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  He suggested: “Maybe Alan won’t be eager to come home. What then?”

  Lily was shaking her head, slowly and forcefully. “He will be, he must be, willing to come home, when I have talked with him. He is a good man in his heart, and so he must.”

  “But if he doesn’t. Sure you won’t have another drink?”

  She accepted mechanically. But when the drink was ready, she just held it in her hand, frowning at the glass. She said: “In the unlikely event that he doesn’t want to come home… but no. He will. He will.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Witch was purring through flightspace, her statglass ports all tuned for opacity. Looking out would not have inflicted any serious harm upon the human eye or brain, but there was nothing to see, except what had often been described as eye-watering, nerve-grating irrelevance.

  Harry and Lily were seated in the control room, in their very comfortable, almost infinitely adaptable combat chairs, enjoying a meal of tender pseudo beefsteak and new potatoes, raw materials provided by the ship’s recycler.

  At least Harry was enjoying it, with an accompanying glass of wine. The lady had nibbled a bit on a couple of Harry’s suggestions, but seemed to quickly lose her appetite.

  Somehow the fact that she didn’t seem to be eating properly was a source of irritation. It bothered him to think he was turning into some kind of a damned uncle or something.

  Finally Harry asked: “Don’t care for my chef? She does get a little idiosyncratic sometimes.” The chef, of course, was only a facet of the Witch’s very capable and knowledgeable optelectronic brain, and the cooking and service were performed entirely without the touch of human hands.

  She shook her head. “Not exactly what I’m used to. But then what I’m used to is not all that great.” She pushed her tray away and turned her chair. “Where did you get these chairs? They’re very comfortable.”

  “They ought to be. I paid a lot for ‘em.”

  Lily pulled back the tray, toyed with her food again.

  Harry wondered aloud: “I wonder what people eat on Maracanda.”

  “Just about everything that people use has to be imported, I understand. Food and air and water all recycled, as on a ship.” She took note of Harry’s intense gaze. “Before I left home, I looked the place up as best I could.”

  “The recycling sounds good. What else did you find out?”

  “Not much. I left home in a hurry.”

  “Traveling alone, until you got to Hong’s World?”

  “Yes. And then I got there just in time for an evacuation.” Then Lily burst out: “What do you suppose has happened to Red-path and Dietrich?” At the same moment she dropped her mostly uneaten meal, tray and all, into the disposal.

  “That’s one of the subjects on which I don’t care to suppose anything.”

  “Harry, I don’t blame you for what you—for the way you handled the problem.”

  “That’s good.” Harry sounded like he didn’t care much one way or the other.

  Still she wouldn’t let it alone. “I’m not sure what else you could have done with them. But still it bothers me to think of how they . . ” She let it trail off.

  “All right, let’s talk about it. I don’t mind. If you’re asking seriously, I wouldn’t give much for their chances.” Harry sipped and nibbled, judiciously balancing flavors. “But no need for you to feel guilty over something I did. In fact, you can take credit—if you want to call it that—for their being still alive when we told them goodbye.” Harry’s tray, polished almost clean, went to its doom, and a moment later his wineglass and napkin joined it.

  “You’re serious, Harry.”

  “Very much so. About some things.”

  The Witch had encountered the berserker on the outer fringe of the Thisworld system, actually within line-of-telescopic-sight, and less than one light-hour’s distance, of where Harry had marooned the two men. That led him to assume that other bad machines had been in the vicinity, and that, by now, it was quite possible Redpath and Dietrich had gone where all humans, good or bad, eventually wound up. Well, if that was the case, at least berserkers were almost always quick and efficient in their killing.

  Lily didn’t want to discuss the matter any further, and neither did Harry. Well, he wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it. He couldn’t tell whether she eventually would or not.

  Distantly he wondered again if she was locking the door of her little private cabin when she went to sleep. Of course, the Witch would find out for him if he should want to know—just out of curiosity. The Witch would even unlock the door again if her master made such a request. But he did not.

  Harry went to his own cabin from time to time, always alone. And he routinely locked his door, using a code word to ensure that it would stay that way. That had become a habit with him, even when no one else was aboard the ship.

  It was morning again, ship’s time, and they were back in the control room, talking.

  “Do you love space, Harry? Traveling in it, looking at it, thinking of all the endless infinities just outside the hull?”

  “No.”

  That took his passenger somewhat aback. “No? Why not?”

  “Because there’s nothing there.”

  “Nothing?”

  “There are some beautiful sights, I’ll give you that. An exploding star, a nebula, a firestorm of radiation. I bet the system we’re going to visit is somewhat spectacular. But you can’t get close to most of them, and if you could, the beauty would be gone. On top of that, they’d kill you.”

  “But—Harry, I’ve been getting the impression that you spend most of your life in space.”

  He thought about it. “That’s not the way I look at it. What I’m really doing is spending a lot of time inside my ship. By now I’ve got everything in her set up just about the way I like it.”

  She thought about it. “Is that all you want from life? A comfortable ship?”

  “I could do worse. It’s more than a lot of people get.”

  Long experience had convinced Harry that whenever a pilot or a passenger was in a particular hurry to get to someplace, anyplace, the normal complications involved in astrogation tended to grow into fiendish puzzles, sometimes equipped with menacing claws and teeth. That was just considering nature, before you factored in berserkers. The tides of dark matter, dust and gas, though no more than a hard vacuum by breathers’ standards, were continually ebbing and flowing in ordinary spacetime, and sometimes threw up corresponding obstacles in nearby flightspace.

  Harry’s remaining passenger had little more to say about her destination, or her plans for when she got there, but she seemed to be counting down the hours and minutes. Meanwhile events ran true to form, regarding technical delays. But with perseverance and a little luck Harry overcame the routine difficulties. With Lily spending most of her time in the next chair, alternately stiffening and slumping in apparent anxiety, he put up a holostage display to let her see something of what his helmet showed him as the Witch dropped out of flightspace and began decelerating in her close approach to the Maracandan system. They were, or ought to be, within an hour or so of landing.

  There were a few small outlying planets, commonplace and virtually uninhabitable, in eccentric orbits. They were the least eccentric thing about the place. The system the Witch was approaching was so odd that Harry was damned if he could be certain at what point his ship had entered it. The most glaring peculiarity was that it lacked the normal arrangement of one primary star at the center. Instead it presented an alternate formation whose weirdness raised in Harry’s imagination the image of a bored Creator who was pleased to think up little jokes.

  The Maracandan primary was not one object, or even two, as would have formed a decent, normal, close binary sun. There were three, none of them routine. Here the visitor was confronted in the first place by a sizable black hole, blessed with the name of Ixpuztec, and in the second place by a neutron star, called Avalon, of the fast-spinning pulsar variety.
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  In the third place, there was Maracanda itself.

  Even in the company of Avalon and Ixpuztec, Maracanda was the oddest of the trio. It was something the Witch’s data bank refused to call either star or planet, but referred to cautiously as a “habitable body.” It was vastly more massive than any normal Earth-type planet, but portions of its surface were rendered comfortably habitable by stable zones of natural gravity inversion.

  All three components of the primary were perpetually chas-ing each other in a most peculiar orbital dance, one that traced out a nearly perfect figure eight. Together they formed what researchers called an azlaroc-type system. Long ago Harry had heard of such rare things, as distant curiosities. He turned to his data bank to refresh his memory on the subject. There were exactly four such objects known to exist, including the eponymous and remote Azlaroc itself, among the millions of solar systems so far studied in the six or seven percent of the Galaxy that Earth-descended humans had more or less explored.

  The celestial mechanics of a three-body primary looked wildly improbable, not to say artificial. But a history of observation strongly suggested that the stability of the four known examples could be relied on.

  Further consultation with the Witch’s data bank assured Harry that the celestial mechanics had actually been worked out in theory centuries before any such system had been discovered, even before serious space travel had begun.

  Given the diverse and exotic natures of the three bodies composing the Maracandan triple primary, Harry couldn’t understand how they could really be all of approximately the same mass, as the laws of celestial mechanics would seem to demand. But that was what their behavior implied. To his surprise, his data bank waffled on giving that question a straight answer. Harry had to assume the figure-eight orbital track meant that the system’s common center of mass kept shifting around somehow through the space between them.

  The data bank also noted that the “habitable body” had a human population somewhat in excess of half a million, and steadily growing. More than half of them lived in Port City, the capital. Somehow it was no surprise to note that a Space Force office had been established in the capital, which meant the Force would very likely have some ships in this solar system, too. This information added nothing to Harry’s peace of mind. But it would not prevent his landing; he had what he thought were reasonable grounds to suppose that the news of his being wanted on criminal charges had not yet reached this backwater.

  The Witch was still hundreds of millions of kilometers from the center of the peculiar figure eight when transponders aboard began to acknowledge signals from robotic outposts of the local early warning system. Harry had been expecting this; something of the kind had been established around any world whose people knew dread of berserkers, which meant almost any that had people on it. From the spacing and timing of the signals, Harry judged this warning network to be no better than second-rate.

  There also came a terse robotic message alerting the visitor to prepare for a somewhat unusual final approach and suggesting that the ship’s captain might want to wait in a carefully chosen orbit until a human pilot experienced in Maracandan space could be provided.

  Harry promptly sent his answer. “No. Hell, no. Look, you people have an open spaceport down there, don’t you? Just give me the regular approach instructions, I don’t need to be piloted in.”

  He was going to have to wait a while for a reply to that. The Witch was still at a distance where the exchange of light-speed messages occupied the better part of an hour.

  Lily had been silent while Harry was talking to the early warning system. But now she commented: “That’s really unusual, isn’t it? Offering to send a pilot?”

  “Very close to unheard of—except when there’s something as tricky as a black hole or a pulsar nearby. Here we have both— not to mention that thing that’s the real oddity. We’ll probably get a string of special instructions. But I have no doubt the Witch can handle it.”

  Harry had already begun the job of stowing away the c-plus cannon, and he was going to have to speed it up. He disliked being forced to hurry anything, but he knew that he probably had less than an hour in which to finish the job. It was vital to make sure that the weapon’s presence aboard was disguised as thoroughly as possible.

  Lily asked in an innocent voice: “Can I help?”

  “Not skilled in armaments, are you? No. So your best method of helping is just to keep out of the way.”

  She moved a little closer. “What would happen if they discovered you still had their cannon on your ship? And while we’re on that subject, I wonder why you do still have it? I know you started some explanation back on Hong’s World, but my mind was elsewhere then.”

  Her voice had taken on a challenging, speculative sound that made Harry pause with tools in hand. “The answer to your first question, lady, is that neither of us would be smiling. I’d be arrested and put on trial in some kind of Galactic Council court, maybe just in front of a Space Force magistrate, and they’d be sure to call all available witnesses, which means you. The trial would take some time, because I’d have the best lawyer I could find. You couldn’t very well concentrate on your search for your dear husband.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.” She swung her big chair, rotating to right and left, in a manner that might have been playful, except that her face was grim. “We can avoid those kinds of problems, I’m sure. I do want to get on with the search for Alan, as quickly as possible.” She drew a deep breath. “Harry, I mentioned this before, but you didn’t really answer. I can’t afford to pay you any more, just getting here took almost all my money. But will you help me find him? Just stand by me until I’ve done that? I mean, assuming all the business about a trial can be avoided?” Her eyes as she asked the question displayed an utter innocence.

  A chain of emotions passed through Harry Silver’s mind, some so quickly that he couldn’t be sure just what they were. Anger briefly dominated, but uncertainty kept anything from really taking over. He stared at her, and he still couldn’t be sure of anything about her. But more and more he wanted to find out, even if doing so cost him time and effort.

  Finally he said: “Okay, I can put in some time helping you locate your husband. Then, if just getting to see him proves to be a problem, maybe—I say maybe—I can help with that, too. If that’s what you really want.”

  She pulled herself up straight in the chair. “What else do you suppose I want?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  Lily shook her head, as if to clear away some misunderstanding. “Thanks. Thanks, Harry. If I could pay you more, I would. Listen, when I talked about avoiding a trial, I didn’t mean to make it sound like—like I was blackmailing you.”

  “I was trying not to hear it that way. Thanks for putting your request so nicely. Now I can feel that I’m just satisfying my own curiosity.”

  After a pause, Harry went on: “As for your second question, the reason I still have the cannon on board is that I haven’t found any reasonable way to get rid of it. Can’t just chop it out of the hull without wrecking my ship. And even if I was willing to do that, I don’t have the tools that would cut this hull. Removing it properly will take special equipment, and special skills which I don’t have either.

  “There aren’t many people who could make a neat job of it. And the only ones I know outside of the Space Force shouldn’t be trusted with the weapon.”

  His passenger seemed to be thinking his situation over, trying to come up with something helpful. At last she offered: “What about the Templars?”

  “A thought. But I haven’t had time to think about it.” That was something of a lie; but he was a long way from having a serious Templar plan as yet.

  Lily went on: “So, you’ll say nothing about having the cannon on board, and of course I won’t either. Are you going to report that we encountered a berserker?”

  “Sure. That’s not only required, it’s the only decent thing to do. No p
roblem. I’ll make a report as soon as we get to where someone can listen to me.”

  “You’ll just tell them we saw one and managed to get away from it?”

  “Better than that. I’ve got a recording that’ll give the interested authorities a pretty good look at what happened.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. It’s obvious that the damned machine took a calculated risk, making an all-out effort to catch up with us inside a dust cloud. It had bad luck and wrecked itself. That’s what generally happens when ship or machine tries to go too fast in the wrong place. Made a real spectacular smash-up.”

  “Is that what the recording shows?”

  “It does now. Destruction is basically destruction, and the Witch and I’ve just touched up the pictures and the data a little bit. Making sure the key points show up clearly. No big changes were necessary.” Harry seriously hoped that any traces the c-plus firing might have left in the Witch’s onboard systems had been erased by now.

  The Maracanda system offered its visitors a rich assortment of things to marvel at. This became more evident as they drew close enough to get a good look at its triple primary.

  The black hole was not directly visible, its jealous gravity too powerful to allow the escape of any image-bearing light. But its location was perfectly easy to spot by its broad accretion disk spreading out tens of millions of kilometers on each side, an accumulation of material on the verge of being sucked into the ravenous, spinning vortex that hid beneath the blackness of its event horizon. The stuff was falling so fast and heated so intensely in the process that it glowed with radiation all across the electromagnetic spectrum, but was especially ferocious in the X-ray band.

  Here, within the labyrinthine complications of the Maracanda system, any orbit a ship might take had to contain some element of risk. This was why the routine approach directions for Maracanda itself were so stringent, forceful, and detailed. No one had to tell the experienced pilot that gravitational anomalies could swallow spaceship-sized bodies in less than an eye blink. The smallest miscalculation could send a ship into a knot, or over a slippery, invisible brink, into a domain where engine power and artificial gravity would be overwhelmed before even a quantum computer could react.