bones in a few minutes. By departure date, you ought to be completely
yourself again.”
She frowned, shook her head in a puzzled way, tried to sit up. “Hoy, not
yet,” he said, laying hands on the bare slight shoulders. “I prescribe
lots of bed rest. When you’re strong enough to find that boring, I’ll
arrange for entertainment tapes to be projected. The computer says
there’re a few left. Ought to be interesting, a show that old.”
Still she struggled feebly. The chemical-smelling air fluttered fast, in
and out of her lungs. Alarm struck him. “What’s the trouble, Djana?”
“I … don’t know. Dizzy–”
“Oh, well. After what you’ve been through.”
Cold fingers clutched his arm. “Nicky. This moon. Is it … worth …
anything?”
“Huh?”
“Money!” she shrieked like an insect. “Is it worth money?”
Why should that make that much difference, right now? flashed through
him. Her past life’s made her fanatical on the subject, I suppose,
and–“Sure.”
“You’re certain?” she gasped.
“My dear,” he said, “Leon Ammon will have to work hard at it if he does
not want to become one of the richest men in the Empire.”
Her eyes rolled back till he saw only whiteness. She sagged in his
embrace.
“Fainted,” he muttered, and eased her down. Rising, scratching his
scalp: “Computer, what kind of medical knowledge do you keep in your
data banks?”
Reviving after a while, Djana sobbed. She wouldn’t tell him why.
Presently she was as near hysteria as her condition permitted. The
computer found a sedative which Flandry administered.
Or her next awakening she was calm, at any rate on the surface, but
somehow remote from him. She answered his remarks so curtly as to make
it clear she didn’t want to talk. She did take nourishment, though.
Afterward she lay frowning upward, fists clenched at her sides. He left
her alone.
She was more cheerful by the following watch, and gradually reverted to
her usual self.
But they saw scant of each other until they were again in space, bound
back to the assigned round that was to end on Irumclaw where it began.
She had spent most of the time previous in bed, waited on by robots
while she recovered. He, vigor regained sooner, was preoccupied with
setting matters on the moon to rights and supervising the repair of
Jake. The latter job was complicated by the requirement that no clue
remain to what had really taken place. He didn’t want his superiors
disbelieving his entries in the log concerning a malfunction of the
hyperdrive oscillator which it had taken him three weeks to fix by
himself.
Stark Wayland fell aft, and mighty Regin, and lurid Mimir; and the boat
moved alone amidst a glory of stars. Flandry sat with Djana in the conn,
which was the single halfway comfortable area to sit. Rested, clean,
depilated, fed, liquored, in crisp coverall, breathing ample air,
feeling the tug of a steady Terran g and the faint throb of the power
that drove him toward his destination, he inhaled of a cigarette, patted
Djana’s hand, and grinned at her freshborn comeliness. “Mission
accomplished,” he said. “I shall expect you to show your gratitude in
the ways you know best.”
“Well-l-l,” she purred. After a moment: “How could you tell, Nicky?”
“Hm?”
“I don’t yet understand what went wrong. You tried to explain before,
but I was too dazed, I guess.”
“Most simple,” he said, entirely willing to parade his cleverness anew.
“Once I saw we were caught in a chess game, everything else made sense.
For instance, I remembered those radio masts being erected in the wilds.
An impossible job unless the construction robots were free from attack.
Therefore the ferocity of the roving machines was limited to their own
kind. Another game, you see, with more potentialities and less
predictability than chess, even the chess-cum-combat that had been
developed when the regular sort got boring. New types of killer were
produced at intervals and sent forth to see how they’d do against the
older models. Our boat, and later we ourselves, were naturally taken for
such newcomers; the robots weren’t supplied with information about
humans, and line-of-sight radio often had them out of touch with the big