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had every observed outside of atmosphere before. All kinds of organics, in
enormous profusion."
"Excuse me, but I have never heard what the basic purpose of that mission
was."
"General intelligence-gathering. Not looking for berserkers, certainly, not
with two people in one small ship." The young woman fell silent, perhaps with
some private memory.
"You were telling me about all the organic materials."
"Right. We were surprised. There are very few planets, you know, in that
sector near the
Core."
"CORESEC. I know a little bit about it. But tell me."
"High average star-density, better than thirty per cubic parsec. Nebular
material very heavy, very complex. A maze of tunnels and bottlenecks; it's
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easy for a ship to get trapped. A
number of them have. That's why they sent Frank."
"And you."
"Yes, I suppose. I was good. We saw gluts of petroleum. Would you believe
dense enough in places for real gas-fires? Where there was free oxygen too, in
regions sheltered from heavy starlight, you could get a line of real flame a
billion kilometers long, along a zone of compression in the medium."
Another pause. Lombok got the feeling that when she had started to talk she
had intended to lead up to something, but now she kept drifting away from it
again. No doubt because nothing mattered. He prompted: "On that trip you
became pregnant."
"Yes. I didn't realize you knew about that. I was on contraceptives,
naturally. If I had wanted a pregnancy that wouldn't have been the ideal time
or place to start it."
"Naturally."
"But for some reason there was a contraceptive failure. On that trip, all the
long shots came home first."
It seemed that going on with the conversation was among the things that did
not matter. Not wanting to concentrate too obviously on the pregnancy, he
asked, "Tell me how you got away from the berserker."
Now Elly was looking past Lombok, as if at a viewscreen somewhere, and as she
began to speak again tension gradually developed. Her strong hands started
pulling and fingering at her robe.
"It was after us I mean right after us, a few kilometers, no more. I think
that by then it had decided it could take us easily, and it wanted us alive.
As we entered the Taj, there was some kind of shock, sudden change, don't ask
me exactly what. Frank was knocked out. I
remained conscious the whole time at least when they hypnotized me back at
CORESEC, they couldn't find any gaps in my consciousness."
"And what did you see, feel, experience, while you were in there?" There was
no immediate answer, and Lombok added, "How long did this immersion last?"
The brief glance Elly gave him was almost pitying. "How long did it last?
Well, the ship's clock in Frank's compartment ran through about four hours
during the immersion, as you call it. The clock on my side meanwhile recorded
something over eleven years."
Lombok had seen those figures before. He cleared his throat. "Obviously not
any relativistic effect."
"Obviously." She smiled briefly. "Or I would have come out of the Taj with a
half-grown child."
"So, some kind of strange field or whatever fouled up the timers. They were
the regular cesium-133 clocks?"
"Yes. Therefore atoms of cesium-133 were changing energy states in our two
compartments in quite different ways. If you were a scientist you'd look more
puzzled than you do."
"Oh, I'm puzzled. But that's nothing new for me. Was your pregnancy affected
by whatever had happened? Was the later fetal development normal?"
"I really don't know. There were other people willing to worry about that. And
able to do a better job of taking care of it than I could, I'm sure.
I had all I could handle, for a while, inside my own head. I had the conceptus
removed on
Alpine, the first place we stopped. You know, this is the first time I've
really talked about it since. It was a nice-looking adoption agency, as I
recall, well-equipped& I suppose there's an eleven-year-old running around
Alpine now with a stranger origin than he or she can well imagine." Elly's
expression softened, without quite reaching anything that could be called a
smile.
Lombok sat back in his chair, raised his arms in a luxurious stretch. He
looked up and around, at the dim groining of the ancient arches. "Who is the
Final Savior, if you don't mind my asking?"
"I don't mind. We will know It when It comes."
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"It?"
"When we say that, people tend to think we are berserker-worshippers.
Completely untrue.
The Savior is, will be, beyond the classifications of life and non-life."
"Identified with omnipotence? With a Creator?"
"I don't see any meaning in those questions."
Lombok cheerfully let them pass. "You were going to tell me more about your
experience inside the Taj."
"Yes." Elly saw her hands plucking at the gray robe, and made them stop.
"Descriptions won't do much good, I'm afraid. I tried to make recordings, take
pictures. They didn't show very much when we got home."
"I know. If it hadn't been for the two things you brought back, it's possible
no one would have believed your story at all."
There was a flash of humor in her eyes. "I didn't want to bring up the subject
of those artifacts. Security, you know."
"I thought security wouldn't matter to you."
"It must matter to you, though. Now I'm sure you are really from Defense. Tell
me, have more people been sent to the Taj? Oh, they must have been, by this
time. I'd like to know what they've found out."
So would I, Lombok thought drily. Neither of the two expeditions had returned
as yet. Which was not necessarily a sign of anything really wrong, not yet,
but certainly in another standard year it would begin to be. He said, "I'm not
really in the exploration end of the business."
Elly was once more looking over his shoulder. "You want to hear what it was
like. All right. At one point, for example, it was as if as if the ship had
been turned inside out, and shrunken to the size of a giant beach-ball.
Spherical still, but hardly bigger than a human body. I sat there somehow, on
this intricate thing, riding like a sort of side-saddle. My own body I
couldn't tell if my body was inside out too, or not. I'm sure I wasn't
dreaming. My head was giant-sized and stuck out unprotected."
"Didn't you have your suit on?"
"Yes. When the experience started. But then I seemed to be outside of it."
"Colonel Marcus was unconscious all this time?"
"Yes. Commander Marcus, then. I couldn't raise him on the intercom, which had
changed into the weirdest little squiggle of wire. I looked around the the
beach-ball, but I couldn't identify anything belonging to the ship."
"And what about things outside the ship? Away from it?"
There was a longer pause than any yet. Elly might have been working out a
complex math problem in her mind.
"Order," she answered at last. "And disorder, too. But maybe what looked like,
felt like chaos was only order, arrangement, of a higher kind than I could
understand."
"Can't you tell me anything more concrete?"
"I can. But I don't think it'll help you in grasping the total experience."
She gave a sharp sigh, started again. "When you're dreaming, the concept or
feeling comes into your mind first, and then the brain generates pictures as
an appropriate accompaniment. This wasn't dreaming, definitely. But I think it
worked in a similar way. First I was aware of order, and then I saw these
great structural members surrounding our ship. Somehow I was able to
appreciate, visualize, the distance scale. As if we were inside something like
a geodesic dome, but bigger than a star. I've never had an experience like
that before. I don't suppose I ever will again.
"I was aware of disorder, or apparent disorder, things going on that made no
sense at all to me. And with that I visualized a mist, more like a
water-droplet fog than nebula, so thick that I
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