She closed her suit, left the air-bubble of the tiny communications hutch, and drifted back towards the hall that served as combined workroom, kitchen, recreation area and dormitory.

The green sphere of liquid nitrogen containing M-29 was off to her left. She regarded it with scorn. It had done nothing to restrain M-26A, even when that Construct was no more than a battered and bewildered brain fragment. How much use was it likely to be with a complete Construct? But the Stellar Group ambassadors had insisted, and with this one there was at least the mind pools’ conviction that it was rendered harmless (just as Phoebe would have vouched that M-26A was harmless!).

Well, cross her fingers, but that was Chan Dalton and Leah Rainbow’s problem, not hers. They were working in there now, either as individuals or in the uncomfortable union of the mind pools. One of them was sure to drop by with a progress report from the nitrogen bubble before the end of the day.

She floated on, in no hurry to return to the main building. On the way she attempted something that she had already failed to do a dozen times. She tried to decide what else had gone from the Dump. She had heard about the old Mattin Link, refurbished and made serviceable — though not efficient, the energy drain on the power supply system when it operated had been monstrous! — but other objects had vanished, too. Her own recent ramblings in the Dump had revealed thousands of curiosities that she had never noticed before; on the other hand, nothing seemed to be missing.

Today she drifted past a huge double-ended tree, more than a kilometer long and sprouting abundant silver-green leaves and globular fruit from every branch. It must be one of the obsolete free-space vegetation forms, harmless enough to be left alone here in the Dump. It might be even older than the vanished Mattin Link.

Fresh fruit? The temptation to gather one of those giant orange globes from the slow-orbiting plant was strong. Except that “harmless” probably didn’t include being eaten by dimwit scientists with odd food cravings.

Phoebe kept going, and at last came to the pressurized main building. It would be warm inside, and the field of the power kernel even provided gravity. But the moment that she hated worst of all was approaching.

Well, it was pointless to put it off any longer. She went through the lock folds and stripped off her suit.

They were there, all four or them. She realized that she’d entertained a vague hope that two of them might still be off in the treatment room. She walked across to join them, forcing herself to appear calm and relaxed.

Esro Mondrian sat at a table, staring straight ahead. He ignored the food in front of him. His expression seldom varied, a strange little half-smile that suggested amusement at a secret joke. When Phoebe crossed his line of sight, he gave her a knowing nod and a sly little wink. But his forehead was beaded with sweat.

Tatty Snipes sat next to him, holding his hand. She was neatly dressed and carefully made up; skeletally thin, with blue veins visible as a tracery on her temples. And she was trembling.

It was obvious to Phoebe that a Stimulator session had recently ended. “Kubo says hello.” She offered the greeting to all of them equally. She hung up her suit and raised her eyebrows questioningly at Tatty. “Anything?”

Tatty shook her head. “Nothing. Next time you talk to Kubo, tell him it’s no good.”

“It takes time, you know. Maybe — ”

“Phoebe, I’ve been through this before. I think I’m the system’s expert on what you can and can’t do with the Tolkov Stimulator. I can compare Esro with what happened to Chan, and I assure you, it’s just not working. I want you to tell Kubo that.”

Instead of replying, Phoebe turned to the other couple in the room, if Tatty Snipes looked like a dying woman, Godiva Lomberd, who ought to have been dead, appeared in radiant health.

Phoebe had seen her return from the Q-ship around Travancore, with that gaping hole right through her body. She could not believe now fast Godiva had healed. Today she was wearing a dress that left her midriff bare. There was no sign of any wound. The skin on her belly and back was smooth and flawless.

What thoughts went through the brain behind that smooth forehead and serene face? Godiva was beaming fondly at the rigid form of Luther Brachis, strapped tightly into his chair. He in turn was glaring at Phoebe, one eye bulging asymmetrically from its orbit. His mouth was working angrily, and he again and again tried to rub the back of his mangled skull against the restraining head brace.

“He’s having a bit of a bad day,” said Godiva. “He’s angry with me now, because I won’t let him try to feed himself. He makes such a mess. But he recognizes you. He’s making progress.”

Brachis growled, like a caged and tormented bear, and Phoebe instinctively recoiled. She had heard no suggestion of trying a Tolkov Stimulator treatment on Luther Brachis. He was too far gone. It was a miracle that Godiva had managed to keep him alive at all. A second miracle, of restored higher faculties, was surely too much to hope for.

Phoebe had no appetite, but she went across and helped herself to food also. Eyeing the other four as she ate, it occurred to her that both Tatiana and Godiva had given their typical responses. Tatty saw no progress at all, whereas to Phoebe s eye there was at least a glimmer of intelligence in Mondrian’s look; while Godiva, ignoring reality, saw Brachis as something more than a brain-dead animal.

Seeing them together now, Phoebe managed a great leap of understanding. Godiva and Tatty were marooned here, far from home, far from every grace of civilization, far from all friends and all comforts. They were condemned to tend men who were no more than mindless husks of what they had been only a month earlier. The women were feeding them now, spoonful by patient spoonful, but there was no sign of acknowledgement or appreciation.

And here was the real shock: Tatty and Godiva were happy. If Mondrian and Brachis improved and became human again, that would be wonderful. But if they did not, that was acceptable. The women would stay with them. They would never leave the Sargasso Dump.

It was an even bigger shock to Phoebe to realize that the same was true of her. She was here, waiting. Waiting for Chan and Leah to tell her if M-29 could explain what had happened to the other Construct and to the old guards, before they vanished together across fifty light-years. Waiting for the brain-tattered zombies of new guard recruits to show up, so that she could begin to work with them.

Waiting for the second miracle.

Maybe Phoebe too would never leave the Dump. And maybe that was all right.

Epilogue

It was an alien landscape. But to men and women who had spent their whole lives patrolling the remoter reaches of the solar system, Earth would have been just as alien.

With five suns to light the sky, true dark was the rarest of events. But a time of minimal light was approaching, with the closest and brightest pair already set and a third gliding towards the horizon. The ruddy glow of the other two, a pair of contact binary dwarfs a third of a lightyear away, provided the signal for the world’s nocturnal life to awaken.

Crawling, creeping and flying forms emerged from their deep burrows. The guards stared at them. There was no sense of fear on either side, and indeed there was no danger. For the guards it was astonishment at sheer numbers, at a thousand different species appearing in the twilight.

And yet this fecundity is the norm, across a hundred worlds within the Stellar Group. M-26A was crouched on a plain of gravel, the bed of a sometime lake that would fill every couple of hundred years as the planet performed its complex figure-eight orbit around its two dual primaries. There is no reason for your astonishment. According to my recorded information, what you see here should be considered nothing unusual.