The others had moved closer to the ranks of robots and were looking at them curiously.

“They seem pretty standard,” said Sy. “I’ve never seen this design before, but they’re computer-controlled. We should be able to understand their instruction procedure.”

“But why?” said Rosanne. “Even when we understand it, Peron, what are we supposed to do with it?”

“Dig into the coding. Change it. Make it so that our voices can give acceptable commands, too. And maybe make it so that the system won’t respond to Captain Rinker and the others in S-space.”

“But what good will all that do?” Elissa was looking puzzled.

Lum grinned at her. “Isn’t it obvious?” He turned to Peron. “Rinker is quite right, Peron, you are a troublemaker. You intend to take over this ship. Then we’ll go and visit Immortal Headquarters — wherever that is — on our terms.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Olivia Ferranti blinked her eyes. The texture of the illumination seemed a little different, not quite the way that she remembered it before she last went to S-space; and her body was light, floating away, as though she was leaving part of her on the padded floor or the container.

She shivered and slowly sat up, rubbing at her chilled forearms; then she suddenly jerked to full wakefulness. She was being observed. Five faces were peering in warily at her through the transparent top of the suspense tank. She pulled herself forward to the casket’s door and eased it open. Peron was standing there, nervously watching.

“You read our message?” he said.

“Of course we did — you were watching us, weren’t you?”

He nodded. “We told you to send someone at once. But it seemed to take you an awful long time.”

Olivia Ferranti was breathing deeply, adjusting to the familiar but surprising taste of the air in her lungs. She shrugged her shoulders, as much for muscular experiment as for any body message.

“Four days — four days here. But we only talked for a few minutes in S-space. I call that a fast response.” She looked around her, at Peron and the others. “Relax. I was only sent here to talk. What do you think I’m going to do, knock the lot of you down and tie you up? Any one of you could beat me in a fight. You’re the Planetfest winners, remember?”

“We remember,” said Peron. “We just want to be sure that you do. You and the others. Why are you here, and not Rinker?”

“He made the transition very recently, just a couple of hours ago, when the automatic systems were going wrong. Transitions too close together have bad effects. In fact, frequent transitions shorten subjective life expectancy. And he doesn’t trust you, either.”

She licked her lips. “I guess he thinks I’m more expendable. Look, I know you’re in a hurry to talk, but I’d like a drink of water.”

Peron glanced briefly at the others, then led the way back through the winding corridor, taking them once more to the central food processing chamber of the ship.

“He didn’t really want anybody to talk to you,” said Ferranti as they moved along the corridor. “But he agreed that there was no choice. ‘They’ll be like a band of wild apes,’ he said. ‘Fiddling around with my ship! They don’t know how anything works — my God, there’s no way of knowing what they may do to it and to us!’ “

She looked around her at the intent young faces that closely watched her every movement. “I must say that I have to agree with him. I’m sure you’re feeling pretty cocky at the moment, with everything under control. But you could kill this ship by pure accident. It’s frightening — you’re smart, but there are so many things you simply don’t know.”

“So why don’t you tell us some of them?” Sy asked in a surly voice. “You’ll find we’re all quick learners.”

“I’m not supposed to tell you much — and some things I don’t even know myself. And before you get paranoid as to why I’m holding some things back from you, I’ll tell you the reason for that. There’s a sound logic for why you weren’t told everything back on Whirlygig.”

They had reached the food chamber. Olivia Ferranti bent over a water spigot, took a long, leisurely drink, then sighed and shook her head.

“That’s one of the things that I really miss. Water just doesn’t taste right in S-space.” She turned to face the group. “How much do you know about the history of your civilization on Pentecost?”

“We know that the first settlers came off The Ship,” said Peron. “It was called Eleanora, and it started out from a planet called Earth, thousands of years earlier.”

“That’s a beginning.” Olivia Ferranti settled herself cross-legged, floating a handsbreadth above the floor, and gestured to the others to gather round her there. “And if you’re anything like most of the candidates we get from Pentecost for indoctrination, that’s almost all that you’ll know. So make yourselves comfortable. I need to give you a bit of a history lesson. You may not like some of it too well, but bear with me.

“Eleanora was the biggest and most advanced of half a dozen arcologies that were built as colony ships in the Sol System, more than twenty-five thousand Earth-years ago. The arcologies were all constructed in orbits close to Earth. Just as Eleanora was close to complete, and the colonists had arrived on board it, the nations down on Earth did what we’d all been afraid they would do for generations. They went mad. Someone pulled the trigger, and after that there was no stopping it. It was a full-scale nuclear war.

“When that war happened, there were about thirty-five thousand people living away from Earth. They were working on mining and construction, or on applications satellites and stations, or they were inhabitants of the colony ships. We were all helpless, watching the world explode before our eyes. And at first none of us knew what to do next. We were numb with shock and horror.” “You said ‘we.’ You mean you were there — yourself?” asked Elissa.

“I was. Me, myself, in person. I was a physician on one of the orbiting space stations.” Olivia Ferranti shook her head and rubbed gently at her eyes. She seemed to be staring far beyond the circle of her listeners, out across space and time to the death of a planet. “Initially we just wouldn’t believe it. Earth couldn’t destroy itself like that. We knew it must have been terrible on the surface, because we had seen the whole globe change in a few hours from a beautiful blue-green marble to a dusky purple-black grape, and the smoke plumes had risen well into the stratosphere. Even so, emotional acceptance was beyond us. Somehow, beyond logic, we believed that the damage was temporary and the surface nations would recover. We waited for radio signals from survivor groups, messages that would tell us that civilization was still going on beneath those dark clouds of dust and smoke. The signals never came. After a few weeks we sent shuttles down into the atmosphere, shielded against high levels of radioactivity and designed to go down below the clouds and examine the surface. There was so much dust in the northern hemisphere that we could see nothing, not even from low altitude. We tried south of the equator, and after a couple of months we finally knew. It was the end.

“We couldn’t rule out the possibility of isolated survivors, clinging on to existence down there in the darkness. But as time went by even that hope seemed less and less likely.

“Some plants would survive, we knew that; and we felt sure there would be life in the sea — but we had no idea how much. We tried to calculate what would happen to the whole food chain when photosynthesis was reduced to less than a tenth of the usual value, but we had no faith in our answers. Anyway, they didn’t really make any difference. For mankind on Earth, it was the end. And we felt as though it was the end for us, too. We seemed like a handful of mourners, circling the funeral pyre of all our friends and relations.