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“Anyway Bank is a bad district,” the linker mumbled.

Caitlín laughed. “It’s a polyglot district, cheap and raffish and fun, but bad it is not if you make friends and keep your wits about you. What’s left of my virtue has been worse endangered in the orderly room of St. Enoch’s or fashionable homes on Anvil Hill than ever on the Bank.”

“You travel about the planet, you said?”

“Aye.”

“‘Oo takes care of your pets when you are gone?”

“A grandfatherly ragamuffin by name of Matt Fry. How he got on a transport ship I’ll never be knowing, nor anyone else. He does not tell the same story twice, and he had no special skill to justify his freight save that he’s the most enchanting rascal born since Falstaff. I at least could promise to qualify in medics, for my daddy had given his girl a head start; Well, Matt is sweet and understanding with the animals, and he keeps the place clean and unburgled, and asks no more than the doss itself, plus
whatever bottles I leave behind me, none of them ever full.” Caitlín shook her head. “I wish I could give him shelter the whole year, but we’d neither of us ’ave privacy, and then my gentleman friends—” She halted. “Bad cess to me, I’ve embarrassed you again. Can you forgive me?”

“No, no, no,” Susanne stammered through her blushes. “No offense. I did t’ink…you and Daniel—no, like you say, the privacy—
allons,
we change the subject, no?”

“Best we do,” Caitlín agreed soberly. “My tongue is too loose. An Irish failing, like drink. Dan keeps after me to curb it.”

“Talk and drink, I believe those are species problems, not national.” Susanne spoke fast, directing conversation away from the personal, gaining confidence as she did. “I ’ave never met an Irish before you, I have read some of your people’s works, and screened some of their dramas, and watched Documentaries…. Per’aps on this trip you can show me their land?”

“Faith, I’d love to.”

“And then I will take you t’rough Provence. More, if we get time. But first we go to Ireland, because of your parents.”

“Grand! Which do you prefer, a modern city—they tell me Dublin is exciting these days—or historical monuments and lone, lovely countryside? We may need to be choosing one or the other.”

“The countryside. Cities on Eart’, they are too much alike. Every countryside is unique.”

“In ours it rains,” Caitlín warned, “and drizzles, and rains, and mists, and rains, and might snow a little. I’ve forgotten what the season will be.”

“Cela ne fait rien
. I would still like to see. Our French
campagne,
it is too civilized now, agridomains, parks, communities, and in between a few spots they keep quaint for the tourists.”

Caitlín smiled sadly. “Hurry then to Ireland, for from what I hear, she’s fast going the same way. Glad I am that I knew her wild, and that Demeter will stay herself while I live.” She hummed a bar or two of music.

“What was that?” Susanne asked.

“Oh, it’s said to be an old lullabye. I set words of my own to it not long ago, after my mother wrote to me from Lahinch where she was holidaying.”

“The words? Would you sing?”

“When ever did a bard refuse?” Caitlín laughed. “It’s mercifully short.

Thereafter the two of them grew more and more lively.

W
HEN
Chinook
was approximately a million kilometers from the T machine, watchship
Bohr
established laser contact. Notification of her clearance for Sol had already been beamed here. What remained was a formality or two, and the sending ahead of a small automatic “pilot fish,” which would tell the guard at the far end of the gate that a vessel was coming through and the usual safety measures were to be put into effect. Procedures were completed while
Chinook
maneuvered for approach to the first beacon she must pass.

That was not the outermost one. The path she would follow wove among seven glowing globes. It was not similar to the Phoebusward track around the Solar engine, which had ten beacons. Many minds had speculated about the reasons for those variations. The alien spacefarers had probably found some answers, Brodersen thought.

He sat by himself in the command center. The odds were overwhelming that he would be the merest passenger during transit. Cybernetic systems ought to handle everything. If they failed or looked about to fail, Su Granville at the computer, Phil Weisenberg and Martti Leino in the engine room under her direction—would take over. Nevertheless he felt obliged to be on station, and without Pegeen to distract him, much though they both wanted to experience the hours together. Brodersen never wearied of watching. Visually, approach to a gate was less spectacular than many things in space. But he would think of what the sights meant, and try to comprehend that beings existed who had made this be, and feel his soul drown and soar in awe.

Each passage was slightly unlike the last, since beacons were always changing their configurations to match the wheelings of stars through the galaxy (and who knew what further protean
aspects of the universe?). The shifts were too small for senses to notice in less than decades, they were easily compensated for, and in any event, a ship had a certain amount of tolerance. If she veered off a particular course by a few kilometers, she’d still arrive where she was supposed to, albeit the exact time and position at which she appeared might not be quite what they were meant to be. Even so, space law rightly prescribed a slow tracing out of a path, with ample margin for error.

After all, a bad mistake would throw you into the unknown. Assuming that a complete transit pattern involved two or more beacons, seven of them gave you 5913 possible destinations. (Robot probes had verified that assumption, departing from here as well as from the Solar System, never to return.) In addition there were infinitely many paths which did not go straight from marker to marker, each of which would also take you somewhere. (Robot probes had verified that likewise, until the authorities decided they’d lost too many.)

Brodersen knew that a particular track would bring him to wherever the alien ship had gone—and
Emissary,
which afterward returned in order to vanish into a different kind of trap. Like the rest of the public, he had not been told which track it was. (At the time, he had agreed that secrecy was a sensible policy.) A machine must lie at the end of that gate. One of the human probes must have appeared there earlier. But if the aliens noticed it, they would have no way to tell who sent it from where.

Like most people, Brodersen took for granted that many, perhaps all of the remaining beacon-to-beacon courses likewise led to T machines. The trouble was, once you’d gone through, what was your route back? You’d blunder blind through gate after gate till your supplies ran out, unless you found an advanced society which could help you.
Emissary
had set off in that hope, but
Emissary
knew that such a civilization existed. Yet the next T machine might simply have been at a relay point in an otherwise empty place…. Sure it was that very few tracks led to races that were knowledgeable in these matters. The Phoebean System, for instance, had been devoid of sentience, let alone spacefaring civilization, until the Voice guided men there….

Hours passed.

Mostly
Chinook
fell free, and he floated loosely harnessed to his seat in the exhilarating ghostliness of zero gravity. Then when she reached the prescribed distance from a marker, gyros,
softly whirring, swung her about; jets kindled; for minutes he had a slight weight; again he drifted. The silence was vast. He could have used the intercom to talk with Pegeen, but that would have been open for the whole crew to hear. Nobody else had anything to broadcast either, as visions swung majestic across the screens.

A sphere against blackness, moon-sized to the eye, shining green as Ireland until it dwindled from sight… the T machine at their closest approach, a foreshortened cylinder reaching over a few degrees of arc, white with a hint of pearly sheen athwart the stars, a spine-walking sense of how much mass how tightly gripped in upon itself were here a-spin how furiously … a sphere whose color was not in the visual spectrum … the Milky Way, the nebulae, the galaxies beyond our galaxy….

And now heaven was altering enough for him to notice: this bright star and that bright star moving closer together or farther part, at last flitting and weaving over the dark like fireflies, as
Chinook
went ever deeper into that field which the monstrously whirling monstrous mass created….

The time was long and the time was nothing until a siren called, “Stand by!” Brodersen’s pulse leaped. He caught the arms of his chair. The ship turned heavily, came to rest, hung an instant. Force grabbed him. The final maneuver along any track was a sharp acceleration straight toward the machine.

He felt no jump, no warp, nothing except free fall when the jet cut off. In his viewscreens, the universe appeared momentarily to stagger. It steadied at once; the effect was an optical illusion due to persistence of vision. Everywhere around, he saw titanic serenity; a cylinder, dwindled by remoteness to a bit of thread, which was not the cylinder he had been seeing; a disc like that of Phoebus, but whiter, fierier, which was the disc of Sol.

Chinook
had passed through.

He resumed his captaincy.

“Aram Janigian, commanding watchship
Copernicus”
the face in his outercom receiver said, heavily accenting the Spanish. “Welcome,
Chinook.”

“Daniel Brodersen, commanding. Thank you,” was the equally ritual response. “All’s well aboard.”

“Good. Your position and vectors are acceptable, no immediate correction required.”

Familiar though it was, Brodersen felt impressed anew by the fact that a ship always emerged with the same velocity relative to the second T machine as she had had relative to the first at the instant she jumped. Somehow energy differences between stars were compensated for within the transport fields—unless some conservation law that man knew nothing about was in operation.

“Here is your update,” Janigian said.

It went directly from computer to computer, starting with the exact local time. A readout showed Brodersen that he was within two hours of his ETA: pretty good. Solar wind conditions, notices of craft elsewhere in the System, etc., etc., followed. When that was done, Janigian delivered selected items personally. Port Helen, of the Iliadic League, was closed by a strike; a shipment of cometary water and hydrocarbons, inbound for Luna, had been granted A priority; an asteroid from interstellar space, swinging by on its hyperbolic orbit, would make close approach to Mars on 3 February; pending further notice, a sphere of one million kilometers’ radius around the San Geronimo Wheel was interdicted to unauthorized persons and carriers—

Brodersen started, fetched up against his harness, and bounced back. “Huh?” he exclaimed. “How come?”

“A scientific project that doesn’t want gas contamination; or so I understand,” Janigian said, bored. “Why do you care? You’re cleared for Earth.”

“Um-m… I’d hoped to visit the Wheel, as long as I’m here,” Brodersen lied fast. “Reviving happy memories. What is this project?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have the complete announcement fed into your bank if you wish. Perhaps you can arrange permission.”

“Thanks. Please go on.”

The briefing completed, the farewell courtesies exchanged, the vectors calculated,
Chinook
set out at one gee. She would need between four and five Terrestrial days to round Sol and reach Earth. It should be a totally routine voyage.

Brodersen tapped for a readout of the prohibition. Having glowered at it, he unsnapped himself and paced among the instrumentalities, blank surfaces, and star-crowded screens of the command center. Eventually he activated the intercom. “Captain to chief engineer,” he said. “Phil, would you come up here?” A part of him imagined Caitlín’s disappointment that he
had said nothing to her. Later, later—to her and them all. First he needed a consultation with the top technical expert aboard, who was also his oldest friend aboard.

Weisenberg sauntered through the door. The furrows in his countenance lay easy; he rarely registered excitement. “What’s what, Dan?” he asked in his drawled English. His parents, Neo-Chasidim, had moved to Demeter to escape persecution in the Holy Western Republic.

“You were listening, weren’t you?” As was customary, Brodersen had put his conversation with Janigian on the intercom. “Okay, check this business on the San Geronimo Wheel and tell me what you think it smells like.”

Weisenberg placed his lank frame, joint by joint, into a chair before the terminal. Silence followed. Brodersen felt sweat prickle forth on his skin and caught a whiff of it.

“Well?” he snapped at length.

Weisenberg looked at him. “It is rather noncommittal, isn’t it?” he said.

“Noncommittal, hell! Who do they expect will take seriously that goose gabble about turning over a public monument, for months, to research that trivial?”

“Anybody who isn’t paranoid, Dan. Foundations do underwrite odd undertakings; and the monument in question is monumentally unimportant to just about everyone alive.”

Brodersen slammed fist against bulkhead, hurtfully hard. “All right, I’m paranoid! You too. The whole gang of us. For good reason.
Emissary
is being held somewhere, if she and her crew haven’t already been destroyed. Doesn’t the Wheel seem logical?”

Weisenberg nodded his white head. “Well, yes, if you insist, it does. No vessel would likely pass near the closed zone. If any did, she’d have no cause to turn scanners that way at full magnification, and identify a modified
Reina-class
ship orbiting close.” Long fingers rubbed a long chin. “Where is the Wheel currently?”