“Do you think your husband would have deviated from the assigned route?”

  “He might have,” said Helen’s voice in Daw’s ear. He could see her now, far ahead in the dimness, ready to dive into the pale, circular, lime-green immensity of a tube. “He was a funny person, and I guess maybe I may not have known him as well as I thought I did.”

  Daw put on a burst of speed and was up with her before she had gone a thousand yards into the tube. “You’re right,” he said, “this is what I like.”

  “I do too—maybe my husband liked it too much. That would be in harmony with his personality profile, I think.” Daw did not answer, and a few seconds later she asked in a different tone, “Do you know what I was thinking of, while you were telling me about those charts? Stones. Little pebbles. Do you get it?”

  “No,” Daw said. The tube was bent just enough here for the ends to be invisible to them. They sailed through a nothingness of pale green light.

  “Well, I may not know a lot of math but I know some etymology. You were talking about calculations, and that word comes from the Latin for a stone: calculus. That was the way they used to count—one stone for one sheep or one ox. And later they had a thing like an abacus except that instead of rods for the counters it had a board with cup-shaped holes to put stones in. Those numbers you figured out were little stones from a world we’ve never seen.”

  Daw said, “I think I understand.” He could make out the end of the tube now, a region of brighter light where vague shapes floated.

  “The thing I wonder about is where are they now, those first stones? Ground to powder? Or just kicking around Italy or Egypt somewhere, little round stones that nobody pays any attention to. I don’t really think anything would happen if they were destroyed—not realty—but I’ve been wondering about it.”

  “Your sense of history is too strong,” Daw told her. He nearly added, “Like Wad’s,” but thought better of it and said instead, “For some reason that reminds me—you were going to tell me why you were talking to Wad, but you never did.”

  “Wad is the boy that looks like you? I said I would if you’d tell me about him.”

  “That’s right,” Daw said, “I didn’t finish.” They were leaving the tube now, thrown like the debris from an explosion through an emptiness whose miles-distant walls seemed at first merely roughened, but whose roughness resolved into closely-packed machines, a spininess of shafts and great gears and tilted beams—all motionless.

  “You told me about the midshipmen,” Helen reminded him. “I think I can guess the rest, except that I don’t know how it’s done.”

  “And what’s your guess?”

  “You said that you were Wad—at least in a sense. In some way you’re training yourself.”

  “Time travel? No.”

  “What then?”

  “Future captains are selected by psychological testing when, as cadets, they have completed their courses in basic science. Then instead of being sent to space as junior officers, they go as observers on a two-year simulated flight—all right on Earth. The advantage is that they see more action in the two years of simulation than they’d get in twenty of actual service. They go through every type of emergency that’s ever come up at least once, and some more than once—with variations.”

  “That’s interesting; but it doesn’t explain Wad.”

  “They have to get the material for the simulations somewhere. Sure, in most of it the midshipman just views, but you don’t want to train him to be a detached observer and nothing else. He has to be able to talk to the people on shipboard, and especially the captain, and get meaningful, typical replies. To get material for those conversations a computer on every navy ship simulates a midshipman whom the captain and crew must treat as an individual.”

  “Do they all look like you?”

  “They have to look like someone, so they’re made to look—and talk and act—as the captain himself did during his midshipman days. It’s important, as I said, that the captain treat his midshipman as a son, and that way there’s more—” Daw paused.

  “Empathy?” He could hear the fragile smile.

  “That’s your word. Sympathy.”

  “Before it was corrupted by association with pity, that used to mean what empathy does now.”

  A new voice rang in Daw’s headphones: “Captain! Captain!”

  “Yes. Here.”

  “This is Polk, Captain. We didn’t want to bother you, sir, but we’ve got the numbers from the central registers in that corner module, and from the form—well, we think you’re right. It’s a bearing.”

  “You’ve got duplicates of the charts, don’t you? Where were they going?”

  “What star, you mean, sir?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “It doesn’t seem to be a bearing for any star, Captain. Not on their charts, or ours either.”

  Helen Youngmeadow interrupted to say: “But it has to point to some star! There are millions of them out there.”

  Daw said, “There are billions—each so remote that for most purposes it can be treated as a nondimensional point.”

  “The closest star to this bearing’s about a quarter degree off,” Polk told her. “And a quarter of a degree is, well ma’am, a hell of a long way in astrogation.”

  “Perhaps it isn’t a bearing then,” the girl said.

  Daw asked, “What does it point to?”

  “Well, sir—”

  “When I asked you a minute ago what the bearing indicated, you asked if I meant what star. So it does point to something, or you think it does. What is it?”

  “Sir, Wad said we should ask Gladiator what was on the line of the bearing at various times in the recent past. I guess he thought it might be a comet or something. It turned out that it’s pointing right to where our ship was while we were making our approach to this one, sir.”

  Unexpectedly, Daw laughed. (Helen Youngmeadow tried to remember if she had ever heard him laugh before, and decided she had not.)

  “Anything else to report, Polk?”

  “No, sir.”

  She asked, “Why did you laugh, Captain?”

  “We’re still on general band,” Daw said. “What do you say we switch over to private?”

  His own dials bobbed and jittered as the girl adjusted her controls.

  “I laughed because I was thinking of the old chimpanzee experiment; you’ve probably read about it. One of the first scientists to study the psychology of the nonhuman primates locked a chimp in a room full of ladders and boxes and so on—”

  “And then peeked through the keyhole to see what he did, and saw the chimpanzee’s eye looking back at him.” Now Helen laughed too. “I see what you mean. You worked so hard to see what they had been looking at—and they were looking at us.”

  “Yes,” said Daw.

  “But that doesn’t tell you where they went, does it?”

  Daw said, “Yes, it does.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They were still here when we sighted them, because we changed course to approach this ship.”

  “Then they abandoned the ship because we came, but that still doesn’t tell you where they went.”

  “It tells me where they are now. If they didn’t leave before we had them in detection range, they didn’t leave at all—we would have seen them. If they didn’t leave at all, they are still on board.”

  “They can’t be.”

  “They can be and they are. Think of how thinly we’re scattered on Gladiator. Would anyone be able to find us if we didn’t want to be found?”

  Far ahead in the dimness her utility light answered him. He saw it wink on and dart from shadow to shadow, then back at him, then to the shadows again. “We’re in no more danger than we were before,” he said.

  “They have my husband. Why are they hiding, and who are they?”

  “I don’t know; I don’t even know that they are hiding. There may be very few of them—they may find it hard to make us notice them. I don’t know.”

  The girl was slowing, cutting her jets. He cut his own, letting himself drift up to her. When he was beside her she said: “Don’t you know anything about them? Anything?”

  “When we first sighted this ship I ran an electronic and structural correlation on its form. Wad ran a bionic one. You wouldn’t have heard us talking about them because we were on a private circuit.”

  “No.” The girl’s voice was barely audible. “No, I didn’t.”

  “Wad got nothing on his bionic correlation. I got two things out of mine. As a structure this ship resembles certain kinds of crystals. Or you could say that it looks like the core stack in an old-fashioned computer—cores in rectangular arrays with three wires running through the center of each. Later, because of what Wad had said, I started thinking of Gladiator; so while we were more or less cooling our heels and hoping your husband would come in, I did what Wad had and ran a bionic correlation on her.” He fell silent.

  “Yes?”

  “There were vertebrates—creatures with spinal columns—before there were any with brains; did you know that? The first brains were little thickenings at the end of the spinal nerves nearest the sense organs. That’s what Gladiator resembles—that first thin layer of extra neutrons that was the primitive cortex. This ship is different.”

  “Yes,” the girl said again.

  “More like an artificial intelligence—the computer core stack of course, but the crystals too; the early computers, the ones just beyond the first vacuum-tube stage, used crystalline materials for transducers: germanium and that kind of thing. It was before Ovshinsky came up with ovonic switches of amorphous materials.”

  “What are you saying? That the ship is the entity? That the crew are robots?”

  “I told you I don’t know,” Daw said. “I doubt if our terms are applicable to them.”

  “But what can we do?”

  “Get in touch with them. Let them know we’re here, that we’re friendly and want to talk.” He swung away from her—up, in his current orientation, up six miles sheer before coming to rest like a bat against the ceiling, then revolving the ship in his mind until the ceiling became a floor. The girl hovered five hundred feet above his head as he inspected the machines.

  “I see,” she said, “you’re going to break something.”

  “No,” Daw said slowly, “I’m going to find something to repair or improve—if I can.”

  · · · ·

  Several hours passed while he traced the dysfunction that held the equipment around him immobile. From the module where he had begun he followed it to the next, where he found broken connections and fused elements; another hour while he made the connections again, and found, in cabinets not wholly like any he had seen built by men, parts to replace those the overloads had destroyed. When he had finished his work, three lights came on in distant parts of the module; and far away some great machine breathed a sigh that traveled through the metal floor to the soles of his boots, though Helen, still floating above him, did not hear it. “Do you think they’ll come now?” she asked when the lights gleamed. “Will they give him back to us?”

  Daw did not answer. A shape—a human shape—was emerging from the mouth of a distant tube. It was a half mile away, but he had seen it as the girl spoke, a mere speck, but a speck with arms and legs and a head that was a recognizable helmet. In a moment she had followed his eyes. “Darling,” she said. “Darling.” Daw watched. A voice, resonant yet empty, said, “Helen.”

  “Darling,” the girl said again.

  The empty voice said: “I am not your husband. I know what you believe.”

  Daw saw it as the figure came down beside him. He thought the girl would not see it, but she said, “Who are you?”

  Through the clear faceplace Daw could see Youngmeadow’s face. The lips shaped: “Not your husband. You would call me a simulation of him. Something that can talk to you; they cannot, or will not, do that directly.” It seemed to Daw that the face, so like Youngmeadow’s, was in some deeper way not like Youngmeadow’s at all, or anyone’s—as though, perhaps, those moving lips concealed organs of sight in the recesses of the mouth, and the voice, the sound he heard, poured forth from the nose and ears.

  “Where is my husband?”

  “I cannot answer that.”

  “Cannot,” Daw asked, “or will not?”

  “There are four words, and all are difficult. What is meant by is? By husband? I can ask, but you could only answer in further words, further concepts we could not define.”

  “You are a simulation of him?”

  “I said. ‘You would call me a simulation of him.’”

  Helen asked suddenly, “What have you come to tell us?”

  “That with this”—the figure that looked like Youngmeadow gestured toward the repairs Daw had made—“there has been enough. You have seen something of us; we, now, of you. There cannot be more, now. We both must think.”

  “Are you trying to tell us,” Daw asked, “that we could not have worked out a philosophy for dealing with your culture until we made this contact?”

  “I can answer few questions. We must think. You too.”

  “But you want us to leave your ship. Are we friends?”

  “We are not,” the simulation answered carefully, “not-friends.” He lifted off as a man would have, and in a few seconds was gone.

  “He wasn’t your husband,” Daw said.

  “I know it.”

  “Do you trust me, Helen? Will you take my word for something?”

  She nodded.

  “Your husband is dead. It’s over.”

  “You know.”

  Daw thought of the scattered bits of rag and vacuum-shriveled flesh he had seen—and not mentioned to the girl overhead—white making the repairs. “I know,” he said.

  He lifted off, and she flew beside him for a time, silently. There was a dysfunction in his headphones so that he heard, constantly, a sound like the noise of the wind. It was not unpleasant, except that it was a dysfunction. At last she said, “Was he ever alive, Captain? Do you know what I’ve been thinking? That perhaps he never was. The cabins, you know.”

  “What about them?” Daw asked.

  “They’re only supposed to be for one person, but you had two of us in there. Because everybody knows empathists have to be married… and there’s Wad—he really wasn’t on the ship either. Are you sure my husband existed, Captain? That he wasn’t just something implanted in our minds before we left Earth? I can remember the way he held me, but not one thing he said, not word for word. Can you?”

  “He was real,” Daw said, “and he’s dead. You’ll feel better when you’ve seen the medics and had some rest.”

  “Captain…”

  “He came in here,” Daw said, “and somehow he realized the truth, that the crew of this ship—whatever you want to call them—was still on board. Then he thought the same thing you did: that he would break something and make them notice him. His empathy was all for people, not for things. He broke something and they noticed him, and he’s dead.”

  “Only people are important,” the girl said.

  “To other people,” Daw answered, “sometimes.”

  · · · ·

  On board Gladiator she said: “I never told you what it was I asked Wad, did I? I was asking about you—what your childhood was like.”

  In Daw’s mind a voice more insistent than hers quoted: “At the resurrection, therefore, of which of the seven will she be the wife? For they all had her.” But Jesus answered and said to them, “You err because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. For at the resurrection they will neither marry nor be given in marriage…” Aloud he said, “I hope Wad told you the truth.”

  “When you were in training—I mean, like he is now—you were watching a simulated captain, weren’t you? Was it yourself you saw there, only older?”

  “I don’t think so,” Daw said. “A real captain. He was a crusty bastard, but he generally knew what he was doing.”

  The Hero as Werwolf

  Feet in the jungle that leave no mark!

  Eyes that can see in the dark—the dark!

  Tongue—give tongue to it! Hark! O hark!

  Once, twice and again!

  —Rudyard Kipling,

  Hunting Song of the Seeonee Pack

  An owl shrieked, and Paul flinched. Fear, pavement, flesh, death, stone, dark, loneliness, and blood made up Paul’s world; the blood was all much the same, but the fear took several forms, and he had hardly seen another human being in the four years since his mother’s death. At a night meeting in the park he was the red-cheeked young man at the end of the last row, with his knees together and his scrupulously clean hands (Paul was particularly careful about his nails) in his lap.

  The speaker was fluent and amusing; he was clearly conversant with his subject—whatever it was—and he pleased his audience. Paul, the listener and watcher, knew many of the words he used; yet he had understood nothing in the past hour and a half, and sat wrapped in his stolen cloak and his own thoughts, seeming to listen, watching the crowd and the park—this, at least, was no ghost-house, no trap; the moon was up, night-blooming flowers scented the park air, and the trees lining the paths glowed with self-generated blue light; in the city, beyond the last hedge, the great buildings new and old were mountains lit from within.

  Neither human nor master, a policeman strolled about the fringes of the audience, his eyes bright with stupidity. Paul could have killed him in less than a second, and was enjoying a dream of the policeman’s death in some remote corner of his mind even while he concentrated on seeming to be one of them. A passenger rocket passed just under the stars, trailing luminous banners.

  The meeting was over and he wondered if the rocket had in some way been the signal to end it. The masters did not use time, at least not as he did, as he had been taught by the thin woman who had been his mother in the little home she had made for them in the turret of a house that was once (she said) the Gorous’—now only a house too old to be destroyed. Neither did they use money, of which he like other old-style Homo sapiens still retained some racial memory, as of a forgotten god—a magic once potent that had lost all force.