“But couldn’t it have come from a lot farther away — way out past Gargantua?”

“No. Because by the time the silver sphere turned into a hole in space, swallowed up Louis Nenda’s ship, and zoomed off along the light-line, the ray’s point of origin had moved. It was right next to Gargantua by the time I lost sight of it. The only way you can explain that is if it came from something in orbit around Gargantua.”

Darya closed her eyes again. She had a bit of a headache, and recalling the last desperate minutes close to Summertide had somehow made her dizzy and disoriented. Her eyes did not want to focus. She must have been staring for too long at the image on the display. She squinted up at Gargantua. The giant planet was receding fast from Mandel, on a complex orbit controlled both by Mandel and its dwarf stellar companion. But the Dreamboat was moving faster yet. It was catching up.

“A few more hours, Hans.” She suddenly felt slow and lazy. “Just a few more hours. We’ll start to see all the little satellites. Begin to have an idea where we’re going. Won’t we?” She was puzzled by her own words, and by the odd sound of her own voice. “Where are we going? I don’t know where we’re going.”

He did not answer. She made a big effort and turned to him, to find that he was not looking at her at all. He was staring at J’merlia and Kallik.

“Still asleep,” he said.

“Yeah. Still asleep.” Darya smiled. “ ’S all right, Hans, I’m not going to attack you.”

But he was sitting up and swinging his legs over the side of the bunk. His face was redder than usual, and the line of the scar that ran from his left temple to the point of his jaw showed clearly.

“Something’s wrong. Kallik never sleeps for more than half an hour at a time. Stay there.”

She watched as he hurried over to the central control panel of the Dreamboat, studied it, and swore aloud. He reached forward. There was a whir of atmospheric conditioners, and Darya felt a cold and sudden draft in her face. She muttered a protest. He ignored her. He was bending over the inert forms of J’merlia and Kallik; then, suddenly, he appeared at her side again.

“How are you feeling? Come on, sit up,”

Darya found herself being levered to an upright sitting position. The chilly air brought her to fuller wakefulness, and she shivered. “I’m all right. What’s wrong?”

“Atmosphere. The ship took a real beating when we lifted off from Quake. Something was knocked out of whack in the air plant. I’ve put in a temporary override, and we’ll do manual control till we know what happened.”

For the first time, his urgency reached through to her.

“Are we all right? And Kallik and J’merlia?”

“Now we are, all of us. We’re quite safe. But we weren’t. Maybe J’merlia and Kallik could have breathed what we were getting a few minutes ago — they have a high tolerance for bad air — but you and I couldn’t. Too much monoxide. Another half hour like that, we’d have been dead.”

Dead! Darya felt a cold wave across her body, nothing to do with the chilly cabin breeze. When they had faced death at Summertide, the dangers had been obvious to all of them. But Death could arrive in other ways, never making an appointment or announcing his presence, creeping in to take a person when she was least expecting him…

She could not relax. Hans Rebka had stretched out on the bunk again by Darya’s side. She moved close to him, needing human contact. He was breathing hard, and a moment later they were touching along most of their bodies. She could feel him trembling. But then she realized that the tremors were in his hands, touching her face and reaching beneath her shirt to her breasts. In the next few seconds it became obvious that he was highly excited.

They clung to each other without speaking. Finally Darya craned her head up, to stare past Hans at the sleeping forms of J’merlia and Kallik.

What about them — suppose they wake up? She was on the point of saying it. She caught herself. Shut up, dummy. What are you trying to do?

She made one concession to modesty, reaching up past him to turn the light off above the bunks. He did not seem to care; after a few more seconds, neither did Darya. Neither, she was sure, did J’merlia and Kallik.

An hour later the two aliens were still asleep. So was Hans. Darya lay with her eyes closed, reflecting that one aspect of male human behavior varied little from Fourth Alliance to Phemus Circle.

And I’m beginning to understand him better, she thought. He’s a sweet man, but he’s a strange one. A close call from death doesn’t frighten him. It makes him excited — excited enough to ignore his own taboos. I don’t think he gave Kallik and J’merlia one thought… nor did I, for that matter. I suppose it’s not the approach of death that’s the stimulus, it’s the knowledge that you survived… Maybe that’s the way with all the men of the Perimeter worlds, and the women, too. It certainly worked well for Hans.

She smiled to herself. Pity it didn’t work for me. Death doesn’t excite me, it scares me. I enjoyed myself, but I didn’t even come close. Never mind. There’ll be other chances.

At last she opened her eyes. They had not bothered to turn off the projection unit. Gargantua hung above her head, perceptibly bigger. She could see the markings on the swollen face, and the planet had turned a quarter of a revolution since the last time she had looked at it. The huge and permanent atmospheric vortex known as the Eye of Gargantua sat in the center of the disk. It was staring straight at her: orange-red, hypnotic, baleful.

Darya found herself unable to breathe.

So there’ll be other chances, will there? the Eye’s expression said. Don’t count on it. I know something about death, too.

CHAPTER 4

E. Crimson Tally: Permanent record for transfer upon return to Persephone.

Today I reached my initial destination, the planet Opal of the Dobelle system. Today I also drew a major and disturbing conclusion concerning my mission.

It is this: The decision made by Senior Technician Sue Xantippe Harbeson Ando was an appropriate one, although not for the reasons she gave me. For it turns out that the slow, inefficient method of information transfer via human channels yields information that I would never have received by direct access to the data banks. This is true for a simple reason: some important information is not in the data banks.

The central data banks of the Fourth Alliance are incomplete! Who could have foreseen that? Worse still, I now have reason to believe that they are sometimes in error, so much so that I can no longer rely on them.

I would now like to present the evidence that supports these conclusions.

Item one: My journey to Opal required that I pass through four transition points of the Bose Network. This I knew before departure. The data banks had also indicated that each Bose Transition Point serves as a nexus for the transportation of different species; thus members of the Cecropia Federation and the Zardalu Communion might be encountered there, as well as humans of the Fourth Alliance and the Phemus Circle.

This information proved accurate. At the third transition point, 290 light-years from Sol, in a region already verging on the Phemus Circle zone and adjoining both Fourth Alliance and Cecropia Federation territories, I saw and recognized Cecropians, Lo’tfians, Varnians, Hymenopts, and Ditrons.

The data banks make the relationship between these species very clear. Lo’tfians and Ditrons serve as slave species to Cecropians. Hymenopts and Varnians are sometimes free beings, but are usually slave to humans living in the territories of the Zardalu Communion. (Slave to the land-cephalopod Zardalu also, should any still exist; but none has been encountered since the Great Rising, in pre-Expansion times.)