Follingston-Heath adjusted his state-of-the-art monocle, which he wore not only to improve the poor vision in his right eye (a problem surgery could not help) but also because he liked the look of it. A strong, ultrathin wire ran from a corner of the monocle to the battery pack clipped to the underside of his collar. In addition to improving normal vision, the device also allowed him to see reasonably well at night, and could be adjusted to provide up to 8x magnification.

  At the moment it was focused on Iranaputra, who was standing and leaning over the game dome, shaking his finger so hard at the retired soldier that Follingston-Heath was certain it must fly off and strike him in the chest. Beneath his hand the dome had darkened, its hundreds of simulated warships having vanished into memory as if they’d never existed.

  Which of course they never had, except as abstract gaming representations. Armadas of that size were impractical to build and maintain. Likewise, the Totamites and Rovariks were also figments of the two men’s respective imaginations, conjured simply to fight battles of a size and scope without precedence in interstellar combat.

  Mina Gelmann sat off to one side and watched the two men argue, her sketch pad propped at an angle on one knee as she tried to capture in facile pencil the essence of the confrontation. Not of the imaginary war fleets but that of her two friends. She hummed throatily to herself as she worked.

  Despite her advanced age, she was still quite an attractive woman, her petite figure largely intact. Nary a week went by that she didn’t have to deal with a proposal from one of the Village’s unmarried male inhabitants. That was why she chose to hang with Shimoda and Iranaputra, Follingston-Heath and Hawkins. Like her, they were also single, but they regarded her as a friend, not a subject for marriage or conquest. Their company acted as a shield to fend off otherwise irritatingly persistent, unwanted suitors. She was grateful for the friendship and privacy her friends afforded her.

  Not that she had anything against men, as she’d proven on repeated occasions. She simply wasn’t interested in a permanent partner. The occasional romantic assignation, however, often with younger visitors to the complex, was not to be rejected.

  The pencil flashed and danced. If she liked the result, she’d transfer it to storage later. She was a moderately accomplished artist, which had helped ease her way not into a career in fine art, but into one in robotics. Her artistic soul tended to manifest itself in her hair color, which she changed weekly. Presently it was an electric red-orange, so that she looked like a votive candle fled from its holder.

  Her friends encouraged her to draw, not only because the results were always interesting and admirable but because it kept her quiet. If Mina Gelmann had a drawback, it was her tendency to offer relentless unsolicited advice on any subject. She was kind, caring, concerned, thoughtful, and mothering. One consequence of this talent was that she could send a grown man screaming from the room inside of an hour, much to her own honest bewilderment. She was just so damn nice. All one could do in her presence was listen, and listen, and smile, and nod, listen some more, and when courtesy finally allowed, slink away fast, moaning softly.

  When she retired, her colleagues at work gave her a paid ticket to Earth, out of gratitude and relief. It was a solo ticket, because Mina Gelmann had outlived three husbands.

  She even got along with Hawkins, who could outtalk and outshout any demagogue but who was utterly baffled by her unflagging concern. Her unvarying kindness in light of his insults and acerbic commentary usually reduced his blustering to a discordant mumble.

  Thanks to his sumo and Zen training, Shimoda could tolerate her longer than most, though if he lingered too long in her presence, he had a tendency to develop a distinct twitch of the left eyebrow. Follingston-Heath simply tuned her out, as a good soldier would tune out any battlefield noise. She knew when he was ignoring her, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that he gave the appearance of listening.

  Iranaputra had the hardest time, often seeking cover behind Shimoda’s bulk or FH’s height.

  Still, she was a steadying influence on the four men, much as a ton of wet concrete would serve as a steadying influence on a quartet of butterflies.

  “Now, now.” She rose from her seat and walked toward the game dome. At the sound of that admonishing tone Hawkins hunched lower in his chair, while Shimoda’s face slid into its contemplative-Buddha mode.

  For Follingston-Heath and Iranaputra there was no escape. Follingston-Heath fiddled with his monocle while Iranaputra looked around wildly. But the doors to the porch were shut against a wind which had come up earlier in the day, and blatant flight from the rec room would have been impolite. He envied the blue jay swinging on the feeder outside its winged freedom.

  “Stop fighting and tell me what you think of this.” She held up the sketch she’d been working on.

  Follingston-Heath breathed a barely imperceptible sigh of relief. Perhaps she wasn’t going to lecture them on the medical evils of verbal altercation after all. He focused gratefully on the drawing.

  “It’s us. Vic and I.” He glanced up at her. “I thought you were working on one of your conceptual schematics.”

  “I don’t spend all my time on schematics,” she reminded him. “I can draw other things, you know.”

  “Most assuredly you can. Can’t she, Vic, old chap?”

  Iranaputra glanced murderously at his friend and opponent, forcing a smile as he regarded the sketch. “Oh, yes, to be sure.” He ran a hand continuously through his black hair, a nervous gesture he was unable to repress. “Yes, I see. It is Wesley and I, fighting.”

  Gelmann smiled. “I think I’ve caught your mood pretty well.” A finger traced the drawing. “See here, Victor, how I’ve shown the veins in your neck standing out?”

  Iranaputra felt compelled to comment on the accuracy of the observation. “Surely that is exaggerated, Mina. I could not have been that angry.”

  “You were at that moment.”

  Follingston-Heath frowned at the picture. “And I am surely not so standoffish.”

  “Feh! You haven’t got a nonsupercilious bone in your body, Wesley. You should be ashamed of yourself, taunting poor Victor like that.”

  “I was not taunting him.” Follingston-Heath felt his blood pressure start to rise. “He accused me of cheating.”

  “You were cheating,” Iranaputra insisted, but without as much determination this time. You couldn’t muster a whole lot of determination in Gelmann’s presence. She sort of sucked it all up, like a giant emotional vacuum cleaner, transformed it, and then threw it all back at you in the guise of help and concern.

  “Don’t be like that, Victor.” He winced. A confident man in his early seventies, who’d spent years supervising several hundred employees, and she made him wince. It was a skill that never ceased to astonish.

  Shimoda had theorized that women of Gelmann’s ilk possessed a sixth sense or power, a kind of nimbus of concentrated maternal energy tendrils which they could fling out with a single word or gesture to stun anyone within range like emotional nematocysts.

  Iranaputra knew when he was beaten. “I know, I know,” he mumbled, not looking at her. “I should not let it get to me, it is only a game, it is bad for my blood pressure. I know.”

  “Well, you don’t have to make it sound like I’m badgering you into admitting it.”

  “I’m sorry.” Iranaputra wanted to scream. Displaying true friendship, Follingston-Heath came to his rescue.

  “I was not cheating, but in the interests of good fellowship, I think we should call the contest a draw. How about it, old nut?”

  “Well, why not?” He smiled thinly.

  “There, now isn’t that better?” declared Gelmann. Neither man chose to comment.

  “Can we have a look at your picture?” Follingston-Heath indicated the drawing.

  “Of course, Wesley.” She handed over the sketch pad.

  “Alone?” The good Colonel fought to keep a note of hopeful desperation from his voice. “If the artist is present during moments of criticism, it tends to influence the observer.”

  “Don’t flatter me, Wesley. I know that you were trained in diplomacy as well as other tactics.”

  “Sorry. It’s part of me.” He smiled at her, then turned to his friend, bending close over the sketch. “See what she’s done with the noble and dramatic line of my chin, here?” Iran’s gaze descended dubiously to the sketch.

  “There is nothing noble or dramatic about it, my friend. It is a chin, like everyone else’s chin.”

  “Ah, but see how she’s done the shading here? And here, on the neck.” Gelmann wandered away as Follingston-Heath discoursed, and the two men were able to relax.

  Actually the picture wasn’t half-bad, Iranaputra had to admit. Even her rendering of the game dome was stylish.

  Hawkins tried to withdraw into himself as she approached, wishing he was back in his apartment, while Shimoda kept his eyes riveted on the game, calmly awaiting his fate.

  Hands clasped behind her, she halted and gazed at the checkers board. “Playing checkers?”

  Her predilection for stating the obvious was one of her less endearing traits, Hawkins knew. “No, Mina. We’re symbolically realigning the space-time continuum.”

  “Now, Wallace.” He flinched, afraid she was going to rumple his hair playfully. He did not care to have that discordant tangle of gray and brown rumpled, playfully or otherwise. Shaven Shimoda, of course, was immune to such a sally. Though she had been known to pat him reassuringly on his pate from time to time.

  “Always the kidder,” she told Hawkins. “I see that Kahei is winning, as usual.”

  “Not as usual,” said Shimoda placidly. “I’m having a good game, that’s all.” He glanced at his opponent. “Wal always moves in such a hurry. Sometimes it works for him, unless I manage to keep my perspective.” He blinked. “Why am I telling you all this, which you know already?”

  “Beats me.” She cocked her head knowingly to one side. “You men are always making these confessions to me. I don’t know why. Have you heard anything new about the crazed-machine problem?”

  “No.” Hawkins leaned back resignedly. The checker game with Shimoda had slipped into Gelmann-stasis. There would be no continuing until she moved on. Only then could normal life resume. “I don’t suppose you have?”

  His sarcasm was thick as blackstrap molasses. As usual, it had no effect on her. “Well, since you ask. There’s news from the Candomblean League. You know how those people are. That peculiar religion of theirs.”

  “They have a good time.” Hawkins wondered why he felt a sudden urge to defend the spiritual precepts of distant Candomble.

  “Hedonists, the lot of them. An irresponsible bunch. Anyway, it seems that one of their innumerable holidays was about to conclude on Amado III when the climate controller monitoring equipment took itself off-line to go hunting for this mythical suprahuman intelligence. The most noticeable consequence was that heavy unprogrammed cloud-seeding resulted in six centimeters of snow. Can you imagine? Have you ever seen pictures of the Candomblean worlds? All tropical, or at least warm.

  “So everyone was running around freezing in their silly little costumes and clothes, all strings and diaphanous material and that nonsensical peek-a-boo stuff the women there seem so fond of.”

  A faint gleam came into Hawkins’s eye. He’d seen pictures of the famous Candomblean festivals. The participants wore very little indeed. Hawkins was old, but he wasn’t dead, and there was nothing wrong with his memory.

  Gelmann was going on about failed robotics and how they didn’t build optical circuits the way they used to, but Hawkins’s mind was filled with images of scantily clad young women. The sheer bulk of her spiel, however, eventually drove them away.

  “You would think that in this day and age someone could fix these things, find the source of this problem, but oh no, they don’t know where to start, the schmucks.”

  “We all know that robotics were your specialty, Mina.” Shimoda’s tone was tolerant. “If only they would ask for your help.”

  “I would know what to do,” she insisted. “At least how to begin.”

  “Has it occurred to you,” said Hawkins solemnly, “that if the cream of the cybernetics staff of the federation and the Keiretsu and the Eeck and the Victoria League can’t figure out what the problem is, it might be even beyond your grasp?”

  “No,” she replied blithely. “My perspective is different, I’m sure. I have more experience. I always had a special relationship with the machinery I worked on, you should excuse my saying so.”

  Yeah, Hawkins thought. You probably terrified it to the point where it didn’t dare do anything but function properly.

  “I just think that if I was given a chance, I could help,” she insisted. “After all, I was both a designer and a technician.”

  “Why don’t you offer your services to the Manhattan District Park Service?” Hawkins suggested. ‘They’ve been having similar problems, it’s not far from here, and I’m sure they’d be delighted with your offer of assistance.”

  “Such a simple problem.” She was shaking her head.

  They all knew what had happened in Manhattan Park. The AI-directed buses which convoyed people around the island were shooting off in all directions in search of alien intelligence, careening wildly down unprogrammed avenues and streets and scaring the dickens out of petrified visitors on walking tours.

  “If you want to donate your expertise to the problem,” Shimoda added, “why don’t you try to fix something important, like our music system?”

  The Lake Woneapenigong Village had a central music library. From any apartment, one could call up every imaginable variety of music: classical, popular, ethnic, or modern, and even mix and match them according to personal taste. Adding a shot of Beethoven to Piaf, for example, or Dastaru vocals to classic Elvis.

  Lately, however, the AI unit which supervised the system had taken to programming music of its own while devoting most of its time to hunting for higher intelligence elsewhere, thus forcing the retirees to suffer through periods of intensely boring programming while the unit conducted its search. As it was not considered to be a serious problem, it remained at the bottom of the local, overworked repair technician’s list. After all, if one didn’t care for what the unit was playing, in-room speakers could always be turned off.

  But while not critical, the service was missed.

  “Yeah,” agreed the suddenly enthusiastic Hawkins, “if this is such a simple problem, why don’t you fix our sound system?”

  She took no umbrage at his tone. Mina never took umbrage, never got angry. It was maddening. “I certainly would. But I don’t have access to any equipment. All I have are these.” She held up her perfectly manicured fingers. “Joseph won’t let me use his tools. He’s afraid to let me work with any AI components because if I screw something up, he’s afraid he’ll get the blame. You know how sensitive AI units are. They’re very temperamental.”

  “Especially lately,” Shimoda observed.

  “Can you see that putz Hatteras letting me work on anything?” she said, referring to the director of Lake Woneapenigong Village.

  “No,” Shimoda admitted. “He is a very cautious man. Also very nervous.” Gelmann, he knew, could make anyone nervous. The director she would probably give a coronary.

  “How true.” She turned and headed back toward the game done, intent on retrieving her sketch pad.

  Hawkins sighed, absently considered the board before him, and moved a piece one space forward. Another few seconds killed. That was how his days were spent: eating, sleeping, talking, and killing time. It was what a place like Lake Woneapenigong, however benign, was for. He took no pleasure in the routine execution of temporal homicide.

  Rather, he longed for the noise and confusion of Earth’s ancient great cities, with all their overcrowding, pollution, and vanished excitement.

  IV

  The infection continued to spread as frantic technicians conversed and exchanged unhelpful information. Maintenance personnel fought to keep ahead of the rising tide of mechanical curiosity. As fast as one aberrant unit was fixed, another went drifting off in search of nonhuman intelligence. Frustration was beginning to turn to anger.

  On Sansamour traffic in the principal port city was snarled for days when the central traffic-control computer simultaneously set all controls to green, hoping to facilitate the arrival of the intelligence it was certain had to be waiting somewhere nearby, and not wishing to in any way impede its progress.

  The result was that several thousand vehicles of varying shape and size tried to enter rather fewer controlled urban intersections at approximately the same time, resulting in a single massive reverberant whang that echoed across the entire metropolis as they smashed unhindered into one another. A veritable plastic tsunami echoed across guideways and roads.

  Only those vehicles under manual operation at the time survived the catastrophe, their drivers guiding them carefully around the ridges of crumpled trucks and cars and their dazed occupants, some of whom were kicking futilely at their traitorous transports. There were also many who could not so vent their feelings, because they were dead.

  It was the last straw for the beleaguered Sansamour Congress, which had been attempting to cope with one utility failure after another. It lodged, in the strongest terms, a formal protest with the Kessenway Manufacturing Monopoly, which had provided the AI equipment for most of the utilities on Sansamour.

  Protesting its innocence, outraged Kessenway forwarded the claim directly on to its primary suppliers on Minimato, whence the basic AI components had come. The Minimatoans insisted they were not at fault, hinting that the problem was one of assembly and not original manufacture.

  Thus insulted, the Kessenwayites turned to their allies on Jefferson and Reis, which in turn drew the rest of the First Federal Federation into the dispute. A full federation claim for damages was presented to the official trade representative of the Keiretsu, who hastily tachyspaced a worried missive to his superiors on Edo. Military reservists were put on alert, whereupon the Federals responded. Politicians exchanged veiled threats, luxuriating as always in the opportunity to deliver themselves of some choice thoughtless rhetoric.