The shaw was close. The man’s sidearm sat within centimeters of Sally’s hand. She felt no excitement, only a vivid sense of everything around her, as she snatched it from its holster and sprang back.

  “Oh, no!” she cried. “Stop where you are!”

  “Wha’s this?” He jerked to a halt, appalled. “Ha’ ye gone schizo?”

  “Not a move,” she said across the meters of living sod. The pistol never wavered in her grip. “At the least suspicion, I’ll shoot, and believe me, I’m a damn good shot.”

  He rallied, mustered composure, said in a flat voice: “Wha’ are ye thinking o’? I can scarce believe ye’re goodlife.”

  “No, I’m not,” she flung back. “Are you?”

  “Hoy? How could ye imagine—?”

  “Easily. Your story about the berserkers chancing upon Ilya doesn’t hang together. The sole explanation for everything I’ve witnessed is that you informed them, you Adamites, you called them in. Dare you deny?”

  He swallowed, ran tongue over lips, bowed his head. “We’ve a trap to spring,” he mumbled.

  “For a single trophy, you’d set a world at stake? You’re as evil as your enemy.”

  “Sally, Sally, I can no’ tell ye—”

  “Don’t try. I haven’t the time to spill, anyway. I’m going to do what you’d never have let me, lead the natives hereabouts to safety…if any safety is to be found, after what you’ve caused. Go back! This instant! I’ll kill anyone who tries to follow me.”

  For a long while he looked at her. The wind soughed in the darkling trees.

  “Ye would,” he whispered finally. “Ye might ha’ asked leave o’ the admiral, though.”

  “Would he have granted it, that fanatic?”

  “I can no’ tell. Maybe no’.”

  “It wasn’t a risk I could take.”

  “Fro’ your standpoint, true. Ye’re a brave and determined person.”

  “Go!” She aimed the pistol between his eyes and gave the trigger a light pressure.

  He nodded. “Farewell,” he sighed, and trudged off. She watched him for a minute before she disappeared into the woods.

  The deathmoon slipped out of flightspace and accelerated ponderously toward that red sun. Starshine glimmered off the kilometers-wide spheroid that was its hull. The weak light ahead cast shadows past gun turrets, missile tubes, ray projectors, like the shadows of crags and craters on a dead planet.

  A radar beam brought word of the double world. The berserker calculated orbits and adjusted its vectors accordingly. Otherwise nothing registered on its receivers but endless cosmic rustlings.

  The solar disc waxed, dark spots upon bloody glow. The target globe and companion glimmered as crescents. The berserker was slowing down now, to put itself in a path around the one which was alive.

  It passed the other one. Abruptly, detectors thrilled. Engines had awakened, spacecraft were scrambling from both planets—human vessels.

  The berserker tracked them. They numbered half a dozen, and were puny, well-nigh insignificant. Not quite; any could launch a warhead that would leave the berserker a cloud of molten gobbets. However, even attacking together they could not saturate its defenses. It would annihilate their missiles in midcourse, absorb their energy beams, and smash them out of existence, did they choose to fight.

  Should it? Within the central computer of the berserker, a logic tree grew and spread. The humans might be present by chance (probability low). If not, they had some scheme, of which the revelation by the Montgomery unit had been a part (probability high). Ought the berserker to withdraw? That might well be the intent of the humans; they often bluffed. The assumption that they were strong in this system would affect strategy, by causing underestimation of their capabilities elsewhere.

  The berserker could retreat, to return in an armada invincible against anything the humans might have here. But this would mean postponing attacks elsewhere. It would buy the enemy time he much needed, to bring help from distant sectors. Whole worlds might never get attended to.

  Information was necessary. The berserker computed that its optimum course was to proceed. At worst, a single capital unit would perish. It considered dispatching a courier back to base with this message, calculated that the humans would detect and destroy the device before it could enter flightspace, and refrained. Its own failure to report in would warn the others, if that happened.

  The berserker moved onward—majestically, a human would have said—under its great imperative, to kill.

  First, if possible, it should dispose of the opposing spacecraft. They were widely dispersed, but generally maneuvering near the target mass. Computation, decision: Move their way, seek engagement, meanwhile establish orbit, commence sterilization, lash back at any surviving human vessel which dared try to distract the berserker from its mission.

  It swung inward. The little ships did likewise, converging on a volume of space above the terminator. The berserker followed. A destroyer accelerated audaciously forth. The berserker shifted vectors to shorten the range. This brought it near the fringes of atmosphere, at less than orbital speed. Its track curved gradually downward. But the parameters were in its data banks, its drive was already at work to bring it up again, it was simply using gravitation as an aid.

  Lightning lanced out of the night below.

  Electronically fast, the ships fire control center reacted. Even as sensors recorded the slash of energy through metal, and went blank before that fury, a missile sprang.

  There was only time for the one. Then the berserker tumbled around itself, sliced across. Stars danced about, incandescent drops that had been armor, before they cooled and went black. Radar-guided, light-fast, the beam carved again, and amidst the pieces, blind, deaf, dumb, helpless. The human vessels spurted to salvage the fragments before those could become meteors.

  A new gibbous Olga gleamed red-cold over Snowcrown. Mountains beyond were jagged ramparts under constellations Earth had never seen. In a hollow of the foothills, campfires cast flickery gleams off eyes and eyes, as three hundred or more Ilyans huddle close. They said little, in that enormous silence.

  Sally Jennison crouched likewise. She, the alien, her skin bare beneath its garb, needed the most help against gathering chill. Her friends, the leaders of the exodus, squatted to right and left. She could almost feel their questioning. Rainbow-in-the-Mist uttered it: “How long must we abide Lady-Who-Seeks? The food we have brought grows scant. The younglings and the old suffer. But well you know this.”

  “I do,” Sally replied. Breath smoked ghost-white from her lips. Hunger made her light-headed; her own rations had given out many hours ago, as she took the Geyserdale folk eastward to shelter. “Better hardship than death.”

  Feather-softly, he touched her hand, “Yours is the worst case,” he fluted. “We would not lose you whom we love. When can everybody turn back?”

  “When the danger is past—”

  Behind those ridges that barred view of he west, heaven sundered. A sheet of blue-white radiance momentarily shrouded stars and moon. Trees and shadows were as if etched. Ilyans shrieked, flung arms over faces, clutched infants to their bodies. Sally herself stumbled bedazzled.

  “Hold fast!” she yelled. “Rainie, tell them to stay brave! We’re all alive!”

  The ground sent a shudder through her bones. She heard rocks bounce down slopes. The rags of brilliance began to clear from her vision.

  She went about among the Ilyans with her lieutenants, helping, reassuring. They had not panicked—that was not in their nature—and although they were more vulnerable to actinic light than she was, it didn’t seem that anybody’s sight had been permanently damaged; intervening air had blotted up the worst. She wept in her relief.

  After minutes the sound arrived, a roar whose echoes cannonaded from hill to hill for what seemed like a long while. But there had been no second hell-flash. Whatever had happened, had happened.

  “Is the danger past?” asked Rainbow-in-the-Mist when stillness had returned.

  “I…think so,” Sally answered.

  “What next shall we do?”

  “Wait here. You can hold out till—oh, dawn. Though if things go well, it should end sooner. My fellow creatures ought to arrive in their vehicles and ferry you back before then.”

  “Home?”

  She disliked admitting: “No. I fear not. Your homes are smashed and burnt, as you yourselves would have been if we’d not fled. It’ll be a year or two”—brief Ilyan years—“till you can rebuild. First we’ll distribute you among your kindred in the unharmed hinterlands.

  “But I must go tell the humans. Best I start off at once.”

  “We will,” Rainbow-in-the-Mist said. “I’ve better night vision, and can find things to eat along the way and…would not let you fare alone, Lady-Who-Saved-Us.”

  She accepted his offer. He would have insisted. Besides, he was right. Without a partner, she might not survive the trek.

  Unless, to be sure, the men of Adam came looking for her in their aircars, wearing their light amplifier goggles.

  They did.

  “We’re unco busy,” Admiral Scrymgeour had snapped “No time for official briefing, debriefing, any such nonsense, later later, just to satisfy the bureaucrats. In the interim, Dr. Jennison, now that ye’ve gotten some sleep and nourishment, I detail Captain Dunbar to explain and discuss. He deserves a rest himsel’.” Did he wink an eye?

  She had inquired if they might leave the clamor and closeness underground, to talk in peace (if peace was possible between them). Dunbar had agreed. Residual radioactivity wasn’t dangerous topside unless exposure was unreasonably prolonged. Warmly clad, they sought the bluff above Lake Sapphire.

  Olga stood nearly full, a rosiness on which few scars showed, only dark emblazonings and streamers of brightness that were high-floating clouds. A frost ring surrounded it, and stars. Through windless cold, it cast a nearly perfect glade over the water. Beyond, mountains reared hoar. Snowcrown a faintly tinged white. Ice creaked underfoot, almost the single sound. It covered scorched turf, leveled homesteads, trees shattered to kindling, with a glittery blanket. Come sunrise, growth would begin again.

  Dunbar spoke softly, as though unwilling to violate the hush: “Ye’ve naught to fear fro’ us, ye realize. True, belike ye’d no’ ha’ been released on your errand o’ mercy if ye’d applied. Overcaution, same as when ye appeared in your boat. Howe’er, ye did break free, and save those many lives. Our consciences are eternally in your debt.”

  “What about yourself?” she wondered. “You failed in your duty.”

  He smiled like a boy. “Och, they’re glad I did. And in any case, no’ to be modest, I carried out my real duty wi’ full success. That’s wha’ matters. The episode wi’ ye will simply not get into the record.”

  She nodded in troubled wise. “You demolished the berserker, yes.”

  “Wrong!” he exulted. “We did no’. ’Twas the whole point. We captured it.”

  Her pulse stumbled. She stared at him.

  He grew earnest. “We could no’ tell ye, or your colleagues, in advance. The attempt might ha’ been a failure. If so, we’d want to try afresh elsewhere—different ruse, o’ course, but same basic objective. Meanwhile, we could no’ ha’ risked word about that intention getting out and forewarning the enemy, could we?”

  “But now—?” she breathed.

  He faced her. Beneath his shadowing hood, eyes shone forth. “Now,” he said, “we can make amends to ye, to Ilya. We’ll mount guard o’er this world, at least until a gathered alliance can assume the task. No’ that I await another attack. When they ne’er hear fro’ the ship they sent, the berserkers will likeliest become leery. They’ve much else they want to do, after all, before they’re forced out o’ the entire sector.”

  Compassion touched her. “Including an assault on Adam?”

  “Maybe. If so, they’ll no’ succeed. They may well no’ e’en try. The fact that we fooled them should gi’ them pause. Be that as it may, we’ve strength to spare—including our weapons on the ground, and more that we can install roundabout this planet—strength to spare for Ilya.” His lips tightened. “We did do its folk a wrong—perforce; in a righteous cause; nonetheless a wrong. We pay our debts, Dr. Jennison.”

  “But what was your cause?” she asked in bewilderment.

  “Why, I told ye. To capture intact a first-line berserker unit. No’ the actual ship, though study o’ the pieces will prove rewarding, but its brain, the principal computer, hardware and software both, before it could destroy itself.

  “To that end, we lured a single craft here, where we’d assembled a ray projector. Our weapon has the gigawatts o’ power, the lake for cooling, the sheer physical dimensions for precision, that I could dissect a berserker across two or three thousand kilometers.

  Her gloved hands caught his. Fingers closed together. “Oh, wonderful!” Her admiration retreated. “Yes, I can see how the data will be very helpful; but can they make that big a difference?”

  “They can change everything,” he replied.

  After a moment, during which breath smoked between them, he said slowly: “Ye inquired about von Neumann machines. Ye were correct; that is wha’ the berserker fleet is, taken as a whole. A self-reproducing system whose basic program is to seek out and kill all that’s alive.

  “Well, wha’ if we humans created another von Neumann machine, a system whose basic program is to seek out and kill berserkers?”

  Her response was unthinking, automatic: “I’ve read something about that. It was tried, early in the war, and didn’t work. The berserkers soon learned how to cope with those machines and wiped them out.”

  “Aye,” he agreed. “The ancient Builders built too well. Our race could no’ make computers to match theirs, in scope, flexibility, adaptability, capacity for evolution. We must needs develop living organization, dedication, skill, humans an integral part o’ the control loop. And ’tis no’ served us badly. We’ve saved oursel’s, most o’ the time.

  “But…there is no end to the war, either. They’ve the cosmos to draw on for the means o’ building more like themsel’s.”

  Sally remember her image of a womb, and shivered.

  “On the basis o’ what we’re going to learn,” she heard Dunbar say, “let us make machines which will be likewise, but whose prey is berserkers.”

  “Dare we?” she replied. A crack rang loud through midnight as frost split a fallen tree apart. “Might they turn on us also, at last?”

  She thought she saw stoicism on his face. “Aye, the old fear. Maybe, on that account alone, humankind will unite to forbid our undertaking.

  “Or maybe we’ll do it, and ’twill prove no single answer by itsel’. Then at least our hunter machines will bring attrition on the enemy, take pressure off us, help us deliver the final hammer-blow.

  “And if no’ e’en that comes to pass, why, we’ve still gained information beyond price. Once we’ve examined our…prisoner, we’ll understand today’s berserkers far better. We’ll become able to fight them the more readily.”

  It blazed from him: “Is that no’ worth the risk and cost to Ilya, Sally?”

  At once he was abashed. “Forgi’ me,” he said, while his hands withdrew from hers. “Dr. Jennison.”

  She regarded him by the icy brilliance. The thought came to her that perhaps robots that hounded robots were nothing to fear. Perhaps dread lay in the fact that a war which went on and on must, ultimately, bring forth men who were as terrible as their enemies.

  She didn’t know. She wouldn’t live long enough to know. She and he were merely two humans, by themselves in a huge and wintry night.

  She took a step forward, renewed their handclasp, and said, “We can argue about it later, Ian. But let’s be friends.”

  The Nest

  I’d been out hunting all day, in the reeds and thickets and tall grass of the bottomlands down by the Styx, and luck had been bad. The heat and mugginess bothered me worse than it should have, after all these years in the Nest, and the flies were a small hell, and there was no game to speak of. We’d killed it all off, I suppose. Once I did spot the sabertooth which had been hanging around the cattle pens, and shot at him, but he got away. While chasing him, I went head over heels into a mudhole and lost my powderhorn and two good flints, besides ruining my shirt. So I came back toward evening in a devil of a temper, which is probably what started the trouble.

  There was a sort of quiet golden light all over the world as I rode homeward, filling the air and the wide grasslands and the forest. Pretty. But I was thinking bitterly about the cave and The Men and a wet cold wind blowing off the glaciers of home and roaring in the pines. I wondered why the hell I hadn’t had the brains to stay where I was well off. You got rich, working out of the Nest, if you lived, but was it worth the trouble?

  Iggy’s feet scrunched on gravel as we came onto the road. A lot of the boys have kidded me about riding a dinosaur, when a horse is so much faster and smarter. But what the hell, a young iguanodon goes quickly enough for me, and the flies don’t bother him. And if the need arises, he’s like a small tank—as I was very shortly going to learn.

  I plodded along, swaying in the saddle, ten feet up in the air on Iggy’s shoulders. The fields stretched around me now, hundreds of acres of wheat and rye and maize, with the orchards dark against the yellowing sky. The slaves were still at work, cultivating, and a couple of overseers waved to me from their horses. But I was feeling too grouchy to reply; I sat hunched over pitying myself.

  A screen of trees and hedges marked off the fields; beyond, the road went through gardens that blazed with color, all around. Roses and poppies like fresh blood, white and tiger tawny lilies, royally purple violets—sure, Duke Hugo was a free-wheeling buzzard, but he did know flowers. Ahead of me, I could see the peaked roofs of the houses, the slave pens beyond them, and the castle black over all the Nest. I thought of a hot shower and clicked my tongue at Iggy, to make him step faster.