Fear lashed my anger as I followed the insanity flickering in his eyes.

  “Now!” He made a quick motion with his hands; I ducked. “I give it to you!” He flung the chain toward me. Reflexively I caught it. An turned away instantly and stalked into Poloscki’s.

  When I burst through the rattling hangar door at my place, the lift was coming down. Sandy yelled through the mesh walls, “Did he get the job?”

  “Probably,” I yelled back, going toward the office.

  I heard the cage settle on the silicon cushion. Sandy was at my side a moment later, grinning. “So how do you like my brother-in-law, Androcles?”

  “Brother-in-law?” I remembered An using the phrase, but I’d thought it was part of the slang golden. Something about the way Sandy said it though. “He’s your real brother-in-law?”

  “He’s Joey’s kid brother. I didn’t want to say anything until after you met him.” Sandy came along with me toward the office door. “Joey wrote me again and said since An was coming out here he’d tell him to stop by and see me and maybe I could help him out.”

  “Now how the hell am I supposed to know who Joey is?” I pushed open the door. It banged the wall.

  “He’s one of my husbands, the one who wrote me that letter you told me you’d read.”

  “Oh, yeah. Him.” I started stacking papers.

  “I thought it was pretty nice of him after all that to tell An to look me up when he got out here. It means that there’s still somebody left who doesn’t think I’m a complete waste. So what do you think of Androcles?”

  “He’s quite a boy.” I scooped up the mail that had come in after lunch, started to go through it but put it down to hunt for my coveralls.

  “An used to come visit us when he got his one weekend a month off from his training program as golden,” Sandy was going on. “Joey’s and An’s parents lived in the reeds near the estuary. But we lived back up the canyon by Chroma Falls. An and Joey were pretty close, even though Joey’s my age and An was only eight or nine back then. I guess Joey was the only one who really knew what An was going through, since they were both golden.”

  Surprised and shocked, I turned back to the desk. “You were married with a golden?” One of the letters on the top of the pile was addressed to Alegra from Carlson’s Labs. I had a carton of the kids’ junk in the locker and had gotten the mail—there wasn’t much-sent to the hangar, as though I were waiting for somebody to come for it.

  “Yeah,” Sandy said, surprised at my surprise. “Joey.”

  So I wouldn’t stand there gaping, I picked up Alegra’s letter.

  “Since the traits that are golden are polychromazoic, it dies out if they only breed with each other. There’s a big campaign back in galactic center to encourage them to join heterogeneous proke-groups.”

  “Like bluepoint Siamese cats, huh?” I ran my blackened thumbnail through the seal.

  “That’s right. But they’re not animals, boss. I remember what they put that kid-boy through for psychotic reinforcement of the factors that were golden to make sure they stuck. It tore me up to hear him talk about it when he’d visit us.”

  I pulled a porta-pix out of Alegra’s envelope. Carlson’s tries to personalize its messages.

  “I’m sure glad they can erase the conscious memory from the kids’ minds when they have to do that sort of stuff.”

  “Small blessings and all that.” I flipped the porta-pix on. Personalized but mass produced: “. . . blessed addit . . .” the little speaker echoed me. Poloscki and I had used Carlson’s a couple of times, I know. I guess every other mechanic up here had too. The porta-pix had started in the middle. Now it hummed back to the beginning.

  “You know,” Sandy went on, “Joey was different, yeah, sort of dense about some things . . .”

  “Alegra,” beamed the chic, grandmotherly type Carlson’s always uses for messages of this sort, “we were so glad to receive the urine sample you sent us by Mr. Ratlit last Thursday . . .”

  “. . . even so, Joey was one of the sweetest men or women I’ve ever known. He was the easiest person in the group to live with. Maybe it was because he was away a lot . . .”

  “. . . and now, just a week later—remember, Carlson’s gives results immediately and confirms them by personalized porta-pix in seven days—we are happy to tell you that there will be a blessed addition to your group. However . . .”

  “. . . All right, he was different, reacted funny to a lot of things. But nothing like this rank, destructive stupidity you find out here at the Star-pit . . .”

  “. . . the paternity is not Mr. Ratlit’s. If you are interested, for your eugenic records, in further information, please send us other possible urine samples from the men in your group, and we will be glad to confirm paternity . . . I can’t understand the way people act out here, boss. And that’s why I’m pushing on.”

  “. . . Thank you so much for letting us give you this wonderful news. Remember, when in doubt, call Carlson’s.”

  I said to Sandy, “You were married with—you loved a golden?”

  Unbidden, the porta-pix began again. I flipped it off without looking.

  “Sandy,” I said, “you were hired because you were a fair mechanic and you kept off my back. Do what you’re paid for. Get out of here!”

  “Oh. Sure, boss.” He backed quickly from the office.

  I sat down.

  Maybe I’m old fashioned, but when someone runs off and abandons a sick girl like that, it gets me. That was the trip to Carlson’s, the one last little favor Ratlit never came back from. On-the-spot results, and formal confirmation in seven days. In her physical condition, pregnancy would have been as fatal as the withdrawal. And she was too ill for any abortive method I know of not to kill her. On-the-spot results. Ratlit must have known all that too when he got the results back, the results that Alegra was probably afraid of, the results she sent him to find. Ratlit knew Alegra was going to die anyway. And so he stole a golden belt. “Loving someone, I mean really loving someone—” Alegra had said. When someone runs off and leaves a sick girl like that, there’s got to be a reason. It came together for me like two fissionables. The explosion cut some moorings in my head I thought were pretty solidly fixed.

  I pulled out the books, plugged in the computer, unplugged it, put the books away, and stared into the ecologarium in my fist.

  Among the swimming, flying, crawling things, mating, giving birth, growing, changing, busy at whatever their business was, I picked out those dead-end, green worms. I hadn’t noticed them before because they were at the very edge of things, bumping against the wall. After they released their free phosphates and got tired of butting at the shell, they turned on each other and tore themselves to pieces.

  Fear and anger is a bad combination in me.

  I came close to being killed by a golden once, through that meanness and stupidity.

  The same meanness and stupidity that killed Alegra and Ratlit.

  And now when this damn kid threatens to—I mean at first I had thought he was threatening to—

  I reached Gerg’s a few minutes after the daylights went out and the street lamps came on. But I’d stopped in nearly a dozen places on the way. I remember trying to explain to a sailor from a star-shuttle who was just stopping over at the Star-pit for the first time and was all upset because one woman golden had just attacked another with a broken glass; I remember saying to the three-headed bulge of his shoulder, “. . . an ant colony! You know what it is, two pieces of glass with dirt between them, and you can see all the little ants make tunnels and hatch eggs and stuff. When I was a kid, I had an ant colony . . .” I started to shake my hand in his face. The chain from the ecologarium was tangled up in my fingers.

  “Look.” He caught my wrist and put it down on the counter. “It’s all right now, pal. Just relax.”

  “You look,” I said as he turned away. “When I was a kid, all I had was an ant colony!”

  He turned back and leaned his rusty elbow on the bar. “Okay,” he said affably. Then he made the most stupid and frustrating mistake he possibly could have just then. “What about your aunt?”

  “My mother—”

  “I thought you were telling me about your aunt?”

  “Naw,” I said. “My aunt, she drank too much. This is about my mother.”

  “All right. Your mother then.”

  “My mother, see, she always worried about me, getting sick and things. I got sick a lot when I was a little kid. She made me mad! Used to go down and watch the ships take off from the place they called the Brooklyn Navy Yards. They were ships that went to the stars.”

  The sailor’s Oriental face grinned. “Yeah, me too. Used to watch ’em when I was a kid.”

  “But it was raining, and she wouldn’t let me go.”

  “Aw, that’s too bad. Little rain never hurt a kid. Why didn’t she call up and have it turned off so you could go out? Too busy to pay attention to you, huh? One of my old men was like that.”

  “Both of mine were,” I said. “But not my ma. She was all over me all the time when she was there. But she made me mad!”

  He nodded with real concern. “Wouldn’t turn off the rain.”

  “Naw, couldn’t. You didn’t grow up where I did, narrow-minded, dark-side world. No modern conveniences.”

  “Off the main trading routes, huh?”

  “Way off. She wouldn’t let me go out, and that made me mad.” He was still nodding.

  “So I broke it!” My fist came down hard on the counter, and the plastic globe in its brass cage clacked on the wood. “Broke it! Sand, glass all over the rug, on the windowsill!”

  “What’d you break?”

  “Smashed it, stamped on it, threw sand whenever she tried to make me stop!”

  “Sand? You lived on a beach? We had a beach when I was a kid. A beach is nice for kids. What’d you break?”

  “Let all the damn bugs out. Bugs in everything for days. Let ’em all out.”

  “Didn’t have no bugs on our beach. But you said you were off the main trading routes.”

  “Let ’em out!” I banged my fist again. “Let everybody out, whether they like it or not! It’s their problem whether they make it, not mine! Don’t care, I don’t—” I was laughing now.

  “She let you go out, and you didn’t care?”

  My hand came down on top of the metal cage, hard. I caught my breath at the pain. “On our beach,” I said, turning my palm up to look. There were red marks across it. “There weren’t any bugs on our beach.” Then I started shaking.

  “You mean you were just putting me on, before, about the bugs. Hey, are you all right?”

  “. . . broke it,” I whispered. Then I smashed fist and globe and chain into the side of the counter. “Let ’em out!” I whirled away, clutching my bruised hand against my stomach.

  “Watch it, kid-boy!”

  “I’m not a kid-boy!” I shouted. “You think I’m some stupid, halfcrazy kid!”

  “So you’re older than me. Okay?”

  “I’m not a kid any more!”

  “So you’re ten years older than Sirius, all right? Quiet down, or they’ll kick us out.”

  I bulled out of Gerg’s. A couple of people came after me because I didn’t watch where I was going. I don’t know who won, but I remember somebody yelling, “Get out! Get out!” It may have been me.

  I remember later, staggering under the mercury street lamp, the world-wind slapping my face, stars swarming back and forth below me, gravel sliding under my boots, the toes inches over the Edge.

  The gravel clicked down the metal siding, the sound terribly clear as I reeled in the loud wind, shaking my arm against the night.

  As I brought my hand back, the wind lashed the cold chain across my cheek and the bridge of my nose. I lurched back, trying to claw it away. But it stayed all tangled on my fingers while the globe swung, gleaming in the street light. The wind roared. Gravel chattered down the siding.

  Later, I remember the hangar door ajar, stumbling into the darkness, so that in a moment I was held from plummeting into nothing only by my own footsteps as black swerved around me. I stopped when my hip hit a workbench. I pawed around under the lip of the table till I found a switch. In the dim orange light, racked along the back of the bench in their plastic shock-cases, were the row of master-gauntlets. I slipped one out and slid my hand into it.

  “Who’s over there?”

  “Go ’way, Sandy.” I turned from the bench, switched up the power on the wrist controls. Somewhere in the dark above, a fifteen-foot slave-hand hummed to life.

  “Sorry, buster. This isn’t Sandy. Put that down and get away from there.”

  I squinted as the figure approached in the orange light, hand extended. I saw the vibra-gun and didn’t bother to look at the face.

  Then the gun went down. “Vyme, baby? That you? What the hell are you doing here this hour of the night?”

  “Poloscki?”

  “Who’d you think it was?”

  “Is this your—?” I looked around, shook my head. “But I thought it was my—” I shook my head again.

  Poloscki sniffed. “Hey, have you been a naughty kid-boy tonight!”

  I swung my hand, and the slave-hand overhead careened twenty feet.

  The gun jumped. “Look, you mess up my waldo and I will kill you, don’t care who you are! Take that thing off.”

  “Very funny.” I brought the talon down where I could see it clawing shadow.

  “Come on, Vyme. I’m serious. Turn it off and put it down. You’re a mess now and you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “That kid, the golden. Did you give him a job?”

  “Sure. He said you sent him. Smart so-and-so. He rehulled a little yacht with the roboi-anamechaniakatasthy-sizer, just to show me what he could do. If I knew a few more people who could handle them that well, I’d go all roboi. He’s not worth a damn with a waldo, but as long as he’s got that little green light in front of him, he’s fine.”

  I brought the talons down another ten feet so that the spider hung between us. “Well, I happen to be very handy with a waldo, Poloscki.”

  “Vyme, you’re gonna get hurrrt . . .”

  “Poloscki,” I said, “will you stop coming on like an overprotective aunt? I don’t need another one.”

  “You’re very drunk, Vyme.”

  “Yeah. But I’m no clumsy kid-boy who is going to mess up your equipment.”

  “If you do, you’ll be—”

  “Shut up and watch.” I pulled the chaim out of my pouch and tossed it onto the concrete floor. In the orange light you couldn’t tell whether the cage was brass or silver.

  “What’s that?”

  The claws came down, and the fine-point tips, millimeters above the floor, closed on the ecologarium.

  “Oh, hey! I haven’t seen one of those since I was ten. What are you going to do with it? Those are five-hundred-to-one strength, you know. You’re gonna break it.”

  “That’s right. Break this one too.”

  “Aw, come on. Let me see it first.”

  I lifted the globe. “Could be an eggshell,” I said. “Drunk or sober I can handle this damn equipment, Poloscki.”

  “I haven’t seen one for years. Used to have one.”

  “You mean it wasn’t spirited back from some distant galaxy by golden, from some technology beyond our limited ken?”

  “Product of the home spiral. Been around since the fifties.”

  I raised it over Poloscki’s extended hand.

  ‘They’re supposed to be very educational. What do you want to break it for?”

  “I never saw one.”

  “You came from someplace off the routes, didn’t you? They weren’t that common. Don’t break it.”

  “I want to.”

  “Why, Vyme?”

  Something got wedged in my throat. “Because I want to get out, and if it’s not that globe, it’s gonna be somebody’s head.” Inside the gauntlet my hand began to quiver. The talons jerked. Poloscki caught the globe and jumped back.

  “Vyme!”

  “I’m hanging, here at the Edge.” My voice kept getting caught on the things in my throat. “I’m useless, with a bunch of monsters and fools!” The talons swung, contracted, clashed on each other. “And then when the children . . . when the children get so bad you can’t even reach them . . .” The claw opened, reached for Poloscki who jumped back in the half-dark.

  “Damn it, Vyme—”

  “. . . can’t even reach the children any more.” The talon stopped shaking, came slowly back, knotting. “I want to break something and get out. Very childishly, yes. Because nobody is paying any attention to me” The claw jumped. “Even when I’m trying to help. I don’t want to hurt anybody any more. I swear it, so help me, I swear—”

  “Vyme, take off the glove and listen!”

  I raised the slave-hand because it was about to scrape the cement.

  “Vyme, I want to pay some attention to you.” Slowly Poloscki walked back into the orange light. “You’ve been sending me kids for five years now, coming around and checking up on them, helping them out of the stupid scrapes they get in. They haven’t all been Ratlits. I like kids too. That’s why I take them on. I think what you do is pretty great. Part of me loves kids. Another part of me loves you.”

  “Aw, Poloscki . . .” I shook my head. Somewhere disgust began.

  “It doesn’t embarrass me. I love you a little and wouldn’t mind loving you a lot. More than once I’ve thought about asking you to start a group.”

  “Please, Poloscki. I’ve had too many weird things happen to me this week. Not tonight, huh?” I then turned the power off in the glove.

  “Love shouldn’t frighten you, no matter when or how it comes, Vyme. Don’t run from it. A marriage between us? Yeah, it would be a little hard for somebody like you, at first. But you’d get used to it before long. Then when kids came around, there’d be two—”

  “I’ll send Sandy over,” I said. “He’s the big-hearted, marrying kind. Maybe he’s about ready to try again.” I pulled off the glove.