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Through a wobbling, ringing darkness, he heard the Earth­ling: “Help me with this beef, Dave.” And he felt himself

dragged across the floor, somehow manhandled into a bunk and harnessed.

His mind returned. Pain stabbed and flickered through him. He struggled to sit up. “That was an Earthman way to fight,” he pushed out through a swelling mouth.

“I don’t enjoy fighting,” said Maclaren from his own bunk, “so I got it over with as soon as possible.”

“You—” the Krasnan lifted grotesquely heavy hands and fumbled with his harness. “I’m going to the control turret. If you try to stop me this time—”

“You’re already too late, brother Sverdlov,” said Maclaren coolly. “Whatever you were setting out to forestall has gone irrevocably far toward happening.”

The words were a physical blow.

“It’s . . . yes,” said the engineer. “I’m too late.” The shout burst from him: “We’re all too late, now!”

“Ease back,” said Maclaren. “Frankly, your behavior doesn’t give me much confidence in your judgment about anything.”

It rumbled through the ship. That shouldn’t be, thought Sverdlov’s training; even full blast ought to be nearly noise­less, and this was only fractional. Sweat prickled his skin. For the first time in a violent life, he totally realized that he could die.

“I’m sorry for what I called you,” said Maclaren. “I had to stop you, but now I apologize.”

Sverdlov made no answer. He stared up at a blank ceiling. Oddly, his first emotion, as rage ebbed, was an overwhelming sorrow. Now he would never see Krasna made free.

VIII.

S

ILENCE and no-weight were dreamlike. For a reason ob­scure to himself, Maclaren had dimmed the fluoros

around the observation deck, so that twilight filled it and the scientific apparatus crouched in racks and on benches seemed to be a herd of long-necked monsters. Thus there was nothing to drown the steely brilliance of the stars, when you looked out an unshuttered port.

The star hurtled across his field of view. Her eccentric orbit took the Cross around it in thirty-seven minutes. Here, at closest approach, they were only half a million kilometers

away. The thing had the visual diameter of three full Moons. It was curiously vague of outline: a central ab~olute blackness, fading toward deep gray near the edges where starlight caught an atmosphere more savagely compressed than Earth’s ocean abyss. Through the telescope, there seemed to be changeable streaks and mottlings, bands, spots, a hint of color too faint for the eye to tell . . . as if the ghosts of burned-out fires still walked.

Quite oblate, Maclaren reminded himself. That would have given us a hint, if we’d known. Or the radio spectrum; now I realize, when it’s too late, that the lines really are triplets, and their broadening is Doppler shift.

The silence was smothering.

Nakamura drifted in. He poised himself in the air and waited quietly.

“Well?” said Maclaren.

“Sverdlov is still outside, looking at the accelerators and web,” said Nakamura. “He will not admit there is no hope.”

“Neither will I,” said Maclaren.

“Virtually the whole system is destroyed. Fifty meters of it have vanished. The rest is fused, twisted, short-circuited .

a miracle it continued to give some feeble kind of blast, so I could at least find an orbit.” Nakamura laughed. Maclaren thought that that high-pitched, apologetic giggle was going to be hard to live with, if one hadn’t been raised among such symbols. “We carry a few spare parts, but not that many.”

“Perhaps we can make some,” said Maclaren.

“Perhaps,” said Nakamura. “But of course the accelerators are of no importance in themselves, the reconstruction of the web is the only way to get home . . . What has the young man Ryerson to say about that?”

“Don’t know. I sent him off to check the manifest and then look over the stuff the ship actually carries. He’s been gone a long time, but—”

“I understand,” said Nakamura. “It is not easy to face a death sentence when one is young.”

Maclaren nodded absently and returned his gaze to the scribbled data sheets in one hand. After a moment, Nakamura cleared his throat and said awkwardly: “Ah . . . I beg your pardon . . . about the affair of Engineer Sverdlov—”