Turn around twice and there went another month into the file cabinets of time. And here was Mouse with another. "Moyshe, I think I need help."

"Stay out of her way."

"Not the Sangaree woman this time, Moyshe. Another one."

"What else?"

"Carrie just gave me the word. That Sally I was going with... She's peegee."

"Come on. You're shitting me. People don't get pregnant unless... Oh, my."

"Oh, my, yes. Unless they want to."

Moyshe fought a grin.

"You laugh and I'll kick your head in."

"Me? Laugh? I'm sorry. It's just that... What do you want me to do?"

"Shee-it, Moyshe. I don't know. Talk to me. I've never been up this tree before."

"What is it? She figure you'd do the honorable thing?" Why are you doing this to me, Mouse? I had a handle on the Alyce thing.

"That's the name of the game. That's the way they do things here. And the way they lay their little traps. Straight from Century One."

"No law says you've got to give her what she wants, though. Kiss her good-bye." That was how he had failed Alyce, so long ago. He had not found the strength to say no until it was too late.

"I don't like to hurt anybody's feelings."

"That's the chance she took, isn't it?" How come it was so easy to say, but so hard to do? "I don't see how anybody could believe in a marriage that started out that way anyway. Go on. Tell her to kiss off."

"Easier said than done, Moyshe."

"I know. Advice is that way. Here's some more, while we're at it. Take your own precautions so it doesn't happen again."

"That much I figured out for myself." Mouse went away. He returned within the hour, shaking his head. "She couldn't believe that landsmen don't give a damn if a kid's parents are married or not. But I think I finally got through to her."

For a while Mouse's social calendar was less crowded. But only for a while. The ladies seemed incapable of remaining away.

"Tell me something, Amy," benRabi said one afternoon. "Why are we here?"

She started giving him the standard story.

"That's not true. Danion didn't really need us. Certainly not a thousand of us. Even with only two hundred we'll finish up six months early. Your own Damage Control people wouldn't have taken much longer. So what's really going on?"

She would not tell him. She even refused to speculate. He suspected, from her expression, that she might not know, that she was beginning to ask herself the questions that were bothering him.

His came of a long line of thinking sparked by snippets of information and flashes of intuition that had begun accumulating on Carson's.

"Correct me if you can fault this hypothesis," he told Mouse when Amy was out of hearing. "We're guinea pigs in a coexistence experiment. They've got something big and dangerous going and they thought they could hire outside help to get through it. I'd guess they expect heavy fighting. Our job descriptions all deal with damage control. But the experiment was a failure. No takers."

"I wouldn't know, Moyshe. You've got your head working. Who were they going to fight? Not us."

"Sharks?"

"Maybe. But it doesn't add up. Still, I'm not much good at puzzles. How's your head doing?"

"Real good. Why?"

"I thought so. You're more like the old Moyshe lately." They completed the last scheduled repair three weeks later. From then on there was little to do.

One day a long-faced Amy announced, "They just told me. Starting Monday you'll be assigned to Damage Control. To the emergency ready room at D.C. South. I'll take you over and introduce you."

"Breaking up the team, eh?" Mouse asked. "Where are you going?"

"Back to Security." She did not sound pleased.

BenRabi felt a guilty elation. Though he loved Amy, he did not like having her around all the time. He felt smothered.

The damage control assignment was a crushing bore. "A fireman in a steel city would have more to do," Mouse complained. A few days later, he cornered benRabi in order to update him on his own snooping.

"Our fleet commander looks like a maverick. He won't bow down to Gruber of Gruber's Fleet as the head honcho Starfisher. He wants to do things his own way. The other fleets treat this one like an idiot cousin."

"That why the Old Man targeted Payne's Fleet?"

"No. He just jumped on a chance to get somebody onto a harvestship. You were right about the experiment, by the way. It was something Gruber put Payne up to. I get the impression that now he's using the failure as an excuse to go haring off on some adventure of his own as soon as we're done harvesting."

"Speaking of which. Amy says it's the best they've ever had. They're going to hold their auction after we leave."

"Kindervoort still on you about crossing over?"

"He mentions it sometimes. Came to the cabin last week." Did Mouse suspect that he found the offer tempting?

Sports season became crazier than ever as playoff time approached. For Moyshe it was all bewildering color and madness. Mouse, of course, was right in the thick of it. Football was his latest passion. He could quote records and statistics by the hour. BenRabi studied the game just so he could carry on a conversation.

Their lives, increasingly, became frosting, sugar-bits having nothing to do with their assignments. They had come here to find starfish. Despite a thousand doubts and distractions, benRabi kept his wavering cross hair sighted near his programed target. He even resumed wrestling with Jerusalem so he could keep his invisible notes.

Sharing quarters with an agent for the other side constantly hampered him. He was not so naïve as to believe that Amy had been struck deaf and blind by love.

He had come aboard thinking starfish were a wonderful concept, a miraculous hook on which to hang modern myths and legends. They had been one with the lost planet Osiris and the fabulous weapons of Stars' End. Now he knew that the hydrogen streams teemed with "life." The fairy magic was gone, but still the fantastic fish were something to play with during his long hours of waiting for an emergency that never arose.

The starfish, the leviathans of the airless deep, were more fields of force and the balances between them than they were creatures of matter. The longbeards of the breed could be three hundred kilometers long and a million years old. They might occupy thousands of cubic kilometers, yet have fewer atoms in them than a human adult. In them atoms and molecules functioned primarily as points upon which forces anchored. Here, there, a pinpoint hawking hole left over from the big bang formed the core of an invisible organ.

The fabric of space and time were the creature's bone and sinew. He could manipulate them within himself. In essence, he built himself a secondary universe within the primary, and, within that homemade pocket reality existed as tangibly as did men in their own reality. The part of a starfish that could be detected was but a fraction of the whole beast. He also existed in hyperspace, null space, and on levels mankind had not yet reached.

Those beasts of the big night were living fusion furnaces. They fed on hydrogen, and enjoyed an occasional spice of other elements in the fusion chain. At first Moyshe had wondered why they did not gather where matter was more dense, as in the neighborhood of a protostar.

Amy told him that the field stresses around stellar masses could rip the creatures apart.

A starfish's stomach contained a fire as violent as that at the heart of a sun. Not only did fusion take place there, but matter annihilation as well when the beast browsed on anti-hydrogen with that part of him coexisting in a counter-universe.

BenRabi did not speculate on the physics. He was a field man. A supernova seemed kindergarten stuff by comparison. He simply noted his thoughts in invisible ink and hoped the Bureau's tame physicists could make something of them.