey? But you should learn to play the game, Terry.”

He shook his head. “There’s a different game on every world, almost in every city. I can’t sniff borloi with you either. I tried it once. That stuff could hook me fast. I just have to depend on charisma.”

She had found a small bottle. “Take a couple of these. Vitamins, hangover formula. Take lots of water. Does wonders for the charisma.”

Maria made scrambled eggs with sausage and fungus, wrapped in chili leaves. It woke him up fast and made him forget his hangover. He’d been looking forward to Tanith cooking.

There were calls registered on his pocket computer. He used Maria’s phone. Nobody answered at Polar Datafile or Other Worlds. When he looked at his watch it was just seven o’clock.

No wonder Maria was yawning. She’d woken when he did, and that must have been about six. “Hey, I’m sorry. It’s the time change.”

“No sweat, Terry. I’ll sleep after you leave. Want to go back to bed?” He tried again later. Polar Datafile wanted him tomorrow, five o’clock news. An interviewer for Other Worlds wanted all three astronauts for two days, maybe more. Good payment, half in gold, for exclusive rights. How exclusive? he asked. She reassured him: radio and TV spots would

be considered as publicity. What she wanted was depth, and no other vidtapes competing. He set it up.

He called Information. “I need to rent a plane.”

Maria watched him with big dark eyes. “Brenda Curtis?”

“Right.” The number answered, and he dealt with it. A hoverplane would pick him up at the door. He was expected to return the pilot to the airport and then go about his business. How far did he expect to fly? About forty miles round trip.

Maria asked, “Were you in love with her?”

“For about two months.”

“Are you going to tell her about us?”

That might put both women in danger. “No. In fact, I’m going to get a hotel room—”

“Damn your eyes, Terry Kakumee!”

“I’ll be back tonight, Maria. I’ve got my reasons. No, I can’t tell you what they are.”

“All right. Are they honest?”

“I . . . Dammit. They’re right on the edge.”

She studied his face. “Can you tell me after it’s over?” No.” Either way, he wouldn’t be able to do that.

“Okay. Come back tonight.” She wasn’t happy. He didn’t blame her.

The land had more color than he remembered. Fields of strange flowers bloomed in the swampland. Huge dark purple petals crowned plants the size of trees. A field of sunlovers, silver ahead of him, turned green in his rear-view camera.

Farms were sparse pale patches in all that color. In the wake of the Battle of Tanith they had had a scruffy look. They were neater now, with more rice and fewer orange plots of borloi. The outworld market for the drug had disintegrated, of course.

He should be getting close. He took the plane higher. Farms all looked alike, but the crater wouldn’t have disappeared.

It was there, several miles south, a perfect circle of lake .

26409, JANUARY (TANITH LOCAL TIME)

A perfect circle of lake surrounded by blasted trees lying radially outward. “A big ship made a big bang when it fell,” Brenda said. She was wearing dark glasses, slacks and a chamois shirt. Her diction was as precise as she could make it, but he still had to listen hard. A Tanith farm girl’s accent probably slurred it further. “We were on the roof. We wanted to watch the battle.”

“Sauron or Empire ship?”

“We never knew. It was only a light. Bright enough to fry the eyeballs. It gave us enough warning. We threw ourselves flat. We would have been blown off the roof.”

They turned east. Presently he asked, “Is that your farm?”

“No. There, beyond.”

Four miles east of the fresh crater, a wide stretch of rice paddies. The other farm was miles closer. The Saurons must have gone around it. Why?

They’d passed other farms. Here the paddies seemed to be going back to the wild. The house nestled on a rise of ground. The roof was flat, furnished with tables and chairs and a swimming pool in the shape of a blobby eagle. The walls sloped inward.

“You don’t like windows?”

“No. It rains. When it doesn’t, we work outside. On a good day we all went up on the roof.”

The door showed signs of damage. It might have been blasted from its hinges, then rehung.

Lights came on as they entered. Terry trailed Brenda as she moved through the house.

Pantry shelves were in neat array, but depleted. The fridge was empty. The freezer was working, but it stank. He told her, “There’ve been power failures. You’ll have to throw all this out.” She sniffed; half her face wrinkled.

He found few obvious signs of damage. Missing furniture had left its marks on the living room floor, and the walls had been freshly painted.

There were muddy footprints everywhere. “The Marines did that,” Brenda said.

“Did they find anything?”

“Not here. Not even dried blood. Horatius made me clean up. They found the escape pod three miles away.”

Beds in the master bedroom were neatly made. Brenda turned on the TV wall and got Dagon City’s single station, and a picture of Boat #1 floating gracefully toward the landing field. “This works too.”

Terry shook his head. “What did these Saurons look like?”

“Randus was bizarre. Horatius was more human—”

“It looks like he was ready to stay here. To pass himself off as a man, an ordinary farmer.”

She paused. “He could have done that. It may be why he left. We never saw a Sauron on Tanith. He was muscular. His bones were heavy. He looked . . . Round shoulders. His eyes had an epicanthic fold, and the pupils were black, jet black.” Pause. “He made sex like an attack.”

The smiling faces of Firebee’s crew flashed and died. The lights died too. Terry said, “Foo.”

“Never mind.” Brenda took his arm and led him two steps backward through the dark. The bed touched his knees and he sat.

“What did Randus look like?”

“A monster. I hated Horatius, but I wanted him to protect me from Randus.”

Could he pass as a farmer? He’d have to hide Randus the monster and Brenda the prisoner, or kill them. But he hadn’t. Honor among Saurons?

Or . . . leave the monster to guard his woman. Find or carve a safe house. Come back later, see if it worked. The risk would not be to Horatius. So. “Did Horatius think you were pregnant?”

“Maybe. Terry, I would like to take the taste of Horatius out of my mind.”

“Time will do that.”

“Sex will do that.”

He tried to look at her. He saw nothing. They were sitting on a water bed in darkness like a womb.

“I haven’t been with a woman in over a year. Brenda, are you sure you’re ready for this?” He hadn’t thought to ask Lex about this!

She pulled him to his feet, hands on his upper arms. Strong! “You’re a good man, Terry. I’ve watched you. I couldn’t do better. Do you maybe think I’m too tall for you?” She pulled him against her, and his cheek was against her breasts. “You can’t do this with a short woman.”

“Not standing up.” His arms went around her, but how could he help that?

“Is it my face? We’re in the dark.” He could hear her amusement.

“Brenda, I’m not exactly fighting. It’s just, I still think of you as a patient.”

“So be patient.”

She didn’t need his patience. She had none herself. He’d expected the aftereffects of the head wound to make her clumsy. She was, a little. She came on as if she would swallow him up and go looking for dessert. He was appalled, then delighted, then . . . exhausted, but she wouldn’t let him go .

He woke in darkness. He wasn’t tempted to move. The water bed was kind to his gravity-abused muscles. He felt the warmth of the woman in his arms, and presently knew that she was awake.

No warning: she attacked.

She disappeared into the dark like a vampire leaving her victim. She draped his clothes over him and dropped the heavy flechette gun on his belly. He giggled, and presently dressed.

She led him stumbling through a black maze and out into the dusk of a winter morning. “There. After all, I know the house.”

“This is the trouble with not having windows,” he groused.

“Weem’s beasts like windows too. In rain they can come this far.”

The graveyard was eight stone markers cut with a van-saw, letters and numbers cut with a laser. “The names and dates are wrong, except these old ones,” she said. “Horatius hoped it would look like they all died many years ago. I’ll get a chisel or a laser to fix it.”

There was no small grave. “Lex told me you had a child.”

“Miranda. He took her with him.”

“God.” He took her in his arms. “Did you tell the Marines?”

“No. I . . . try not to think about Miranda.”

There was nothing more to see. She told him that the Navy men had found Randus’ skeleton and taken that, and sent Out a big copter for the rescue pod. When the lights came on around noon, Terry helped Brenda clean up the mudstains and empty the freezer and fridge.

“I need money to run the farm,” Brenda said. “Maybe someone will hire me for work in Dagon.”

“Why not sell the place?”

“It was ours for too long. It won’t be bad. You can see for yourself, the Saurons left no trace. No trace at all.”

2656, JUNE (TANITH LOCAL TIME)

Four miles east of the crater. He should be near. He was crossing extensive fields of rice. A dozen men and women worked knee-deep in water that glinted through the stalks like fragments of a shattered mirror. A man stood by with a gun. Terry swooped low, lowered his flaps, hovered. Several figures waved.

They were all children.

He set the plane down. The gun-carrier broke off work and came toward him. Terry waded to meet him; what the hell. “Brenda Curtis’s?”

The boy had an oriental look despite the black, kinky hair. He grinned and said, “Where else would you find all these kids? I’m Tarzan Kakumee.”

“Terry Kakumee. I’m visiting. You’d be about sixteen?”

The boy’s jaw dropped. “Seventeen, but that’s Tanith time. Kakumee? Astronaut? You’d be my father!”

“Yeah. Can I stare a little?”

They examined each other. Tarzan was an inch or two taller than Terry, narrower in the hips and face and chest, and his square jaw was definitely Brenda’s. Black eyes with an oriental slant: Terry and Brenda both had that. The foolish grins felt identical.

“I’m on duty,” Tarzan said. “I’ll see you later?”

“Can’t you come with me? I’m due for lunch.”

“No, I’ve got my orders. There are Weem’s beasts and other things around here. I once shot a tax collector the size of my arm. It had its suckers in Gerard’s leg and Gerard was screaming bloody murder.” Tarzan grinned. “I blew it right off him.”

Smaller fields of different colors surrounded a sprawling structure. If that was the farmhouse it had doubled in size . . . right. He could make out the original farmhouse in the center. The additions had windows.

Fields of melons, breadfruit, and sugar cane surrounded the house. Three children in a mango grove broke off work to watch him land.

Brenda came through the door with a man beside her.

He knew her at once. (But was it her?) She waved both arms and ran to meet him. (She’d changed.) “Terry, I’m so glad to see you! The way you went off—my fault, of course, but I kept wondering what had happened to you out there and why you didn’t come back!” Her dress looked like current Tanith style, cut above the knee and high at the neck. Her grip on his arm was farmhand-strong. “You wouldn’t have had to see me, it just would have been good to know—Well, it is good to know you’re alive and doing all right! Bob, this is Terry Kakumee the astronaut. Terry, Bob Maddox is my neighbor three miles southeast.”

“Pleased to meet you.” Bob Maddox was a brown-haired white man, freckled and tanned. He was large all over, and his hand was huge, big-knuckled and rough with work. “Brenda’s told me about you. How’s your ship?”

“Truth? Firebee is gradually and gracefully disintegrating. There’s a double hull instead of a Langston Field, and we have to patch it every so often. We got Boat #1 repaired on Phoenix. Maybe we can hold it all together till the Empire gets back out here. You interested in space-flight?”

Maddox hesitated. “Not really. I mean, it’s surprising more of us don’t want to build rocket ships, considering. We weren’t all transportees, our ancestors.”

Brenda turned at the door. She clapped her hands twice and jerked her thumb. The children who had been climbing over Terry’s rental plane dropped off and scampered happily back toward the mangoes.

They went in. Reseda Anderssen, busy at a samovar, smiled at them and went out through another door. There was new furniture, couches and small tables and piles of pillows, enough to leave the living room quite cluttered. Brenda saw him looking and said, “Some of the kids sleep in here.”

It didn’t look it. “You keep them neat.” He noticed noises coming from what he remembered as the kitchen.

“I’ve got a real knack for teaching. Have some tea?”

“Borloi tea? I’d better not.”

“I made Earl Grey.” She poured three cups. She’d always had grace, even with the head injury to scramble the signals. He could see just a trace of her lip pulling up on the left when she spoke. She settled him and Bob on a couch and faced them. “Now talk. Where’ve you been?”

“Phoenix. Gafia. Hitchhiker’s Rest. Medea. Uhura. We commute. We tried Lenin, but three outie ships came after us. We ran and didn’t come back, and that cuts us off from the planets beyond. And we found a Sauron ship at EST 1310.”

It was Maddox who stared. “Well, go on! What’s left of it? Were there Saurons?”

“Bob, we were clever. We knew there was a ship there because we caught the signal every time we used the jump points to get to Medea. We couldn’t get down there because the star’s a flare star and we don’t have a Langston Field.

“Only, this time we do. Phoenix sold us—actually, they gave us a mucking great Langston Field generator. We left it on. We moved in and matched orbit with the signal ship, and we expanded the field to put both ships inside.”

“Clever, right. Terry, we Taniths are a little twitchy about Saurons—”

“Just one. Dead. They rifled it and left it for a message beacon. They left a Sauron on duty. Maybe a flare got him.” The corpse had been a skewed man-shape, a bogey man. Like Randus? “I managed to get into the programming. Now we’re thinking of going on to Sparta. We learned some things they might want to know.”

“Let me just check on lunch,” Brenda said, and she went.

It left Terry feeling awkward. Maddox said, “So there are still Sauron supermen out there?”

“Just maybe. The beacon was set to direct Saurons to a Jump point in that system. Maybe nobody ever got the message. If they did, I don’t know where they went. I ran the record into Firebee’s memory and ran a translation program on it, but I didn’t look at the result. I’d have to go back to Firebee, then come back here.”

Maddox grimaced. “We don’t have ships to do anything about it. Sparta might. I’d be inclined to leave them the hell alone.”

“Did they ever catch—?”

“Nope. Lot of excitement. Every so often some nut comes screaming that he saw a Sauron in the marshes. The Mayor’s got descriptions of a Sauron officer, and he says they don’t check out. How the hell could that thing still be hiding?”

“Those two must have gone right past your place to get here.”

“Yeah. Brenda had to backtrack to get to my place. Weeks in the wild, fungus and tax collectors, polluted water, God knows what she ate

Well, yeah, I’ve wondered. Maybe they saw we had guns.”

“That’s not it.”

Bob hesitated. “Okay, why?”

He’d spoken without thinking. “You’d think I’m crazy. Anyway, I could be wrong.”

“Kakumee, everyone knows more about Saurons than the guy he’s talking to. It’s like skewball scores. What I want to know about is, I never saw Brenda’s lip curl up like that when she talks.”

“Old head injury.”

“I haven’t seen her face do that since the day she staggered through my gate. I wonder if meeting you again might be upsetting her.”

Bob Maddox was coming on like a protective husband.

Terry asked, “Have you thought of marriage?”

“That’s none of your business, Kakumee—”

“Brenda’s—”

“—But I’ve asked, and she won’t.” His voice was still low and reasonably calm. “She’d rather live alone, and I don’t know why. Ventura’s mine.”

“I haven’t met her.”

“I guess I don’t mind you worrying over Brenda. Have you met any of the kids?”

“Yeah—”

Brenda was back. “We can serve any time you get hungry. Terry, can you stay for dinner? You could meet the rest of the children. They’ll be coming in around five.”

“I’d like that. Bob, feel like lunchtime?”

“Yeah.”

The men hung back for a moment. “I’ll leave after dinner,” Terry said. “I tell you, though, I don’t think anything’s bothering Brenda. She’s tougher than that.”

Bob nodded. “Tough lady. Kakumee, I think she’s working on how to tell you one of the kids is yours.”

2640B, JANUARY TO MARCH (TANITH LOCAL TIME)

Their idyll lasted two months.

They made an odd couple. Tall and lean; short and round. He could see it in the mirror, he could see the amusement in strangers and friends too.

Terry’s rented room was large enough for both. Brenda began buying clothes and other things after she had a job, but she never crowded the closets. Brenda cleaned. Terry did all the cooking. It was the only task he’d ever seen her fail at.

He was busy much of the time. In a week the work on Boat #2 was finished. There were parts for Boat #1, and he carried them to orbit to work. Boat #1 still wouldn’t be able to make a reentry.

He talked Napoleon’s purser out of a ruined battleship’s hydrogen tank. Over a period of three weeks (with two two-day leaves in Dagon) Terry and the rest of the crew moved Firebee into it. Had Charley been thinking in terms of a regeneration sleeve for the ship?

Firebee was now the silliest-looking ship since the original Space Shuttle, and too massive for interstellar capability. Without an auxiliary tank she couldn’t even use a Jump point with any hope of reaching a planet on the far side.

Captain Shu had done something about that. Firebee now owned a small H₂ tank aboard Armadillo, but they’d have to wait for it to arrive. Terry went back down to Dagon City.

Brenda was still attending the clinic every two days. She was working there too, and trying to arrange something with the local government. She wouldn’t talk about that; she wasn’t sure it would work.

He made her a different offer. “Four of our crew want to stay. Cropland doesn’t cost much on Tanith. But you’ve got a knack for machines. Let me teach you how to make repairs on Firebee. Come as my apprentice.”

“Terry—”

“And wife.”

“I get motion sickness.”

“Damn.” There had never been a lover like Brenda. She could play his nervous system like a violin. She knew his moods. She maintained civilization around him. The thought of leaving her made him queasy.

Armadillo had won an expensive victory in the outer Tanith system. The hulk was just capable of thrust, and it didn’t reach Tanith until months after the battle. Then crews from other ships swarmed over it and took it apart. Firebee’s crew came back with an intact tank and fuel-feed system. Terry had to tear that apart and put it together different, in vacuum. It would ride outside the second hull.

Firebee was fragile now, fit to be a trader, but never a warship or a miner.

Charley was in decent shape by then and working out in a local gym. He came up to help weld the fuel tank. He seemed fit for space. “Captain Shu wants to go home, but we’ve got you and me and Sharon Hayes and that kid off Napoleon, Murray Weiss. I say we go interstellar.”

“I know you do, but think about it, Charley. No defenses. We can haul cargo back and forth between the mining asteroids, and if outies ever come to take over we’d have someplace to run to.”

“And you could see Brenda every couple of months.”

The argument terminated when Terry returned to Dagon.

Brenda was gone. Brenda’s clothes were gone. There was a phone message from Lex Hartner; he looked grim and embarrassed.

Phoning him felt almost superfluous, but Terry did it.

“We’ve been seeing each other,” Lex said. “I think she’s carrying my child. Terry, I want to marry her.”

“Good luck to you.” The days in which an Ihalmiut hunter might gather up a band of friends and hunt down a bride were long ago, far away. He considered it anyway. And went to the stars instead.

2656, JUNE (TANITH LOCAL TIME)

Reseda and three younger children served lunch, then joined them at the table. Three more came in from the fields. There was considerable chatter. Terry found he was doing a lot of the talking.

Dessert was mangoes still hot from the sun.

Brenda went away and came back wearing a bantar-cloth coverall. It was the garment she’d worn the day she reached the hospital, like as not, but much cleaner. The three adults spend the afternoon pulling weeds in the sugar cane. Brenda and Bob Maddox instructed him by turns.

Terry had never done field work. He found he was enjoying himself, sweating in the sun.

The sun arced around the horizon, dropping gradually. Other children came flocking from the rice fields shortly after five. The adults pulled weeds for a little longer, then joined the children in the courtyard. He could smell his own sweat, and Bob’s, different by race or by diet.

Twenty children all grinned at some shared joke. Brenda must have briefed them. When?

“Brenda, I can sort them out,” Terry said.

“Go ahead.”

“The Mayor already told me Reseda was his. The freckled girl must be Ventura Maddox. Hello, Ventura!” She was big for twelve, tanned dark despite the freckles, and round in the face, like Bob himself. A tall girl, older, had Brenda’s tightly kinked black hair, pale skin and a pointed chin. “I don’t know her name, but she’s . . . Lex’s?” Lex’s face, but it would still be a remarkable thing.

“Yes, that’s Sepulveda.”

“Hello, Sepulveda. And the boy—” Tarzan grinned at him but didn’t wave. Tactful: he didn’t know whether they were supposed to have met. ‘—is mine.”

“Right again. Terry, meet Tarzan.”

“Hello, Tarzan. Brenda, I set down in the rice field before I got here.”

She laughed. “Dammit, Terry! I had it all planned.”

“And they’re named for suburbs of some city on Earth.”

“I never thought you’d see that.”

A different crew served dinner. Bob and Brenda took one end of the

table. Terry and Tarzan talked as if nobody else was present, but every so often he noticed how the other children were listening.

But tracks in his mind ran beneath what he was saying. They look good together. He’s spent time with these children, probably watched them grow up. She should marry him.

She can’t! Unless I’m all wrong from beginning to end. Wouldn’t that be nice? “We’ve been carrying kudzu grain in the cargo ever since. Someday we’ll find another famine—”

She must have been carrying Tarzan when she took up with Lex. She held his attention while she carried Tarzan to term, and she held him after Lex knew Tarzan wasn’t his, and then she had Sepulveda. She could have held him if she’d married him, but she didn’t. Held him anyway.

Quite a woman. And then she gave him up. Why?

Terry took the car up into the orange sunset glow and headed north. En route he used his card and the car phone to get a hotel room. By nine he had checked into the Arco-Elsewhere and was calling Maria.

“Want to see the best hotel on the planet? Or shall I get a cab and come to you?”

“I guess I’ll come there. Hey, why not? It’s close to work.”

He used an operator to track down Charley and Sharon, and wasn’t surprised to find they had rooms in the same hotel. “Call me for breakfast,” Sharon said groggily. “I’m not on Dagon time yet.”

Charley seemed alert. “Terry! How’s Brenda?”

“Brenda’s running the planet, or at least twenty kids’ worth of planet. One of the boys is mine. She looks wonderful. Got a burly protector, likable guy, wants to be her fiancé but isn’t.”

“You’ve got a kid! What’s he like?”

Terry had to sort out his impressions. “She raised ‘em all well. He’s self-confident, delighted to see me, taller than me . . . If he saves civilization I’ll take half the credit.”

“That good, huh?”

“Easily.”

“I’ve been working. We’ve sold the big Langston Field generator. Farmer, lots of land, he may be thinking about becoming a suburb for the wealthy. I got a good price, Terry. He thought he could beat me at the Mirror Game—”

“He bet you?”

“He did. And I’ve signed up for eight tons of borloi, but I’ll have to see how much bulk that is before—”

“Borloi!”

“Sure, Terry, borloi had medical uses too. We’ll deal with a government at our next stop, give it plenty of publicity too. That way it’ll be used right.”

“I’m glad to see you’ve put some brain sweat into this. What occurs to me is—”

The door went bingbong.

“Company.” Terry went to open the door. Maria was in daytime dress, with a large handbag. “Come on in. Check out the bathroom, it’s really sybaritic. I’m on the phone.” He returned. “Borloi, right? It’s not worth stealing on the way out, but after we jump we tell the whole population of Gaea about it? Shrewd. We’ll be a target for any thief who wants to sell eight tons of borloi on the black market.”

“Good point. What do you think?”

“Oh, I think we raise the subject with Sharon, and then I think we’ll do it anyway.”

“Let’s meet for breakfast. Eight? Someone I want you to meet.”

“Good.” He hung up. He called, “I can offer you three astronauts for breakfast.”

Maria came out to the sound of bathwater running. “Sounds delicious.’ It has to be early, Terry. Tomorrow’s a working day.”

“Oh, it’ll be early. Early to bed?” He’d wanted to use the city computer files, but he was tired too. It wasn’t the time change; the shorter days would have caught him up by now. It was stoop labor in high G.

Maria said, “I want to try that spa. Come with me? You look like you need it. And tell me about your day.”

They all met for breakfast in Charley’s suite.

Charley had a groupie. Andrea Soucek was a university student, stunningly beautiful, given to clichés. She was goshwowed-out by the presence of three star-travelers. Sharon had George Callahan. Terry had Maria.

The conversation stayed general for awhile. Then George had to leave, and so did Maria. Over coffee it degenerated into shop talk, while Andrea Soucek listened in half-comprehending awe.

Eight tons of dry borloi (they’d freeze-dry it by opening the airlock) would fill more than half the cargo hold. Not much mass, though. The rest of the cargo space could go to heavy machinery. Their next stop, Gaea, had a small population unlikely to produce much for export, unlikely to buy much of the borloi. Most of it would be with them on two legs of their route.

Sharon asked, “Tanith doesn’t manufacture much heavy machinery, do they?”

“I haven’t found any I can buy. I’m working on it,” Charley said.

Terry had an idea. “We want to freeze-dry the borloi anyway. We could pack it between the hull and the sleeve. Plenty of room for light stuff in the cargo hold.”

“Hmm. Yeah! Any drug-running raider attacks us, his first shot would blow the borloi all across the sky! No addicts on our conscience.”

“Rape the addicts. Evolution in action,” Sharon said. “What kind of idiot would hook himself on borloi when the source is light-years away? Get ‘em out of the gene pool.”

Andrea began to give her an argument. All humans were worthwhile, all could be saved. And borloi was a harmless vice— Terry returned to his room carrying a mug of coffee. The aristocratic phone operator recognized him by now. “Mr. Kakumee! Who may I track down for you?”

“Lex Hartner, M.D., surgeon. Lived in Dagon City, Dryland sector, fifteen years ago.”

“Fifteen years? Thanks a lot.” But she’d stopped showing irritation. “Mmm. Not Dryland. . . He doesn’t appear to be anywhere in Dagon.”

“Try some other cities, please. He won’t be outside a city.”

Almost a minute crawled by. “I have a Lex Hartner in Coral Beach.”

It was Lex. He was older, grayer; his cheeks sagged in Tanith gravity. “Terry Kakumee?”

“Hello. I met your daughter yesterday.”

The sagging disappeared. “How is she?”

“She’s wonderful. All of Brenda’s kids are wonderful. Are you wondering whether to tell me I’ve got a boy?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s wonderful too.”

“Of course he is.” Lex smiled at last. “How’s Brenda?”

“She’s wonderful. I asked her to marry me too, Lex. I mean sixteen years ago.”

“Who else has she turned down?”

“Brawny farmer type named Maddox. Lex, I don’t think she needs a man.”

“How are you?”

“I’m fine. Would you believe Charley Lame is fine too? He looks like you’d expect, but his groupie is prettier than mine, if not as smart.”

“I did a good job there, didn’t I?”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“Is it too late to say I’m sorry?”

“No, forget that. She didn’t need me. Lex, you did an autopsy on the corpse of a Sauron superman. Remember?”

“A man isn’t likely to forget that. They rot fast in the swamps. It was pretty well chewed, too.”

“Was there enough left for a gene analysis?”

“Some. Not enough to make me famous. It matched what the Navy already knew. I didn’t find anything inhuman, anything borrowed from animals.”

“Yeah. Anything startling?”

“Nope. It’s all in the records.”

“A Sauron and a Weem’s beast, you don’t expect them to go to a photo finish.”

“It must have been something to see. From a distance, that is. Brenda never wanted to talk about it, but that was a long time ago. Maybe she’d talk now.”

“Okay, thanks. Lex, I still think of you as a friend. I won’t be on Tanith very long. Everything I do is on the city account for awhile—”

“Maybe I’ll come into town.”

“Call me when and if, and everything goes on the card. I’m at the Arco-Elsewhere.”

Next he linked into the Dagon City computer files.

Matters relating to Saurons had been declassified. Navy ships had transferred much of their data to city computers on Tanith and other worlds. Terry found a picture he’d seen before: a Sauron, no visible wounds, gassed in an attack on Medea. It rotated before him, a monster out of nightmare. Randus?

An XYY, the text said. All of the Sauron soldiers, any who had left enough meat to be analyzed, had had freaky gene patterns—males with an extra Y gene, where XY was male and XX was female—until the Battle of Tanith. There they’d found some officers.

Those pictures were of slides and electron-microscope photographs. No officer’s corpse had survived unshredded. Their gene patterns included the XY pair, but otherwise resembled those of the XYY berserkers.

Results of that gene pattern were known. Eyes that saw deep into the infrared; the altered eye structure could be recognized. Blood that clotted fast to block a wound. Rapid production of endorphins to block pain. Stronger bones. Bigger adrenal glands. Powerful muscles. Skin that changed color fast, from near-white (to make vitamin D in cold, cloudy conditions, where a soldier had to cover most of his skin or die) to near-black (to prevent lethal sunburn in field conditions under a hotter sun). Officers would have those traits too.

Nothing new yet.

Ah, here was Lex Hartner’s autopsy report on Randus himself. XYY genes. Six-times-lethal damage from a Weem’s beast’s teeth, and one wound. . . one narrow wound up through the base of the skull into the cerebellum, that must have paralyzed or killed him at once.

A Sauron superman working in a rice paddy might not expect something to come at him out of the water.

Terry studied some detail pictures of a Weem’s beast. It was something

like a squat crocodile, with huge pads for front paws, claws inward-pointing to hold prey, a single dagger of a front tooth . . . That might have made the brain puncture if the thing was biting Randus’s head. Wouldn’t the lower teeth have left other marks on, say, the forehead?

So.

And a stranger, human-looking but with big bones and funny eyes, had run loose on Tanith for sixteen years. Had a man with a small daughter appeared somewhere, set up a business, married perhaps? By now he would have an identity and perhaps a position of power.

Saurons were popularly supposed to have been exterminated. Terry had never found any record of an attack on whatever world had bred the monsters, and he didn’t now, though it must have happened. No mention of further attempts to track down fleets that might have fled across the sky. The Navy had left some stuff classified.

Early files on the Curtis family had been scrambled. He found a blurred family picture: a dark man, a darker woman, five children; he picked out a gawky eleven-year-old (the file said) who might have grown to be Brenda. The file on the Maddoxes was bigger, with several photographs. The men all looked like Bob Maddox, all muscle and confidence and freckled tans. The women were not much smaller and tended to be freckled and burly.

So.

An XY officer, a male, might have wanted children. Might have had children. They were gene-tailored, but the doctors had used mostly human genes; maybe all-human, despite the tales. They weren’t a different species, after all. What would such children look like? How would they grow up?

The Polar Datafile interview was fun. The Other Worlds interview the next day felt more like work. Charley’s voice gave out, so they called it off for a few days.

The borloi arrived in several planeloads. Terry didn’t notice any special attempts at security. On many worlds there would have been a police raid followed by worldwide publicity. Memo: call all possible listeners in Gaea system immediately after jump. Sell to government only. Run if anything looks funny.

They flew half the borloi to orbit and packed it into Firebee’s outer hull, with no objection from Sharon. The work went fast. The next step was taken slowly, carefully.

The Langston Field generator from Phoenix system was too big for either boat.

Sharon put Firebee in an orbit that would intersect the atmosphere. With an hour to play with, they moved the beast out of the cargo hold

with an armchair-type pusher frame and let it get a good distance away. They all watched as Terry beamed the signal that turned it on.

The generator became a black sphere five hundred meters across.

Charley and Terry boarded Shuttle #1. Sharon set Firebee accelerating back to orbit.

When the black sphere intersected the atmosphere there was little in the way of reentry flame. Despite the massive machine at the center, the huge sphere was a near-vacuum. It slowed rapidly and drifted like a balloon. Boat #1 overshot, then circled back.

Air seeped through the black forcefield to fill the vacuum inside. It ceased to be a balloon.

It touched down in the marshes south and east of Dagon City, more or less as planned. No signal would penetrate the field. Terry and Charley had to go into the Field with a big inflatable cargo raft, mount it beneath the generator and turn it off.

At that point it became the owner’s problem. He’d arranged for two heavy-lift aircraft. Firebee’s crew waited until the planes had landed, then took Boat #1 back to Dagon.

They were back at the hotel thirty-six hours after they’d left. Maria found the door open and Terry lolling in the spa. “I think I’m almost dissolved,” he told her.

Lex didn’t call. Brenda didn’t call.

They ferried the rest of the borloi up a day later. Some went into the outer hull. The rest they packed around the cargo hold, leaving racks open in the center. Dried borloi for padding, to shield whatever else Charley found to carry.

It was morning when they landed, with time for sightseeing. Andrea and Charley opted to rent equipment and do some semiserious mountain climbing in the foothills of The Warden. Terry called Maria, but she couldn’t get off work, and couldn’t see him tonight either. That made mountain climbing less attractive. Terry hiked around Dagon City for a while, looked through the major shopping mall, then went back to the hotel.

He was half asleep with his shoes off when the phone chimed.

The face was Brenda’s. Terry rubbed his palms together and tapped the answer pad.

“Hi, Terry. I’m in the lobby. Can I come up?”

“Sure, Brenda. Can I order you a drink? Lunch?”

“Get me a rum collins.”

Terry rang off, then ordered from room service. His palms were sweating.

I ran the record into Firebee’s memory and ran a translation program on it, but I didn’t look at the result. I’d have to go back to Firebee, then come back here. Has Bob Maddox told her? Probably not.

She walked in like she owned the hotel, smiling as if nobody was supposed to know. Her dress was vivid orange; it went well with her color. The drink trolley followed her in. When it had rolled out she asked, “How long are you going to be on Tanith?”

“Two weeks, give or take a week. Charley has to find us something to sell. Besides borloi, that is.’’

“Have you tried bantar cloth? It’s just about the only hi-tech stuff we make enough of. Don’t take clothing. Styles change. Get bolts, and be sure you’ve got the tools to shape it.”

“Yeah . . . Brenda, is there anything you can’t do?”

“Cook. And I’m not the marrying type.”

“I know that now.”

“But I have children. Do you like Tarzan?”

He smiled and relaxed a little. “Good job there. I’m glad I met him.”

“Let’s do it again.”

His drink slopped. Somehow he hadn’t expected this. “Hold it, Brenda. I’m with another woman this trip.”

“Maria? Terry, Maria’s with Fritz Marsden tonight and all tomorrow. Fritz is one of mine. He works at the fusion plant at Randall’s Point, and he only gets into town every couple of weeks. Maria isn’t going to give him up for a, well, a transient.”

He sipped at his drink to give himself time to think. When he took the glass from his lips, she pulled it out of his hand without spilling it and set it down. She pulled him to his feet with a fist in his belt. “I’m not asking for very much, am I?”

“Ah, no. Child support? We’ll be leaving funds behind us anyway. Are you young enough?” Was she serious?

“I don’t know. What’s the worst that can happen?” She had unzipped his shirt and was pulling it loose. And with wild hope he thought, It could be!

She stripped him naked, then stepped back to examine him. “I don’t think you’ve gained or lost an ounce. Same muscle tone too. You people don’t even wrinkle.”

“We wrinkle all at once. You’ve changed incredibly.”

“I wanted to. I needed to. Terry, am I coming on too strong? You’re tense. Let me show you something else I learned. Face down on the bed—” She helped him irresistibly. “I’ll keep my dress on. Okay? And if you’ve got anything like massage oil around, tell me now.”

“I’ve never had a massage of any kind.”

The next hour was a revelation. She kept telling him to relax, and somehow he did that, while she tenderized muscles he’d strained moving borloi bags in free-fall. He wondered if he’d been wrong; he wondered if he was going to die; he wondered why he’d never tried this before.

“I took massage training after you left. I used it at the hospital. I never had to work through a Nuliajuk’s fat padding before . . . No sweat, I can reach the muscle underneath.”

“Hell, you could reach through the ribs!”

“Is this too hard? Were you having trouble in orbit?”

“Nope. Everything went fine.”

“Then why the tension? Turn over.” She rolled him over and resumed work on his legs, then his arms and shoulders. “You didn’t used to be shy with me.”

“Am I shy now?”

“You keep tensing up.” Her skirt was hiked up and she straddled his hips to work on his belly. “Good muscle here. Ease up—Well.”

He had a respectable erection.

She caressed him. “I was afraid you’d changed.” She slid forward and, hell, she didn’t have panties.

“I kept my promise,” she gloated.

“True,” he croaked. “Take it off.”

She pulled her dress over her head. There was still a brassiere; no woman would go without one in Tanith gravity. She took that off too.

She was smoothly dark, with no pale areas anywhere. His hands remembered her breasts as smaller. Four kids—and it had been too long, far too long. He cried out, and it might have been ecstasy or grief or both.

She rolled away, then slid up along the length of him. “And that was a massage.”

“Well, I’ve been missing something.”

“I did you wrong all those years ago. Did you hate me? Is that why you’re so tense?”

“That wasn’t it.” He felt good: relaxed, uncaring. She’d come here only to seduce him, to mend fences, to revive memories. Or she already knew, and he might as well learn. “There’s a Sauron message sender, galactic south of the Coal Sack. It was there to send Sauron ships to a certain Jump point.”

“So?”

“Would you like to know where they were supposed to go? I could find out.”

‘‘No. ‘

“Flat-out no? Suppose they come back?”

“Cut the crap, Terry. Hints and secrets. You never did that to me before.”

“I’m sorry, love—”

“Why did two Saurons go around the Maddox farm and straight to us? You told Bob you knew.”

“Because they’re white.”

Brenda’s face went uncannily blank. Then she laughed. “Poor Bob! He’d think you were absolutely loony.”

“He sure would. I didn’t want to know this, Brenda. Why don’t you want to find the Saurons?”

“What would I want with them? I want to see my children safe—”

“Send them.”

“Not likely! Terry, how much have you figured out?”

“I think I’ve got it all. I keep testing it, Brenda, and it fits every time.’’

She waited, her nose four centimeters from his, her breath on his face. The scent of her was very faint.

He said, “You saw to it that three of your own children were out in the rice paddy, including Tarzan. The girl you kept at the house was Reseda, the blond, the girl with the least obvious of Sauron genes. You invited Bob over. Maybe he’d get rid of me before the kids came back.”

“Just my luck. He likes you.”

“They took away your scent. No enemy could smell you out. They gave you an epicanthic fold to protect your eyes. The flat, wide nose is less vulnerable and pulls in more air.” He pushed his fingers into her hair. Spongy, resilient, thick. She didn’t flinch; she smiled in pleasure.

“And this kind of hair to protect your skulls. It’d take an impact. You grow your own skewball helmets!”

“How gracefully you put it.”

“But it looks like a black woman’s hair, so you want black skin. So you spend an hour on the roof every afternoon. Naked?” There were no white areas.

“Sure.”

“There was a burn-through over Dagon City, and the EMP destroyed most of the records, but maybe not all. Whatever was left had to say that the Curtis family was mostly black.”

“Whereas the Maddoxes are white,” she said.

“That burn-through was important. You had to be sure. I’m betting you caused it yourself. It didn’t have any serious military importance, did it? The pulse wiped out hospital equipment too, so they couldn’t look inside you. Couldn’t see that you aren’t built—”

“If you say, ‘Not quite like a woman,’ I’ll turn you upside down.” She reached down to grip his ankle.

“You came down in a two-man escape pod. One XYY Sauron, and you. There wasn’t any Horatius loose for fifteen years. No Miranda either.”

“Only an XX,” she said. Oh, she felt good lying alongside him. The

Saurons weren’t a different species. Gene-tailored, but human, quite human.

He said, “But you didn’t speak Anglic. Here you were on Tanith with some chance of passing for a citizen. But you couldn’t speak a word, and you were with a Sauron berserker—”

“We say soldier. Soldiers and officers. We don’t say Sauron.”

“Okay.”

“We killed a family and took over the house. It was still war, Terry. We cleaned up as best we could. Hid one body, a girl about my size, and buried the rest. I painted our bantar cloth armor. Turned on the TV wall and left it on. It didn’t tell me what they were talking about, but I got the accents. Worked naked in the fields, but that didn’t help. It left my feet white up to the knees!”

“The soldier couldn’t hide, so you had to kill him. Lex found the knife wound. He wouldn’t tell me about it, Brenda.”

“Lex knows. He delivered Van, our second. Van was a soldier.”

He couldn’t think of anything to say. Brenda said, “I killed Randus. I found a Weem’s beast and gave him to it. We don’t think much of the soldiers, Terry. I cut a claw off the Weem’s beast and made the wound—”

“Almost through your skull.”

“It had to be done in one stroke. And kept septic. And in the jungle I had to climb a tree when I had daylight and take off all my clothes to keep the tan. I waved at a plane once. Too late to hide. If the pilot saw me he must have thought he was hallucinating.”

“What’d you eat out there?”

“Everything! What good is a soldier who gets food poisoning? Anything a De Lap’s Ghoul can eat, I can eat.”

“That’s not in the records.”

“That’s why I can’t cook. I can’t tell when it tastes wrong, I can’t tell when meat’s rotten. I used recipes till I could teach some of the kids to cook.”

“You couldn’t talk, but you could fake the symptoms of a stroke. That’s the part I just couldn’t believe— God damn!”

The left side of her face had gone slack as a rubber mask. She grinned with the other side. “Benda Curris,” she said.

“Don’t do that.”

She reached across him and finished the collins in two swallows. “How long have you known?”

“Maybe fifteen years, but I didn’t know, Brenda. I was still angry. There’s a lot of time to think between the stars. I made up this tale. And worked on the kinks, and then I started thinking I must be crazy, because I couldn’t pick a hole in it. You told the Marines about the Saurons to make them talk to you. They wouldn’t notice how fast your speech improved. They were hanging on every word, trying to get a line on the escaped Sauron, and chattering away to each other. They taught you Anglic.

“I used to wonder what you saw in me. I’m an outworider. I couldn’t recognise a Tanith accent. You made love to me in the dark because you’d lost too much of your tan in the hospital—”

He stopped because her hand had closed hard on his arm. “I wanted your child! I wanted children, and Tarzan would look like he was half outworlder. I didn’t plan the power failure, Terry. Hell, it probably tipped you off.”

“Yeah, you moved like you could almost see in the dark. And wore dark glasses in daylight. The Tanith sun doesn’t get that bright, love.”

“Bright enough.”

“Tanith must have been perfect for you. The sun never gets high. In this gravity everybody’s got muscles.”

“True, but I didn’t pick Tanith. Tanith was where the ships went. What else did you notice?”

“Nothing you could have covered up. I talked marriage at you so you switched to Lex. While you were carrying my child.”

“But I can’t get married. In winter the tan goes away. I have to use tanning lotion and do everything by phone.”

“What was it like for . . . you? Before?”

Brenda sat up. “For Sauron women? All right. I’m second generation. Test-tube children, all of us. Women are kept in. . . It’s like a laboratory and a harem both. The first generation didn’t work out. The women didn’t like being brood mares, so to speak, and one day they killed half the doctors and ran loose.”

“Good.”

“There’s nothing good about any of this. They were hunted down and shot, and I got all of this by rumor. Maybe it’s true and maybe it isn’t.”

“They made you a brood mare too, didn’t they?”

“Oh, sure. The second generation Sauron women, we like having children. I don’t know if they fiddled with our genes or if they just kept the survivors for . . . for breeding after the revolt. They gave us a TV wall and let us learn. I think the first group was suffering from sensory deprivation. Most of the children were bottled, but we tended them, and every so often they’d let us carry a child to term, after they were sure it’d survive. I had two. One was Miranda.”

“Survive?” He was sitting up now too, with the remains of his collins.

“Mating two Saurons is a bad idea. The doctors don’t give a shit about side effects. Out of ten children you get a couple of soldiers and an officer and a couple of girls. They’re the heterozygotes. The homozygotes die. Paired genes for infrared eyes give blindness. Paired genes for fast blood clotting gets you strokes and heart attacks in your teens. You get albinos. You get freaks who die of shock just because the adrenal glands got too big.”

“Can you see why I don’t want to find the Saurons? But these are good genes—” Her hands moved down her body, inviting him to witness: good genes, yes. “As long as you don’t backbreed. My children are an asset to the human race, Terry.”

‘‘I—”

“Six of us escaped. We killed some doctors on the way. Once we reached the barracks it was easy. The XYYs will do anything for us. They smuggled us into four of the troop ships. I don’t know what happened to the others. I got aboard Deimos as a soldier. None of the officers ever saw me. We were part of the attack on Tanith. When I saw we had a good burn-through in the Dagon City shield, the whole plan just popped into my mind. I grabbed a soldier and we took an escape pod and ran it from there.”

“You’re incredible.” He pulled back to look at her. Not quite a woman not quite his woman, ever.

“Terry, did you wonder if I might kill you?”

“Yeah. I thought you’d want to know where the Saurons went first.”

“You bet your life on that?”

“I bet on you.”

“Fool.”

“I’m not dead yet,” he pointed out.

“Bad bet, love. When I knew you knew, I assumed you’d made a record somewhere, somehow, that would spill it all if you died. I couldn’t find it in the city records. But suppose I decided to wipe out everyone who might know? Everyone you might have talked to. Charley, Sharon, Maria—”

Oh my God.

“—Lex, Bob because you might have talked to him, George Callahan in case Sharon talked, maybe a random lawyer; do you think I can’t trace your phone calls? Okay, calm down now.” Hands where his neck joined his shoulders, fingers behind the shoulder blades, rubbing smooth and hard. The effort distorted her voice. “We Saurons…we have to decide not to kill. I’ve decided. But you’ve got a…real blind spot there, Terry. You put some people in danger.”

“I guess I just don’t think that way. I had to know whether you’d kill me, before I told you anything useful. I had to know what you are.”

“What am I?” she asked.

“I’m not dead. Nobody’s dead since you reached the hospital.”

“Except Van.”

“Yeah. Van. But if any of this got out, you’d be dead and Tarzan would be dead and, hell, they’d probably kill every kid who ever lived with you, just in case you trained them somehow. So.”

“So,” she said. “Now what?”

2656 AD, APRIL (FIREBEE CLOCK TIME)

Firebee approached the Alderson jump point with a load of borloi and bantar cloth.

Tanith’s sun had turned small. Terry searched the sky near that hurtingly bright point for some sign of Tanith itself. But stars don’t waver outside an atmosphere, and he couldn’t find the one point among many.

“We made some good memories there,” Sharon said. “Another two minutes . . . Troops, are we really going to try to reach Sparta?”

Charley called from aft. “Sparta’s a long way away. See what they buy on Gaea first.”

Terry said, “I’m against it. Sparta’s got six Alderson points. If they’re not at war they’ll be the center of all local trade. This beloved wreck won’t be worth two kroner against that competition. We might have to join a guild too, if they let us.”

“Isn’t there a chance the Emperor would buy the data we got from Morningstar?”

“I’ll run through those records, Captain, but my guess is we’ve got nothing to sell. There won’t be anything Sparta doesn’t have.”

She nodded. “Okay. Jumping now.”

And Firebee was gone.

Jerry Pournelle says I invented the Sauron supermen for THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE. I don’t remember. I did not (then!) have any mental portrait of these super-soldiers. It was just words.

A year ago he told me he was putting together an anthology of stories of the Sauron supermen. Would I like to get in on that?

I try not to make a promise until I know I can keep it. So we started downstairs for coffee. . . and I was beginning to describe a story before we hit bottom.

My pleasure in my own stories does not always depend on character development but I am well safisfied with Brenda.