A buzz from above drew her heed. She saw a teardrop shape slant down from the eastern sky. It crossed the sun’s disc, but a brief glance straight at a red dwarf star didn’t dazzle her vision. She identified it as an aircar. The model was foreign to her. Well, her race had colonized a lot of planets over the centuries, and no planet is a uniform ball; it is a world. Ilya alone held mystery and marvel enough to fill the lifetimes of many discoverers—

  The car landed on the left bank, where springturf made an amethystine mat. A man sprang out and beckoned to her. He was tall, rawboned, clad in a green uniform which sunlight here gave an ugly hue. His tunic was open at the throat and carelessly baggy at the beltline, around a sidearm, but his stance bespoke discipline.

  She brought the boat to shore, stopped the motor, got out. Seen close, the man was craggy-featured and clean-shaven. Furrows in the weathered face and white streaks through the short dark hair suggested he was in his forties, Earth calendar. Comet insignia glittered on his shoulders and a sleeve patch displayed calipers athwart a circuit diagram.

  In his turn, he gave her a raking glance. She was almost thirty, not much less in height than he, well built, lithe from a career spent in the field. He gave her a soft salute. “Ian Dunbar, captain, engineer corps, Space Navy of Adam,” he introduced himself.

  His accent was similar to that of the fellow who had happened to hear her call, but a trained ear would tell that it was not identical. Likely he hailed from a different continent…yes, she knew about Adam, since the planet was in this general region, but her information was scanty…“Please get inside. We’ll gi’ your fere a ride too if he wishes.”

  “No, he’ll bring the boat in,” she objected.

  “Dr. Jennison,” Dunbar said, “yon’s too large a craft to singlehand wi’out a motor, which we shall ha’ to remove and bring back wi’ us.” He turned his head toward the car. “Cameron, Gordon, out and to work!” he shouted.

  “Aye, sir.” Two younger men wearing the same uniform, without officer’s emblems, scrambled forth, bearing tools.

  The hand of Rainbow-in-the-Mist stole into Sally’s. “What is happening?” he asked fearfully. And yet he had met the charge of a spearhorn, armed with nothing but his knife, and distracted the giant till she could retrieve her rifle. He had been her second in command when she fared away to study natives as unknown to him as to her—most recently, when the quest took them to lands which never saw the moon that hung forever in his home sky and which he called Mother Spirit…

  “I don’t know,” she must admit. “There was talk of an, an enemy.”

  “What does that mean?” he wondered. Nowhere on Ilya had she heard of war or even murder.

  “Dangerous beings, maddened beasts.” The thought of nuclear missiles and energy beams striking this place was like a drink of acid.

  “Hurry along!” Dunbar rapped.

  Sally and her comrade squeezed into the rear seat beside him. The two noncoms followed, after stowing the motor and other stuff from the boat. They took the front, one of them the controls. The aircar lifted. In spite of everything, Rainbow-in-the-Mist caroled delight. He seldom got to fly.

  Sally felt how Dunbar perforce pressed against her. She didn’t want to be, but was, aware of his maleness. It had been long since she said goodbye to Pete Brozik and Fujiwara Ito. The first a planetologist, the second a molecular biologist, her lovers couldn’t very well go xenologizing with her.

  Apprehension stabbed. How were they? Where?

  It turned to resentment. “Well, Captain Dunbar,” she clipped, “now will you tell me what the hell is going on?”

  The ghost of a smile flitted over his starkness. “That is wha’ I believe your folk would call a tall order, Dr. Jennison.”

  “Huh?” She was surprised.

  “Ye’re originally fro’ North America on Earth, true?”

  “Y-yes. but how do you know, when an hour ago you didn’t know I existed?”

  He shrugged, “Speech, gait, style. I’ve seen shows, read books, met travelers. Just because we Adamites are out near the edge o’ human expansion, take us no’ for rustics.” The ghost sank back into its grave. The gaze he turned on her was bleak. “Maybe we were once, our forefathers, and glad to be, but the berserkers ended that. Wha’ I would like to find out this day is why nobody told us about ye, Dr. Jennison. We’d ha’ sent a car to fetch ye. Now I fear ye’re trapped, in the same danger as us.”

  Sally checked her temper, pinched her lips, and made her blue stare challenge his gray before she said: “I can scarcely give you any ideas before I have some facts, can I? What’s been happening? Who are you people, anyway? And what’s become of mine?”

  Dunbar sighed. “We’ve evacuated them. Aye, ’twas hasty and high-handed, no doubt, but we were under the lash oursel’s. The first thing we removed was the comsats; that’s why ye were no longer receiving or being heard, though ’twas but a short time before we imposed silence on every transmission. Meanwhile—”

  The car started downward. Sally looked past Dunbar, out the window. She choked back a scream.

  Lake Sapphire shone enormous below, surrounded by the rural tranquility she had known throughout her stay on Ilya. Eastern mountains, red sun-wheel, scarred and brilliant moon were untouched. But where the Highroad River emptied into the lake, where University Station had clustered, was a blackened waste, as if a noonday turf fire had spread over that ground and consumed the very buildings, or the berserkers had already commenced their work.

  Space was steely with stars. None shone close in the loneliness here. What established this rendezvous point was triangulation on distant galaxies.

  Emerging from flightspace, the berserker homed on a broadcast that Mary Montgomery’s ship had been emitting while she waited. Instruments showed the vessel draw nigh and match intrinsics—lay to—a thousand kilometers off. Magnifying optics showed it as no bigger than hers, though a hedgehog of armament, dim shinings and deep shadows near the Milky Way.

  Alone in the main control room, for her crew was minimal, she settled herself into the command chair and pressed the lightplate which would signal her readiness to talk. Around her, bulkheads stood dullhued, needles quivered across dials, displays went serpentine, electronics beeped and muttered. The air from the ventilators smelled faintly of oil, something a bit wrong in the recyclers, no matter what. Her old bones ached, but no matter that, either.

  The berserkers voice reached her. It was derived from the voices of human captives taken long ago, shrill, irregular, a sonic monster pieced together out of parts of the dead, terrifying to many. Montgomery sniffed at it, took a drag on her cheroot, and blew a smoke ring toward the speaker. Childish bravado, she thought. But why not? Who was to witness?

  “Parley under truce, is this still agreed?” the berserker began.

  Montgomery nodded before recollecting how pointless the gesture was. “Aye,” she said. “We’ve somewhat to sell ye, we do.”

  “Who are you, where is that planet your courier bespoke, what is your asking price?”

  Montgomery chuckled, though scant mirth was in her, “Easy, my ghoulie. Ye, your kind, ye’ve established yoursel’s in these parts again, so as to kill more, no? Well, last time my house suffered grimly We’ve better defenses this while, we can fight ye off, yet ’twould be at high cost. Suppose, instead, we direct ye to another inhabited world—not a human colony, for we’re no traitors, understand—a world useless to us, but wi’ life upon it for ye to scrub out, aye, e’en an intelligent species. They’re primitives, helpless before ye. A single capital ship o’ yours could make slag o’ the planet in a day or two, at no risk whatsoe’er. In exchanges for such an easy triumph, would ye leave us in peace?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Our world we call Adam.”

  The berserker searched its memory banks. “Yes,” it said. “We struck it three hundred and fifty-seven Terrestrial years ago. Considerable damage was done, but before the mission could be completed, a task force of the Grand Fleet arrived and compelled us to retreat. We were only conducting a raid. We had no reinforcements to call upon.”

  “Aye. Since then, Adam has gained strength.”

  “And this time we have a base, a planetary system, raw materials to build an indefinite number of new units. Why should we not finish Adam off?”

  Montgomery sighed. “Were ye human—were ye e’en alive, conscious, insultable, ye metal abomination—I’d ask ye to stop playing games wi’ me. Well, but I suppose your computer does no’ ha’ the data. ’Tis been long since ye last came by. So hearken.

  “In spite o’ the wounds ye inflicted, Adam has a larger population now than then, much more industry, a small but formidable space navy, a civil defense that reaches through the whole system ’tis in. Ye could no’ take us out before the marshalled human forces arrive to drive ye back fro’ this sector. Howe’er, we’d liefest be spared the lost o’ blood and treasure that standing ye off would entail. Therefore we offer our bargain—a world for a world.”

  Lack of life did not mean lack of shrewdness. “If the target you would betray is so soft,” the berserker inquired, “why should we not afterward turn on you?”

  Montgomery drew a little comfort from the bite of smoke in her mouth, more from the family picture above the control console. Her husband was in it, and he had died, oh, Colin, Colin…but her sons and daughters stood strong beside their wives and husbands, amidst her grandchildren and his. She had volunteered for this mission because a human was needed—no computer that humans could build was flexible enough—and if negotiations broke down and the berserker opened fire, why, she was old and full of days.

  “I told ye ye’d find us a hard nut to crack,” she answered, “and this ye can verify by a scouting flit. Only pick up the stray radiations fro’ orbital fortresses and ships on patrol. Afterward think wha’ groundbased installations we must ha’ likewise—whole rivers to cool energy projectors— Ah, but ye do no’ really think do ye?”

  “Nevertheless, it might prove logical for us to attack you, especially if we have been able to accomplish part of our sterilizing objective without loss to our forces.”

  Montgomery made a death’s-head grin at the image of the ship among the stars. “But see ye,” she declared, “before we turn over yon hapless planet to ye, we’ll send forth courier robots far and wide. They’ll bear witness—our recordings, your electronic signature—witness to the treaty, that we gi’ ye the information in return for immunity.

  “Ye’ve struck bargains wi’ humans erenow. Break one as important as this, and how much goodlife can ye hope to recruit in the future?”

  The machine did not ask any further questions such as she would have asked in its place. For instance., how would humans throughout space react to fellow humans, Adamites, who had sold out a living world in order that they themselves be spared a war? Subtleties like that were beyond a machine. Indeed, Montgomery confessed wearily to herself, they were beyond her, and every expert who had debated the issue. There might not be great revulsion, and what there was might not last long. Nonhuman intelligences were rare, scientifically valuable, but, well, nonhuman. Your first obligation was to your kindred, wasn’t it?

  And it was nonhumans that had built the first berserkers, untold ages ago, and programmed them to destroy everything alive, as a weapon in a damned forgotten war of their own. Wasn’t it?

  Silences hummed, pressed inward, filled her skull. Then:

  “This unit is equipped to make agreement on behalf of our entire force,” the berserker said. “Very well, in principle. To begin, provide some description of the planet you would give us.”

  The sun plodded toward noon while Olga waned. The moon’s night part was not invisible where it hung halfway up heaven, east-southeast beyond the Sawtooths. A tenuous atmosphere caught sunlight on clouds, reflected Ilyalight, made a shimmering alongside the pocked daylit horn; the north polar cap reached thence like a plume.

  Sally was used to the sight, but all at once she wondered how alien it might be to Dunbar: a somber red sun showing six and a half times as wide as Sol did on Earth, taking more than a week to go from midday to midday but less than a month from midsummer to midsummer; a moon almost four times the breadth of Luna in Terrestrial skies, more than twenty times the brightness, that never rose or set save as you traveled across Ilya. What was the sky of Adam like?

  That hardly seemed relevant to the disaster around. But she had been stunned by it, and the hours after she landed had hailed more blows upon her. Descent to the caverns the Adamites had dug while, above, they tore University Station apart and sank the fragments beneath the lake—uniformed strangers swarming antlike through those drab corridors, loud orders, footfalls, throb of unseen machinery—a cubicle found for her to sleep in, a place assigned at the officers’ mess, but she had no appetite—warm, stinking air, for there had been no time to install anything but minimal life support, when the complex of workshops, command posts, barracks must be gnawed out of rock and reinforced till it could withstand a direct hit of a megaton—a fantastic job in so short a span, even granting powerful, sophisticated machines to do most of the labor—Why, why, why?

  Andrew Scrymgeour, admiral in overall charge of operations, received her, though only for a brief interview. He had too many demands on him as was. Weariness had plowed his face; the finger that kept stroking the gray mustache was executing a nervous tic; he spoke in a monotone.

  “Aye, we’re sorry we missed ye. I set an inquiry afoot when I heard. As nigh as my aid can find out, ’twas because o’ confusion. Such haste on our part, ye see, and meanwhile such anger among your folk, arguments, refusals that bade fair to become outright physical resistance, did we no’ move fast and firmly. Other scientists were in the field besides ye, o’ course, scattered o’er half this globe. We sought them out and brought them in, thinking they were all. We did no’ stop to check your rosters, for who would wish anyone left abandoned? Somehow we simply were no’ told about ye, Dr. Jennison. Doubtless everybody among your friends took for granted somebody else had gi’en that word, and was too furious to speak to us unless absolutely necessary. Moreo’er, we could no’ lift the lot o’ them off in a single ship, we required several, so on any one vessel ’tis being assumed ye must be aboard another.”

  Yes, Pete and Ito will be horror-smitten when they learn, Sally thought. Worst will be the helplessness and the not knowing; worse for them than me, I suppose. (Oh, it isn’t that we’ve exchanged vows or anything like that. We enjoy each other, minds more than bodies, actually. But it’s made us close, affectionate. I’ve missed them very much, calm and grizzled Ito, Pete’s vitality which a man half his age might envy—)

  “Where have you taken them?” she demanded.

  Scrymgeour shrugged. “To Adam. Where else? They’ll be comfortably housed until arrangements can be made for sending them on to their homes, or where’er is appropriate. Maybe e’en back here, to take up their work again.” He sighed. “But that requires clearing the berserkers fro’ this sector o’ space. Meanwhile, travel may prove so dangerous that our authorities will deem it best to keep your folk detained, for their own safety.”

  “For their silence, you mean!” she flared. “You had no right, no right whatsoever, to come in like this and wreck all we’ve built, halt all we’ve been doing. If Earth found out, it might be less ready to send naval units to help defend Adam.”

  Scrymgeour’s bushy brows drew together. “I’ve not time to argue wi’ ye, Dr. Jennison,” he snapped “ ’Tis unfortunate for us as well as ye that ye were overlooked in the evacuation.” He curbed his temper. “We’ll do wha’ we can. I’ll see to it that an officer is assigned to ye as…liaison, explainer.” Dour humor: “Also chaperon, for ye realize we’ve but a handful o’ women on Olga now, and they too busied for aught o’ an amorous nature. Not that our men would misbehave, I’m sure; but ’twill be as well to make plain for them to see that they’re no’ to let themsel’s be distracted fro’ their duty, e’en in their scant free times.”

  Sally tossed her head. “Don’t worry, Admiral. I have no desire to fraternize. Am I permitted to take myself out of their presence?”

  “Go topside, ye mean?” He pondered. “Aye, no harm in that, gi’en proper precautions. We do oursel’s. Howe’er, ye shall always ha’ an escort.”

  “Why? Don’t you think I might conceivably know my way around just a tiny bit better than any of your gang?”

  He nodded. “Aye, aye. But ’tis no’ the point. Ye mustn’t stray far. Ye must e’er be ready to hurry back on the first alarm, or take over if the notice is too short. I want someone wi’ ye to make sure o’ that. ’Tis for your sake also. The berserker is coming.”

  “If I couldn’t dive underground before the strike,” she sneered, “what’s the point of my ducking under a bush? The whole valley will go up in radioactive smoke.”

  “Ah, but there’s a chance, extremely small but still a chance, that the berserker would spy ye fro’ above.” Scrymgeour bit off his words. “Pardon me, I’ve my job on hand. Return to your quarters and wait to hear fro’ the officer detailed to ye.”

  That turned out to be Ian Dunbar. So it was that she found herself wondering what he thought of her sky.

  “Ye see,” he disclosed awkwardly—shyly?—”the part o’ the task I’m in charge o’, ’tis been completed, save for minor and routine tinkerings. I’ll no’ be much needed any more until action is nigh. Meanwhile, well, we owe ye somewhat. Apology, explanation, assistance in rebuilding when that becomes possible. I’ll…take it on mysel’…to speak for that side o’ us…if ye’re willing.”

  She gave him a suspicious glance, but he wasn’t being flirtatious. Quite likely he didn’t know how to be. He stared straight ahead of him as they walked, gulped forth his words, knotted knobbly fists.

  The temptation to be cruel to such vulnerability was irresistible, in this wasteland he had helped make. “You’ve given yourself plenty to do, then. Four universities in the Solar System pooled their resources, plus a large grant from the Karlsen Memorial Foundation, to establish a permanent research group here. And how do you propose to restore the working time we’ll’ve lost, or repair the relationships with natives that we’ve painstakingly been developing?” She swept a hand to and fro. “You’ve already created your own memorial.”