me in my blackness, feeling my pain, but from a distance. Not quite reconnected with myself. I slowly swam back. I gathered I wasn't dead, unless the penguins were all wrong about everything and hell was repeating the fallen world endlessly. I blinked awake and felt the agony for real at last. Clenching my teeth against the ripping pain, I pulled against my restraints--but, by God, I was not going to give those bastards a scream. Clenching all my teeth? Jeez, they'd fixed my mouth! Arlene lay mostly in my field of vision; I blinked away the tears and noticed the pallor of her skin. She had lost a lot of blood, probably more than I had, and she was white as the cliffs of Dover overlooking the English Chan- nel. I watched closely; I could ignore the pain if I had something else to draw my attention. Her chest rose and fell regularly, and every so often she moved her feet slightly. Arlene Sanders was alive, but how much? We both were strapped down to gurneys in a gunmetal-gray room fitted with couches and what might have been a sink, but without any visible faucet. I leaned back, silently sobbing, and stared at the overhead: a darker version of the bulkhead color with thousands of tiny bright holes--some sort of light source, I reckoned. The door opened, and the clipboard sergeant we'd spotted earlier entered, probably in response to my neural rhythms changing with coming awake. He walked all around me in a counterclockwise circle, looking at dials and readouts and scribbling on his clipboard. He didn't say a word, even when I talked to him: "Hey, you . . . where am I? Am I aboard your ship? We're not the aliens you're looking for, but we're looking for them, too. Can you hear me? I'm a human from Earth, like you, from about two centu- ries before your time." He left without a second glance at me, the puke. But about ten minutes of agony later, his boss arrived. This guy was tall and thin, about my height but twenty kilos lighter; he had sandy hair and a beard with carefully shaved stripes of bare skin in it. He wore a form-fitting T-shirt that made him look ridiculous--no muscle, a total pencil-neck dweeb-- tweedy black with a red spiral coiled around his forearm . . . possibly a rank insignia? He walked like a commissioned officer; they make my neck hairs stand on end, and I never know how to react around one. He spoke to me slowly, and I got most of the words. "You are human. Carry papers showing you are [unknown word] United States Marine Sergeant America [unknown word] Taggart Flynn." "I am." "Am Overcaptain Ruol Tokughavita, People's Democratic Defense Forces. Are trapped out of time like you, pursuing Mutates here to keep them off Earth." "How long, sir?" I asked. "Hundred and seven years." He seemed emotion- ally detached, but he watched me narrowly. He hadn't been away as long as Arlene and I had, but a century wasn't a fortnight; like us, Overcaptain Tokughavita would return to a different world than he had left--he left his world behind where it never would be found. I felt an immediate sympathy for the Overcaptain . . . but I wasn't sure I trusted those alien eyes. "Sir, is there a United States of America still? Are we the last Marines?" "No, Sergeant, but People's State of Earth." "Is there a Constitution?" "The people need no pact against themselves. Live each for the commons, live each for another." Crap. Crap, crap, crap! So in the end we finally lost the battle for individual sovereignty. I lay back, grimacing, but it wasn't the shoulder pain--I could stand that. Now, not only didn't I know where and when we were, I didn't even know what we were; I wasn't sure we were U.S. Marine Corps anymore. And I didn't think I'd make much of a fashion splash with a blue helmet and a patch that read People's Army of Socialist Liberation, or whatever the hell they wore. You Can't Go Home Again, as old Thomas Wolfe said. Fine, I thought. Screw you and your whole People's State of Everything! No matter who was in charge or what they called themselves, by God, there was one U.S. Marine left alive still--two Marines. I knew damned well that Lance Corporal Arlene Sanders stood with me on this one. If the only humans left were weirdo socialists, then we would sign up to help the socialists. Jesus, what else could we do? Arlene. "Is the other all right?" I said, my voice growing hoarse with the effort. Overcaptain Tokughavita looked over at her, read- ing invisible readings; maybe they were projected somewhere, and you needed a contact-lens filter to see them--I don't know. But he was definitely reading from something right over her bed, and I couldn't see anything. "Is alive and progressing. Sad had to shoot but didn't know who you were what you wanted. Came in enemy ship, in league with enemy." I grunted noncommittally. It was a screw-up all the way around: they shot at a Fred ship, then we grabbed one of them in response, then they opened fire on the people who had kidnapped one of their troopers. Man! Something irrational inside me insisted that I would forgive them for shooting me--hell, I already forgave Arlene for shooting me--but I would never forgive them for shooting my buddy. But there was nothing I could do about my anger, not now, not ever . . . not if I wanted to make the best of the bad situation and return to the overcaptain's Earth. I let the overcaptain apologize and made him feel like I was willing to let the dead past bury its dead. Even if I decided to do something to him later, it was still best to make nice, if only to lull him into a false sense of security. "It's all right," I said carefully. "I understand why you shot. I won't mention it again." The overcaptain smiled. The interview was proceeding nicely, but only because I let it. The overcaptain stared at me for a long time, so long that I started to fidget. I didn't know what he wanted. At last, he cleared his throat and spoke again: "Were in imminent fear of death?" "Huh?" "You were afraid you were going to die when we were shooting?" Couldn't he leave ill enough alone? "Um, yes, sir. We figured we were going to buy it." He started to break down. He mumbled and looked at his notes, then cleared his throat again and flushed red. "Why did you stand-fight? How could you?" "How could I? What else would you expect a Marine to do, sir? If I were going down, I wanted to take a few of the bastards with me ... um, no offense, sir." The overcaptain grunted and scribbled in his gouge book. But after years in the field under fire, I can always tell when someone is scared--and Overcap- tain Tokughavita was hiding terror behind that mask of objectivity. Terror about what? I glanced to my right and saw that Arlene was awake, lying on her own side and following the exchange. It emboldened me, her being there. "Sir, can you tell me why Josepaze just fell apart when we captured him? He sounded like he thought dying was the worst possible thing he could think of--as a soldier, don't you accept death as a possibility?" Bad mistake. I had to listen to a twenty-minute lecture on what I already knew, that Homo sap was the only race in the galaxy anyone had discovered who could actually die. But the more we talked about death and dying, the more agitated he became until his skin was pale, he was sweating, and his eyes darted left and right instead of fixing on me, as they had at the beginning of the interview. I suddenly realized the blindingly obvious: Over- captain Tokughavita suffered from necrophobia, the irrational fear of death. He was asking how Arlene and I had managed not to panic under fire! I began to get very uneasy, squirming around on my table. How could a soldier with a morbid fear of dying rise to such a high rank? He asked a couple of "wind- down" questions designed to relax me: what battles I had fought in and something about types of food. That last reminded me of the pills we needed to survive on somebody else's; but I figured that since they were human like us, we could probably eat their food directly. Then he left me alone to wonder how humans just like me (the overcaptain and my erst- while prisoner) so obviously could have no courage at all when it came to risking their lives. Arlene sat up on her table, grimacing and involun- tarily clutching her stomach. "Christ!" she said. "Are we the only humans left who still believe in honor and duty even unto death, semper fi, and all that?" I shook my head, lying back against the hard cold cushion. "We've only had two examples! I'll bet seven to two that we'll eventually find that Tokughavita is pretty unrepresentative of the soldiers even in his era." Well, Arlene should have taken those odds. Over the next four days, while my arm was still immobi- lized and Arlene slowly healed up, seven more sol- diers wandered in to talk to me about death and ended up shaking like a leaf in a lawn blower. By the time I was ready for transport, and my broken clavicle and arm joint were nearly mended, I had figured out that this entire band of humans were so paranoid with necrophobia that they fell all to pieces at even the thought of death. On the fifth day, I was up and about. They didn't rub my face into it during that convalescence that I was a prisoner. I had the run of their ship parked in the sand, except for certain restricted areas around the engines and computer stacks. I didn't realize my life was about to take a hellish turn: Arlene and I were both summoned to separate but adjoining cabins in the stern of the human ship. Somebody had suddenly decided that he simply couldn't live without knowing all about our ability to transcend the fear of death and dying. He decided to give us a little test. 10 The human ship looked roughly like the Fred ship, except scaled down by a factor of four or five. They walked me up a bunch of spiral stairwells and into a small cabin, and suddenly the best-buds routine ended. Before I could struggle or fight back, three guys grabbed me and forced me into a chair, then cuffed both ankles and my left wrist with plastic straps embedded in the seat. A wall suddenly paled and turned transparent, and I saw into the adjacent room where they'd taken Arlene: she was trussed up just as I was, two Christmas turkeys staring at each other through a bulkhead that had suddenly turned into a window. A large clock--the old-fashioned analog kind-- faced me below the window. It was marked up to sixty by fives, and a needle was set at the far end of the scale. Next to the clock was a tube that looked disturbingly like the business end of a large-bore rifle, something ghastly like .75-caliber. I did not like the looks. The overcaptain stood where I could see him. "Have sixty seconds before gun fires. Whoever moves lever first will live, other will die. If no one moves lever before time limit, both die." Through the window, I saw another man talking to Arlene. From the way she paled, I figured she had received the same instructions. "Starts now," declared that malevolent thug Tokug- havita, pressing a button on top of the clock. The hand began to sweep downward, and I felt every oriface contract and clench. My mouth was dry; even my tongue was sandpaper when I tried to lick my lips. Christ . . . oh, Christ! My right hand was free, the lever that would kill Arlene in easy reach. I made no move toward it. Through the glass, or whatever it was, I could see Arlene equally miserable, equally immo- bile. I turned to the overcaptain, who watched with curious dispassion. "I will kill you for this, you--as God and Jesus are my witnesses, you will never live another day without looking over your shoulder for me." "Have thirty-five seconds," he declared, starting to look pale. "Must push lever to live. Can't kill me if you're dead." My eyes bored into his skull so hard he flinched and looked away. "My soul will return as a ghost and hound you into your grave," I promised, my voice so low he could barely hear it. He began to shake and sat down abruptly on a chair, staring at my right hand. I deliberately clenched it into a fist and left it just barely touching the lever . . . but not moving it. "Watch how a man dies," I promised, "for the Corps; in God we trust." "What is this God?" I curled my lip. "If you don't know, I don't think I can tell you in twenty seconds." "What is God?" he demanded, practically screaming. "God is faith. Without faith, man is a beast." I looked at the clock--ten seconds of life remained. "So long, beast." "Other will kill you!" "No, she won't." "How do you know? Must push lever, save your- self!" "I don't know, I have faith. Oh, sir?" "What? What?" "Screw you, sir. You're a walking dead man." The second hand swept through the last few sec- onds into the red. I closed my eyes and clenched my teeth, preparing for the blow that would open a hole in my chest the size of the great Martian rift. But instead of the explosion, I heard a loud snap. When I blinked my eyes open, I saw Overcaptain Tokug- havita, face wild and eyes staring, his hand still clutching the button at the top of the clock. He has no will, I realized. I've beaten the bastard! I deliberately slowed my breathing, trying to calm my pounding heart. Arlene's face was florid, the normally pale skin flushing deep pink, but her expres- sion made me shudder: I had never seen my bud with such cold buried rage. The overcaptain unlocked me as the other man on the other side unlocked Arlene. I made no mention of my decision--I never go back on my word, and I had sworn to kill him, but that didn't mean I had to remind my target in case he had forgotten or not believed me. I noticed one strange thing. Back in the Corps, an officer might be in charge of an op and do most of the planning, but he would have a batch of enlisted men do the actual physical grunt-work (which is why they call us grunts). But here, aside from the initial strap- down, which required several helpers for a man my size, Overcaptain Tokughavita had done everything himself, despite the fact that there were numerous people around obviously of lower rank. Jesus, didn't they even have the concept of a chain of command anymore? I rose, matching Arlene. Both of us marched from our staterooms, angry and hot, and rejoined each other in the passageway. We said not a word all the way back to our quarters, then Arlene did something she only rarely does: she wrapped both arms around me and held tight for several minutes, reassuring herself that I was still there. I stroked the shaved back of her head--after all these years, Lance Corporal Arlene Sanders had maintained that same high-and- tight she had worn the first day I saw her, when she and Gunnery Sergeant Goforth played William Tell. When she was certain I wasn't going anywhere, she unburied her face and grabbed my uniform by the lapels. "Fly," she said, "these people are nearly starved to death for faith." "You're an atheist," I pointed out. "It doesn't have to be faith in God! Just anything outside and higher than themselves, like the Corps, or honor, anything. They've got the words; they talk about 'the commons' as if that meant something to them. But it's just words; they don't really act like it . . . they act like totally individualist pigs." "Social atoms," I agreed. "The Church has always warned about the danger of social atomism--where you think only about yourself as an individual, not about your community, country, society. These so- called communists are the most socially atomist peo- ple I've ever seen! I see what you mean. They don't believe in anything, really." "Fly, there's something weird going on here with these people. I have a terrible feeling we're missing something big ... or something really, really small. But if we can get ahold of the faith lever ..." "Women's intuition?" Arlene rolled her eyes. "All right, sure, call it that. It doesn't change the fact that there's something hidden here, and, by God, we're going to find it, Bud! I mean, Sergeant. If we get ahold of the faith lever somehow, I think we can move this mountain to Mohammed." I blinked at the metaphor food-processor action, but I got the general drift. This was what we call a "high-level strategic victory condition"--a blue-sky goal. But at least it was something to shoot at. The holding cell was pretty civilized, as far as those things go. We had a nice bunk, and Arlene and I didn't mind shacking up--to sleep, that is. There was a fold-down toilet and sink, a table, even a terminal, except we couldn't figure out how to crack the security system around the local net. In fact, we couldn't get away from the initial set of menus, which seemed to display informative "non-authorized pers" as 3-D letters floating above the keypad whenever we got far enough along any route. Our uniforms were starting to stink, but when you live in a ditch in Kefiristan for eight months, you're thankful for any pair of trousers or camouflage jacket that doesn't actually get up and crawl away under its own motive force. Arlene had more pressing needs, as a woman, but she managed to explain enough to the guard that he brought some cotton, which she wrapped in a cloth torn from the tail of her shirt. God only knew what she was going to do tomorrow. I sat down on my bunk, flexing the arm that by all rights should have been broken and immobilized for months. "Hey, A.S., you notice anything remarkable here?" She barely glanced up from the terminal, trying yet again. "You mean besides our miraculous medical cure?" "I meant the medical. I was pretty damned shot up; you even ..." I paused. I had been about to tell her that she even shot me once herself, but I decided there was no point. Why make her feel like crap? "Even you should have had some really bad bruises, even if your armor took all the shots. But I know I had at least four bullets in my arm and one in my leg, and one of the ones in my arm took out my rotator cuff." I stood, moving my arm in a slow, but steady, circular arc. "So how come I can do this?" I winced, but the point was I could do it at all! She shrugged. "Fly, they're two hundred years more advanced than we. Wouldn't you expect them to be able to perform medical miracles? I'm more sur- prised by something you haven't even noticed yet, Sarge." I waited. When she didn't continue, I growled. "Ah, look at the ship," she said hastily. I looked around our jail cell. "For what? Every- thing's pretty shipshape, as what's his face, that CPO out of Point Mugu would say." "Squared away? Sharp corners, nice right angles? Everything our size? Sink and toilet perfectly fitting us humans, and obviously integral to the ship, not an add-on?" "Oh." Light began to dawn on marblehead. "You mean this ship was built for humans?" "Sarge, this ship was built by humans!" She stood, making a wide gesture that included the entire ship, not just our little white cell. "All of it--the whole ship was built by human beings--and I'll bet if we looked at the engines, they would say Pratt and Whitney or Northrop!" "Jesus ... so we're out in space on our own, now? Not just piggybacking on a Klave ship or hijacking some Freds?" I stared. Everywhere I looked, now that I was looking for it, the decor screamed Western European American human. Even the language was basically English with a lot of slang words we didn't know. All right, so the Earth had become some sort of social-welfare semi-capitalist world-wide govern- ment--but it was still ours. We had won the freaking battle, oo-rah! "Notice something else about the ship, Sarge?" "Look, knock it off with the Sarge stuff. I'd rather be Fly when we're alone. Save it for the troops. What else about the ship?" "Sorry, Fly. Um ... oh, that's right; you were unconscious when they loaded us aboard. Fact is, I thought sure you were dead. I was barely awake myself, and after they got me here, they shot me full of tranks and I was out until I woke up with you." She leaned toward me, tapping her eyes. "But I wasn't completely unconscious when they scooped us up after the Battle of Quicksand Hill. I pretended to be, and I got an eyeful." "All right, spit it out, Lance. What did you see?" "Hmph! Now you're the one with the rank thing, Sergeant Fly. I got a good look at the outside of the ship. Two things: first, there are English-language markings on it, or at least they're using our alphabet; this thing is designated TA-303. . . . Does that mean there are several hundred ships in the human fleet?" I scratched my head and shrugged. "I don't know how the Navy numbers ships, Red, if it still even is the Navy. But you're probably right that they wouldn't be numbering in the hundreds if there were only three or four of them." "And second, Fly-dude, the thing was tiny--barely three hundred and fifty meters long and no wider than an aircraft carrier from our era." I thought about the Fred ship--3.7 kilometers long and almost half a klick in diameter. Most of that was engine, which meant-- "Arlene, are you saying this ship is much more advanced than the Fred ship?" "Not just in engineering tech, Fly. Did you notice when they took us to Torture Theater, we went up a long series of spiral ladderways?" "Yeah. So?" "We went up about eight flights." "Yeah. So?" "Fly, that's more than half the diameter of the ship." "Yeah. So--" I froze in mid-dismissal. The signifi- cance suddenly struck me. If you ascended past the centerline of the Fred ship while the ship was parked on the tarmac, suddenly all the decks would be upside down. The Freds induced acceleration that func- tioned like gravity by spinning the circular ship, so the outer deck had the heaviest gravity and the inner core was zero-g. But the ship was built like a building--they never intended gravity to pull any direction but one! "Christ, girl. We've got artificial gravity--real artifi- cial gravity, like in 'Star Trek'!" I sat down and thought for a moment. "Arlene, didn't Sears and Roebuck say that the gravity zones left behind by the First Ones, the guys who built the stuff on Phobos and Deimos, the Gates and stuff, couldn't possibly work on a ship--not even theoretically?" She nodded gravely. "Yup. Obviously, this ship is more advanced than what the First Ones built. "Fly, I've been trying to reconcile all of this with the pace of human technological development. Now maybe I'm just getting cynical in my old age; I don't think so--I still think we can take control here and win this thing. But criminey, Fly! Interstellar travel and artificial gravity and extraordinary medical ad- vances, all in a couple of hundred years--starting from a completely destroyed civilization?" I stared, saying nothing. The creepiest feeling was dawning across me. "Fly, does that sound reasonable to you? Even considering that we evolve so much faster than the Klave or the Freds?" I slowly shook my head. When we left Earth, we were fighting for our lives. Humanity had been set back at least fifty or seventy-five years--our cities destroyed, nuked; bacteriophages sweeping the globe; the Freds had just perfected their ultimate terror weapon: genetically engineered monsters that looked just like human beings, until they opened fire on you. The aliens had the power to move entire planets around like bowling balls! And they had what we called the Fred ray, an immensely powerful blob of energy that cut down everything in its path. Arlene was right; it was pretty freaking hard to believe that in only two centuries we'd move from that to this. In fact . . . "Arlene, I know of only one race that evolves that fast." "You and me both, Sarge. I mean, Fly." I looked around, feeling my stomach clench. "These guys are Newbies? Not humans?" She shook her head. "No. Why would the Newbies evolve into human-looking critters? They go forward, not back! Look, we know these guys left Earth a hundred years ago, two centuries after we did. But we don't know when or if they encountered the Newbies--or when they suddenly got this explosive burst of technological creativity. What if--?" "What if," I took over for her, "the Newbies ran into humans decades ago? Look, we don't know where the Newbie homeworld is; maybe it's closer to Earth than the Fred base we went to first, less than sixty light-years away. What if somehow they met us and influenced us to evolve more at the Newbie rate than our normal rate, fast though it was?" Arlene leaned close, not that it would help if there were sensitive dish-mikes trained on us to pick up every sound. "What if the Newbies are here after all, here with the humans--but we just can't see them for some reason?" I told her about the overcaptain reading invisible readouts from somewhere above Arlene's prostrate form in sickbay. "This ain't good, Lance; I don't like the idea of invisible Newbies running around like ghosts in the machine." She sat down on the hard bunk, closing her eyes to the relentlessly white bulkheads. "I don't like any of this, Fly. I don't like the idea that faith, not brainpow- er, turns out to be our weapon. I'm on shakier ground there than you or--or Albert would have been." She put her hand to her chest; she'd twice had an engage- ment ring from her beloved, and she wore the ring on her dog-tag chain. Then we went through one of the Gates built by the First Ones, and, of course, the ring vanished with everything else. Then the Klave recreated it for her, and she was happier than she had been since the jump. But we jumped again, and it was gone again; now, she often put her hand where the ring used to hang, remember- ing it as vividly as if it were there .... It represented Albert's offer that Arlene never had time to accept. I put my arm around her. On Earth it had been over three hundred years--three hundred and forty, to be exact, adding up all our trips. But still, for us it had been only four months since we went on without Albert, and only five months since we saw Jill ... whatever her last name was. It was all pretty damned confusing. I just couldn't seem to wrap my brain around all this relativistic bouncing around the galaxy. And we were at least another hundred years away from home, even if we started today and headed straight back! "Fly," Arlene said, "let's keep a good watch tonight when we interact with these ... people. Maybe we'll pick up some intel that will either blow this theory away or--or confirm it." I held up a fist; gently, she rapped it with her own. But the normal Arlene Sanders would have smacked it so hard, a big Marine "fist salute," that my knuckles would have been ringing for several minutes. That evening, as we followed the officious jerk of a clipboard sergeant to the mess, people stopped talking when we approached and cringed as we brushed or bumped them. We were celebrities . . . but celebrities on a freak show. See the monsters! Beware, for their F- A-I-T-H may be infectious! This time, I paid particular attention. We definitely climbed higher than the midpoint of the ship could possibly be, so Arlene was right: the ship was built for gravity always being the same direction. They must have had an artificial gravity generator. The mess hall was actually a long narrow room, almost like a corridor, with a center table along which people sat in individual chairs. With a guard holding each of my arms, the overcaptain walked us down- stream right on top of the table itself! I labored not to step in anyone's plate of food or kick over any wine glasses. The pair of guards slapped me down in a central chair and locked a metal band around my waist like a seat belt. I didn't try to tug at it; it was pretty clear I wasn't going anywhere. They plopped Arlene down in the chair directly opposite me, locking her in as well with a resounding click. The room was darker than I preferred, but after the Fred bases and Fredworld, we had gotten pretty used to darkness. Each person had a different set of plates and silverware, and when they ate, they hunched forward and hooked one arm around their plates as if worried the guy on the other side was going to steal their food--a lot like a former convict my father used to employ when he worked managing the Angertons' farm. Equal number of guys and gals. Now that I looked close, I noticed that nobody wore exactly the same uniform. Like in the United States Army before the twentieth century, everybody had his own variation on a common theme: Overcaptain Tokughavita, to my immediate right, wore dark blue trim around the seven pockets on the front of his uniform blouse; the woman sitting next to him had no trim, and the two guys opposite us had five and six pockets instead of seven. The farther away from the overcaptain, down the table, the wilder the variation: I saw a hat that was a cross between the Revolutionary War tricorner and a Texas ten-gallon, one woman had mini-wings stick- ing out the backs of her shoulders. The uniforms (is that the right word when they're not uniform?) tended toward red and burnt umber at the extreme left of the table, where the hats flattened out and looked like berets with spikes. Suddenly, I noticed Sears and Roebuck at the leftmost end of the table, but they didn't look at me. They must have known we were here. Nobody could have missed our ceremonial entrance, walking along the tabletop--nobody else entered that way! People trickled in and out all through the meal. I began to get the idea that these humans made virtu- ally a fetish of individualism verging on the solipsis- tic: each person lived in his own little world, almost unaware of anyone else except when he needed some- thing from outside. The food was different for each person, too--none of it very appetizing from my point of view. My main course tasted like boiled steak in suitcase sauce. But it was better than the Fred food, even the blue squares, and I was reasonably sure that humans couldn't have changed much biochemically in only two hundred years, so the food was probably nutritious enough to keep me and Arlene alive. Once, someone dropped a knife with a clatter, and a whole section of table panicked! Then, when they saw it hadn't killed anyone, they returned to their meal as if nothing had happened. During the meal, there was certainly a lot of intel to pick up; in fact, it seemed these humans didn't even have the concept of classified data or even personal discretion. Arlene was right; all the big bursts in creativity occurred just about sixty years ago. But there were no Newbies that they reported. Sears and Roebuck didn't say a word to us; they acted as if they had never seen us before and weren't particularly interested now. I took the hint and left them alone, hoping they hadn't abandoned us and were just playing some game to get on the humans' good side. The crew of the ship--called different names by different crewmen, of course, but mostly called Disre- spect to Death-Bringing Deconstructionists--still seemed fascinated by our faith, me in God, Arlene in her fellow man. They inched toward us as if afraid to touch, still worrying about "catching" faith. You bet your ass it's infectious! I thought. I made as much contact as I could, putting my hands on people's shoulders, shaking hands (they knew what it meant but didn't like doing it--it meant recognizing the existence of other people), kissing the girls. I got about as much response from the latter as you would expect .... It was like kissing nuns. 11 The crew mobbed us, asking all sorts of basic questions, baby questions, about faith and hope. "What if have faith in something and doesn't happen? Can hope for someone to suffer? Does matter if have faith in yourself but not in external God?" I sensed a purposefulness sweeping the room, centering first in one person then another, almost as if an inquisitive intelligence were flitting from brain to brain, asking a question, then moving on to the next person. First, Overcaptain Tokughavita asked, "How can still have faith in basic goodness of humans if person- al experience tells otherwise?" Arlene surprised me by taking that one; I'd always thought she was the cynic. "It doesn't matter what some people do, or even like most people--I mean, sure a lot of people, maybe most of them, will do bad stuff when they think no one's looking. But if you've ever known someone who won't, someone who really practices his moral system all the time--and I have known someone like that--then you know what we're capable of. Maybe we don't always live up to it, but the basic decency and goodness is in our design specs. We just need some technical work." Then the overcaptain's face softened. "Actually studied first mission in school; strange to meet leg- ends in flesh." "You read about it?" I asked. "There's a book?" "Two books. Many books, but two originals: Knee- Deep in the Dead and Hell on Earth. Woman named Lovelace Jill wrote them, said was on mission with you." Jill! So that was her name. Jill Lovelace? "Jesus," said Arlene. "Talk about tilting at wind- mills!" "Huh?" It was another one of those patented Ar- lene non sequiturs void of any and all meaning. He probed us about our adventures. I was still stunned at the thought of Jill publishing a pair of books! It all seemed so recent to me--to me and Arlene--I had to keep reminding myself that Jill would have had her whole life to research and write the books. Then the sergeant leaned forward, interrupting the overcaptain. I waited in vain for fireworks--not only had they lost their notions of chain of command, but they were so individualistic they didn't even seem to have the concept of manners, respect, and politeness. "Do moral thing because fear divine retribution?" "No," I said, "that's a complete misreading." The nuns had discussed this exact point with us many times in catechism class. "Whatever your morality, if you're just doing the right thing because you're afraid of getting caught, that's not ethics--it's extortion." "Why do right thing when can secretly profit?" "You do the right thing because humans have an inner sense of morality, right and wrong, conscience, whatever, that tells them what is right. If you ignore it, you feel like crap because you're not living up to-- to your design specs, like Arlene says." Then the light of extreme intelligence faded from the sergeant's eyes, and he sat back, listening while Arlene gave a highly exaggerated account of our trip up to Mars. She even went into the first entry into the UAC facility and the attack by the monsters that later turned out to be genetic and cyborg constructs of the Freds. I listened closely; strange as it may seem, I had never heard that part of the story before ... I was in the brig being guarded by two guys named Ron--an interesting precursor to Sears and Roebuck, now that I thought about it, Then an unnamed person asked what this moral force felt like, then it was back to Tokughavita to ask how we knew whether someone else we met was moral, and so on--a whole damned theology lesson. The particular questioner changed, but the "voice" was so similar, I began to get suspicious. Not voice as in the sound of it as it came from their throats; I mean the way they strung the words together, diction, whatever that's called, and the intelligence behind the questions. Most of the time, these guys were con- ceited, social-atomist trogs, except when one would lean forward, cut off whoever was speaking, and ask The Question. I decided early in the evening on 99 percent hon- esty: I only lie when I see a clear-cut advantage to it, and I try to keep my lies as close to the truth as possible. That way I don't get confused. In this case, my only lie was to imply that all humans had some sort of faith, back in our time. Arlene took her cue from me, playing it safe until she figured out what I was pulling on them, then backing me up. It was a fascinating evening, and I didn't even care about the lousy food. They hustled us back to the cell and dumped us. We feigned sleep until we were fairly sure the overt, obvious guards were gone. "If they've got the room wired," Arlene said in my ear, pretending to be romantic, "we're already screwed." I grunted and got up. "Let's assume they don't-- but don't plot any plots out loud, just in case." Arlene sat up, looked around, and gave a little gasp of astonishment. "Fly, look at the terminal! Or where it used to be, I mean." In place of the magic keyboard that projected 3-D images was a simple translucent-green sphere, like a crystal ball. Flickers of electrical impulses kissed the inside surface. We walked over and stared down at it. "Cripes," said my lance corporal, "what the hell are we supposed to do with this?" "I could understand them taking away our comput- er," I said, "but they went to some trouble to put this here. Ah, an intelligence test?" We poked at it, prodded it, even kicked it. An hour later, we were hot and sweaty but no closer to figuring out what we were supposed to do with a glowing green bowling ball glued to the floor. Then Arlene had one of her serendipitous strokes of unconscious genius: she leaned over and snarled at the thing. "Why the hell don't you say something?" "Because haven't been asked question," it an- swered, reasonably enough. We jumped back. Then I approached cautiously. "Did the humans who own this ship put you here?" "How should I know?" it asked. "Weren't here when I was activated. You are first people I've seen." "What's your name?" asked Arlene. "Have no name." "What should we call you?" "Address me directly, second person." I looked at Arlene and grinned. "My turn, as I recall," I said. "Your turn for what? Oh." She rolled her eyes. "Go for it, Fly." When we first ran into the Freds--their demon-shaped machines, actually, the ones they sent for the invasion--we took turns naming the critters as we ran across them. I wasn't sure whose turn it really was, but I had a good name in mind. "I christen thee Ninepin," I said. Arlene snorted, and Ninepin didn't respond. "Ninepin, are there any more like you?" "Others like me, not like me," it answered crypti- cally. "I am prototype, far advanced over other sys- tems on ship or on other ships." "When were you created?" asked my comrade. "Was first activated four hours, seventeen minutes ago. Construction time six hours, eleven minutes. Design first logged into ship system thirty-eight min- utes before construction began." "You, ah, say you're far advanced over the other ship's systems?" I asked. "Aren't there any proto- types, intermediate steps, trial runs?" "No." "Nothing? They just jumped straight from that terminal we used to have here--to you?" "Yes, unless secret experiments unlogged." "What are the odds of that?" Arlene asked. "Infinitesimal. Less than 0.00001 percent proba- bility." Arlene and I looked at each other. "Kiddo," I said, "this goes top far. This is exactly the sort of thing we'd associate with Newbies. I've been thinking--you know your Edgar Allan Poe. What's the best place to hide something?" "In plain view," she said, drawing her red eyebrows together and frowning. "What could be plainer than looking right at these humans?" "Fly, we already decided that they really were humans, not Newbies in disguise." I smiled as she started to catch on. "Yes, those are humans, A.S., but what's inside them?" Now her brows shot up toward her hairline. "You're saying the Newbies have implanted them- selves inside the humans?" "It's a possibility, right? They evolve smaller and smaller, and eventually they wriggle into their host to--what did the Newbie say? To fix them. Maybe they figured we were closer to proper functioning than any of the other races in the galaxy because our rate of technological and social evolution is so much closer to the Newbies'." "Ninepin," I said, "have you been following our conversation? Do you know who the Newbies are?" "Yes and no." I scratched my head and looked at Arlene, who grinned. "You asked two questions, Fly: yes to the first, no to the second." "Ninepin: are there any other species on this ship besides human?" "Yes. Two." Arlene spoke up. "Is one of those two species a paired group of bilaterally symmetric, bipedal crea- tures with short legs and pointy heads?" "Yes. Others call them Klave." "Sears and Roebuc