Gavrilov, crouching stoop-shouldered in the small ship's single pilot's chair, had been closely watching the controls for the past two hours. And for most of that time Gift, standing a couple of strides away, had been curiously watching him. Flower, meanwhile, had consciously lost herself in some kind of computer game, at the other end of the compartment.

While Gift was watching the yacht had slowed, popped into normal space, minijumped again, then gone through the process once or twice more. And all with no kind of solar system anywhere in shouting distance. Some kind of rendezvous, then

Gift even looked out several times through a cleared port, during one of their long intervals in normal space. Hopeless. Like getting a glimpse of ocean, and trying to tell from that where you were on a planet's surface.

A rendezvous, all right, because the signals indicated that a docking was coming up.

Gift didn't get this at all, but by now he had just about given up asking questions.

There came a muffled thud, and the faint sounds of machinery.

Nifty looked forward to meeting whoever was about to come aboard; they could be as crazy as Gavrilov if they wanted to, just so they were a little more willing to pass out information. He was going to demand to be told...

And then the airlock opened, and he knew that for the rest of his life he was never going to demand anything again.

Because he had just seen that his life was over. Because the new pilot had come aboard. A figure stepping out of the worst of Nifty's nightmares came walking out of the airlock, focusing on him with its lenses, taking little notice of the other two people who had frozen in their positions. It was the size of a man and very roughly, the same shape. Two metal arms, ending in five-digit metal grippers. Two metal legs supported a body that had never known either blood or breath.

There was a long moment in which Gift would have used his deathdream - if he'd still had one. Involuntarily his gaze turned away from the shape in the hatchway, turned upward and inward, looking for the deathdream icon, which was no longer there.

Flower was startled at first, when the berserker entered, then joyfully excited. She came quickly to Gift's side where he stood quivering against a bulkhead, and clung to his arm, murmuring. He understood she was trying to reassure him, though his terror would not let him understand a word of what she said.

Gavrilov was not surprised at all by what had come into his ship. It was what he had been expecting, no better and no worse.

Fear and pride together showed in his voice and manner, as he spoke to it.

"I am here," he told the thing. "As I promised my Teacher. And I have brought you an important prisoner."

The invader ignored the remark. "Move quickly," it told them all, speaking in the standard language, sounding the deadly, squeaking berserker voice tones. "Discussion later. A battle is impending."

Meanwhile, at no great distance from the newly boarded ship, the man who wanted to be called the Viceroy, and the quiet woman who had chosen to humor him, still huddled in their odd shambles of quarters aboard a berserker carrier. They too had been told by their Teacher that a battle was impending. The man's eager requests for more information had been ignored.

In recent days Laval had been trying his best to garb himself in an impressive uniform, but very little in the way of spare clothing was available. The Teacher had offered no help, or even encouragement, and without help not much could be done. Part of his uniform was a length of chain he wore looped beltlike around his waist, and padlocked.

The Templar prisoner was still present - his unrepentant head just visible above the top surface of a force-field cube, with the appearance of shimmering gray gelatin. Now and then a machine came by, to spoon-feed the helpless man with food or water.

Roy Laval had been aboard this machine for a long time now. So long that his dark hair and beard had grown long, and he had lost track of the duration of his stay.

Laval was gaunt and hollow-eyed, of indeterminate age. He bore a vague physical resemblance to Nifty Gift, whom he had never met.

Laval and his companion had just taken notice of the approach of a small ship, but they had no idea whether any life units, either goodlife or prisoners, might be on it.

While the two of them were talking about this, the Templar prisoner, visible only as a talking head atop his force-field block at a little distance from the others, kept rudely interrupting. "Hey, clowns! What makes you think that any berserker has any reason to tell you anything, except maybe sit down and shut up, and follow orders. Why should it tell you about the way it's going to do business?"

Laval cast over a scornful, almost pitying glance, but said nothing to the Templar. The woman turned her head and looked at him sadly, as she looked at everything.

Then Laval resumed a kind of lecture he had been delivering, to his only disciple. "If the Teachers in their wisdom chose to create machines that could pass, in casual inspection, for Solarian slime units, we would have no role to play at all. But the truth is that they wish us to share with them, in the creation of a new universe." Laval's face took on an exalted expression as he spoke.

The nameless woman nodded silently. From her blank expression it was hard to tell whether she had really understood a word or not.

"I'd like to see your new universe," the Templar said, and cackled.

"You never will, life slime. You will be dead before it comes about."

"Lucky me! Hey, how do you know," the Templar cried, from his impregnable sanctuary, his perfect prison, "that I am not just such a machine, sent here to test your loyalty?"

"You are only a crazy man, and the only reason our Teacher allows you to live is to test our sanity," Laval muttered over his shoulder. "Shut up."

"Shut me up, if you can. Maybe one of your own group, your precious goodlife, is just such a machine. Have you thought of that?"

Reflexively, Laval and his woman looked suspiciously at each other. But neither of them could believe that.

And then distraction came, not totally unexpected. The ship they had so recently noticed making its approach was now docking - or landing, rather, coming down gently to rest in the standard generated gravity, at a spot right next to this fenced-off portion of the flight deck.

Laval and the woman who had abandoned her name got to their feet. Presently they could see that someone was indeed approaching. A man and an experienced goodlife, judging by the calm way he moved in this environment. Then he walked out of shadow and into a place where the light of distant starclouds fell through the transparent overhead to reveal his face.

"Gavrilov," said the one who meant someday to be the berserker viceroy of Earth.

The dark man, casually clad, walking in his distinctive stooped fashion, approached and acknowledged the greeting with a cool nod. He did not appear much surprised to find Laval and his woman here; possibly he had even been expecting them.

Flower was following Gavrilov slowly, keeping in the background and looking about her with a stunned expression.

It was obvious from the way these two men faced each other that they had met before, and that they were not particularly pleased to be meeting again.

And all the while, on the deck in the background, the spasmodic dance of berserker fighting machines went on, as they prepared to accomplish the next step in their dual plan, of occupying the atoll called Fifty Fifty, and annihilating any Solarian fleet that might attempt to challenge them.

It was also soon obvious that the newcomer considered the "viceroy" his rival, and was not disposed to tell him anything.

The feeling was mutual.

"What news from the slime worlds?" Laval inquired. "Are the Solarians still holding any planets?"

"Quite a few, as a matter of fact."

The Templar, from his privileged position in the background, laughed at that.

Gavrilov only now became aware of the presence of the prisoner. He looked through the shadowy grillwork barrier at the man's head, sticking up out of a block of dim, shimmering force field.

"What have we here?" the newcomer inquired.

Laval, still not minded to provide his rival with any useful information, remained silent; but the Templar himself offered a kind of twisted explanation.

He had not got far before Laval interrupted. "Never mind that slime. I think his slimy badlife masters have drugged him so that he feels no fear. But the Teacher will be interrogating him soon." Now his eyes widened as he suddenly caught sight of Flower, who had come to a stop in the background, her attention raptly on her new surroundings. "Here, you! Who are you?"

Flower was plainly not impressed by his uniform, or indeed anything about him. She continued to look around her as she gave him her name. The excitement and anticipation with which she had come aboard the enormous machine were fading visibly.

"Where are we going to stay?" she asked at last, addressing the world in general.

By now Laval's nameless woman had emerged from the little shelter, a kennel-like and improvised structure at one side of the enclosed space reserved for life, to confront Flower. The two women began a halting conversation. Meanwhile Gavrilov and Laval were continuing the argument they had begun on first seeing each other.

There were certain things the two goodlife men agreed on: All, or most, of the evils of the universe could be blamed upon the stubbornness of Solarian humans - and perhaps a few other life forms that in their own ways, all relatively ineffective, tried to resist the machines.

Gavrilov believed that once the berserkers had perfected an imitation human, then there would be no further need for goodlife like themselves. Machines could do an infinitely better job of infiltrating the remnants of the human resistance and preparing its final downfall.

And in halting speech the nameless woman was explaining to Flower that for the time being all right-thinking goodlife were going to have to rough it. The worldly paradise, when living machines and life-hating people would exist together in perfect harmony, still lay in the future.

Flower was staring at the shabby kennel, at the ragged, haggard woman who had just crawled out of it, and the look on Flower's face indicated that she was waiting to be told that this was all a joke, an initiation of some kind. At any moment now the secret door would open somewhere, and the laughing, kindly people would pour forth, well-fed and well-dressed. And with them would come their friends, the wise, harmonious machines. All along she had believed, really and truly, that Gavrilov was taking them to a paradise world.

And Nifty Gift was a witness to most of it. He had been escorted by two machines out through the small ship's airlock, emerging after Gavrilov and Flower. His captors marched him into an area that was out of the other humans' sight, but still 'part of the walled-off portion of the flight deck of the giant berserker carrier.

When the two berserker robots had abruptly closed in on Gift, one on either side, he prayed that they would kill him quickly. But no such luck.

He could hear human voices at a little distance, but was not taken to join the others. Rather he was put into a closet-sized cage, or holding cell.

Obviously, this was a prepared place of confinement. A spigot on one wall gurgled with cold running water, and right below it a hole in the deck was ready to serve as a crude latrine.

The two man-shaped machines locked him in, closing a force-field door, and left him. He scarcely had time to look around before one of them was back, carrying an odd-shaped bundle that Gift automatically assumed must be some instrument of torture. But the bundle opened turned out to be a suit of space armor - one that appeared to have undergone some peculiar alterations.

His inanimate jailer gestured at him, then watched while he put on the suit, over his frayed and dirty civilian clothes that had remained unchanged during the voyage from Uhao. Then it tossed him a matching helmet, and stood by until he had tried that too, and made sure it mated with his suit.

Then the thing that had brought the suit turned on its two legs and went wordlessly on its way, once more closing the force-field door of his little cell behind it.

Gift heard a murmur of voices. Looking through the grill-work of one side of his cell, he discovered that he could see and hear most of the conversation among the other Solarians, though they could not see him from where they were. They had no suits of armor.

As soon as Gift began to move around inside his special little cell, he realized that the suit they had given him had been altered. The servos were weakened, so that the wearer would have no chance to resist berserkers - the suit felt heavy and slow-moving. But Gift supposed it would still offer substantial protection against injury.

Still the purpose of the special treatment he had received eluded him. Why would a berserker protect an enemy prisoner, but not its goodlife friends? What threatened him, except the berserker itself? The chance of running into any Solarian patrol in this vastness ought to be really almost infinitesimal.

It was after Gift had begun to listen to the strange conversation taking place among his fellow Solarians, that there dawned on him a likely reason for all this concern over his welfare. He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the bars.

He, like the Templar in his block, was being saved for interrogation. The Teacher really wanted to talk to him; but it just had to fight a battle first.

The goodlife living quarters on this machine seemed to be all above decks, consisting of a few walls and inflated balloons, improvised under a thin transparent canopy. A few rags of padding on a hard surface. Water pipes and holes in the deck were the extent of plumbing, and food provision was decidedly sporadic.

Judging from the maneuvers of berserker small ships that he was able to observe on the adjoining flight deck, artificial gravity seemed to be in operation across the whole deck, perhaps throughout the whole machine, not laid on only in the life-unit pens. He supposed this offered some advantage. Gift as part of standard military training had been taught something about how large berserkers were usually organized, designed, and put together. Trouble was that his teachers had been notably short of firsthand experience in their subject. He'd be able to teach the course now.

Listening to Gavrilov's argument with the other goodlife man, whoever he might be, Gift felt the numbness of terror giving way slowly to sullen hate. Somehow these idiots had convinced themselves that berserkers really wanted to be benevolent rulers - hell, if the berserkers ever won the war, it would be because humanity was too stupid to be allowed to live.

As far as he could tell from what he overheard, Laval's plan, or maybe Gavrilov's, or the plan of both, had been to teach their mechanical Teachers what the best (read: the least human) of humanity was really like. Then the Teacher machines in turn would come to love and trust him - and see that when the time came, they would see to it that he was recorded, thus becoming as much like the superior life form as it was possible for him to become.

But Laval and the others who had chosen to be goodlife were quite right about one thing: Their metal masters wanted to learn from them what humanity was like. Great optelectronic brains always gathering data, bits and pieces of information that would form a great mosaic, from all their prisoners. Eventually the vast structure of information thus created would enable the berserkers to understand the phenomenon of Solarian humanity sufficiently well to crush it out of existence.

And while his fellow Solarians - slime units was the name that some of them preferred for their own kind - haggled with one another, Nifty Gift stood voiceless in his cell, ignored except for an occasional look-in by one of the machines that had given him the suit.

He wasn't really thinking anymore, but he was starting to take stock of his surroundings.

To begin with, this was an enormous berserker, vastly bigger than the one that in some bygone age had crushed his spy ship. From what he could see on the expanse of deck stretching away beyond the little area fitted with life support, it had to be a carrier.

Nifty was gradually coming to grips with the realization that his worst fear had now been realized. This was just what he had been willing to kill his shipmates to prevent: He was a berserker's helpless captive, in deep space, beyond any hope of rescue.

And then another thought suggested itself to his stunned mind: At least Traskeluk would never be able to find him here.

The more he considered that idea, how terribly successful his flight from Traskeluk had been, the funnier it began to seem. Gift started laughing, gradually sliding into a helpless hysteria.

In a minute or so Flower, coming back evidently to see what had happened to him, stopped at the door of his little cell and looked in at him curiously. It was as if she were looking everywhere for an explanation, but he had none to give.

The man-sized berserker units, Gift noticed, seemed indifferent to Flower's presence. They were allowing her to wander back and forth at will, within the boundaries of the small region where life was temporarily tolerated. This, then, was Paradise. Her eyes roamed restlessly about. Gift could see that she was looking sadder and sadder.

When Flower left Gift's door and wandered back in sight of Laval, the would-be viceroy barked more questions at her, trying to satisfy himself as to whether she was goodlife or a prisoner. Evidently to him the distinction was of tremendous importance.

He assumed that he had now met everyone who had just arrived on the ship.

Under this interrogation Flower's growing shock and horror turned into fright.

Meanwhile, Gavrilov had looked back toward the yacht once or twice, with a faintly puzzled expression. He might be wondering what had happened to Gift; but he kept to himself whatever thoughts he might have on the subject. Laval was not going to be given any information free.

Except for Gift and the separated Templar, the humans making up the strange little group were standing, now and then sitting or reclining, in what looked like an arena ringed with fire; along with what felt like normal artificial gravity, their unliving host had provided air, and presumably food and water, at least the minimal life support that goodlife and badlife alike required if they were going to answer questions and demonstrate for the machine the almost unfathomable complexities of Solarian psychology.

And the Solarians' talk returned to the subject of possible berserker imitations of humanity. Why is it the machines, with all their computing capacity and technical skills, have never accomplished that successfully? They seem to have some built-in block against doing it.

"The berserkers have never been able to build an imitation of a Solarian human, or any other complex life form, that would convince passersby who saw it in a good light. It seems, in a way, that they've never wanted to try - or have never been able to make a good attempt."

"Why is that?"

"I think that no organic being in the Galaxy knows why."

Laval once more expressed his great contempt for all organic beings. The way he looked at his own hands as he spoke seemed to indicate that he was including himself.

Then one of the three goodlife advanced an explanation. The machines wouldn't lower themselves to the apparent duplication of dirty life.

And from the background the voice of the captive Templar, who had been almost forgotten, came, saying: "Berserkers have them, it seems. Or at least these do. Like a dog has fleas. Or is it lice?"

One of the goodlife men jumped up and tried in vain to punish the Templar. The man in the force-field block laughed, maniacally, and then began to sing.

And the machine, in its untiring examination of human motives, only wanted to hear more of the Templar song:

The prisoner was ready to oblige:

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat

He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment-seat;

Oh, be swift my soul to answer him, be jubilant, my feet!

Our God is marching on!

There was a momentary silence.

And still Gift continued listening, in a curiously detached way, from behind the bars of his prison cell. He thought that hundreds of berserkers over the centuries of conflict must have had the concept of God explained to them a thousand times - as many different explanations as there were explainers - in contradictory theologies: By cool goodlife cynics, by devout prisoners almost frightened to death, by fanatical preachers who had come to preach to their unliving hardware. How the idea of a divine creator, or a first cause, figured in the calculations of the death machines, if at all, seemed impossible to guess.

Now this particular berserker, a computer or program evidently in command of the task force that was about to complete the devastation of the Solarian Gulf Fleet, wanted to know what a trumpet was, and how feet could possibly be jubilant.

And the berserker, as before, wanted an explanation of the Templar song, and what it meant to the life units who seemed to draw strength from what they perceived as the presence and leadership of this mysterious God.

"Where," it inquired of the prisoner, "do you believe that this entity called God is to be found?"

An answer came immediately from the human head that seemed to rest bodiless atop the force-field cube: "Everywhere."

"I do not perceive him," the berserker answered.

"You are not fit to do that."

Gavrilov jumped up and made motions at the barrier, trying to get at and punish the prisoner; then subsided in frustration when he was unable to reach him.

And presumably the berserker continued to watch it all, dispassionately. At least the Teacher made no further comment upon the behavior of life units good or bad.

Or perhaps, Gift thought, the Teacher had been distracted by something the humans could not perceive, and was no longer bothering to watch.

Gift could only marvel that the captive Templar had been able to maintain his defiant attitude under these conditions. It must be a kind of madness. But probably there were drugs that would have that effect. From time to time the helpless captive again broke into song, the same song that Gift remembered Traskeluk singing:

I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps

They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps

I can read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps;

His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel...

Once more the song succeeded in arousing the berserker's curiosity. The machine broke in, turning up the volume of its squeaky voice, wanting to know what certain of the words meant.

"You will tell me now, or later, under interrogation."

But the Templar only sang some more.

Laval had now turned his attention more fully to questioning Flower. His voice was smooth and quiet, but his manner had turned sadistic, talking to her about the horrible things that usually happened to prisoners, and assuring her that her safe status as a goodlife unit had not yet been confirmed.

Gift thought of shouting at the man, but that wasn't going to make Flower's life any easier.

Laval also managed to imply that Gavrilov had not entirely established his goodlife credentials.

Gavrilov naturally contested this, and both men tried to get some confirmation of their status from the machine.

It was possible to believe that the fate of prisoners in general was not necessarily the worst imaginable. After they had given the machine what seemed all their useful information, they were quickly killed. After all, death, net pain, was what a berserker was programmed to achieve. Pain was a part of life.

The crushing of organic bodies - like every other activity involving them - was always messy, and always entailed extra effort on the killers' part to make sure that all the microorganisms that were inevitably associated with Solarian bodies were expunged from existence too. Microbes were after all also alive, and therefore required to be killed. Viruses too seemed to fall into the banned category, as the berserkers computed it.

Among supposed experts on the subject who had never been caught by one, it was widely supposed that, in return for cooperation, the machines were willing to grant prisoners the boon of a quick termination, by being popped naked out into space. Or cast into some equivalent of a roaring furnace, where the matter in their bodies will furnish fuel for the berserker engines, and where there would be no possibility of even the microorganisms in badlife bodies surviving for any substantial period of time.

Laval had let Flower go - for the moment. From the way he looked at her, Gift could deduce a certain sadistic refinement. She wasn't going anywhere.

Given the chance, as the men resumed their dispute, she drew apart from the others again, while the nameless woman crawled back into the kennel. Once again Flower's wanderings carried her out of their sight, brought her back to see what had happened to Gift.

Nifty felt sorry for Flower, and said as much when she came wandering back to him again, but there was nothing he could do for her. Having come as far as he had come, he knew that he was already dead.

He could look at that fact and think about it now. The worst had happened, and here he was.

Gift experienced a curious relief.

Now in his exhaustion, his strange and newfound peace, he actually dozed; it was only for a few minutes, and he dreamed of Traskeluk and Terrin.

He awakened to see Flower looking in at him through the force door of his cell. When she saw he was awake, she whispered: "I was afraid you were dead."

"I am," he told her after a while.

She looked at him, not understanding. It was funny, damned funny, but Gift understood that she was now more frightened than he was.

Gift said: "Actually, I've been dead now for about a standard month. One of your machines killed me over on the other side of the Gulf... no, I take that back. Out there I killed myself."

"I don't understand."

He reached out and tried to hold her hand, but the glassy, repellent force of the door, almost invisible, prevented contact. "Nevermind."

Presently Flower drifted away once more. Climbing slowly to his feet in the awkward suit, going back to his observation post, Gift saw how the goodlife, including Laval, were still pining away for lack of a kind word from their supposed Teacher - well, at least Gift himself had not yet been physically mishandled by the machines. Considering only physical comfort, he'd undergone treatment almost as bad aboard regular coach-class transport, in his limited experience of civilian travel.

Drifty Gift, he thought. And a terrible, detached clarity seemed to be growing in his thoughts. It was as if he had been drugged, ever since the spy-ship skirmish, but he was coming out of it now. Not by chemicals, no, by something else.

Hell itself would hold no terrors for a man in his condition. Hell itself...

When Laval grew curious about current events, he liked to climb up a couple of steps, to a slightly elevated spot giving a slightly better view of the flight deck of the berserker carrier, that the Templar said was code-named Pestilence.

Roy Laval often preferred to watch from the elevated spot, as if this gave him some claim to prominence. Or enabled him to understand what was going on, when he was given no explanation. When he talked to the berserker now, as often as not it did not answer him.

It seemed to Laval that his great Teacher had now completely given up talking to him, or to anyone - as if it had forgotten there were any life units at all on board. But Laval kept trying to read some great philosophical purpose into the neglect.

From time to time the berserker launched a small machine into space from the flight deck, what looked to Gift like a fighter or hardlauncher popping straight up like a round cork from a bottle. No mass launching yet, though from the look of the preparations, something like that certainly impended. Or some fighter or scout came in, straggling back to its mothership at last, and docked. Sometimes when this happened Laval caught himself unconsciously waiting for a human figure in armor to climb out and walk across the deck.

Everything that Gift could see out on the flight deck confirmed that the berserker carrier was preparing for battle, getting ready to launch a swarm of smaller killer machines, analogs of Solarian fighters, hardlaunchers, and undersluggers.

Laval had gone into a kindly goodlife phase, had stopped being overtly sadistic, and was now trying to recruit Flower - it seemed a minimal achievement to sign up at least one more person to join the goodlife cadre he imagined he was forming.

The more Gift studied the construction and the life support that was keeping everyone alive, the flimsier it looked. Obviously, the berserker wanted to protect a lot of other things more than it wanted to protect even the most devout goodlife.

The modest space reserved for the housing of life units looked out into a much vaster domain. This was covered by a glassy overhead of crystalline matter or maybe purely of force, curved like a visual sky.

On the berserker carrier, the doomed Templar and the one or two goodlife - observed and overheard by Spacer Gift, who was present largely as a result of human cross-purposes, and berserker miscalculations - were standing or sitting half exposed to the raging sky.

It tended to get very cold here, standing on the face of Death, whose jaws were open if not quite visible. Very cold, with occasional waves of almost searing heat, sufficient to keep all the slime units from actually freezing. What air there was tended to move about in gusty drafts, and there were abrupt pressure changes. The concept of physical comfort did not seem to enter into berserker calculations.

"There's some very effective artificial gravity in effect here. It's making a considerable effort to keep us alive - or some of us."

"It has to do that, if it's going to bother with having us here at all. We are objects of study."

Gift, suddenly feeling starved, bit into the food cake when a machine brought it around. Ordinarily it would have seemed little better than just edible, but right now his hunger made it intensely satisfying. His body was eager to nourish itself. Right now life - what little he had left of it - Deemed infinitely precious. He thought that he was not going to try to kill himself again, the way he had during his first encounter with the shape of Death.

Flower kept on telling Nifty that she was sorry she had got him into this.

He murmured something inane, to the effect that it didn't matter. The two of them were still separated by the door of Nifty's cell.

Suddenly she asked, innocently: "Why's it got you locked up in there, by yourself?"

"I guess maybe it's saving me."

"For what?" After thinking over her own question for a few seconds, she suddenly cried out: "Oh, Nifty. I'm sorry!" She looked over her shoulder, toward the sound of human voices. "I didn't mean to do this to you. I didn't know... I haven't told any of the others that you're here..."

"Never mind, not your fault." The situation had a curious feeling of inevitability about it. He put his hands to his head.

"I'm so sorry... I wanted to go back on the ship, but now there's a gate and it wouldn't let me."

And the small Solarian ship that had brought three people out here remained beached on the flight deck, tantalizingly almost within reach. It had not been moved from where it had come down. Gift was able to reach a position, on the opposite side of his cell from where he watched his fellow captives, from which it became visible. Gift hadn't been able to get a good look at it when he went aboard on Uhao, because most of the hull had been under water. Now he could see, through the transparent wall of the life pen, a smooth hull, house-sized, unremarkable as small civilian spacecraft went. Near at hand, but it might as well have been a million klicks away.

The yacht, as far as he could tell by looking from this angle, was just resting lightly secured out on the open deck - no fancy landing docks here - and looked as if it would be perfectly easy to drift away in if one got the chance. Fat chance. It would be scheduled for decontamination in the berserker sense; all the live microorganisms it might contain to be incinerated.

The Solarians, goodlife and bad, gasping and shivering alike in the violent changes of temperature, argued tersely with one another, over everything, as it seemed to the listening Gift, and nothing. Now and then Laval or Gavrilov or the Templar snarled their mutual hatred, while machines recorded everything for later evaluation.

Roy Laval, droning on in his endless argument with Gavrilov, remained deeply immersed in his plans to be the quisling ruler of Earth. He plans to be the viceroy set on a throne, or the equivalent, by what he imagined would be a berserker hegemony over life units that would be allowed in some sense to live.

Before the others arrived, and the time for battle drew near, the berserker had been letting Laval play with visual displays, planning what he imagined his palace on conquered Earth was going to be like. But now the machine seemed to have no energy or interest left for such games, and the display was dead and dark.

The lighting in the area of confinement was uncomfortable for human eyes, some areas in shadow and some in harsh glare, and the noise of nearby mechanism was occasionally deafening. The air was first hot and then icy cold, and stank sharply of some chemicals, so that someone imagined it might be a berserker's breath. That would be a good idea for Flower to have.

Now and then a machine came by, rolling or treading through the fringes of the area on some unexplained errand, sometimes moving faster than a man could run, and the people had to stay out of its way - at least the most experienced goodlife took good care to stay out of the way. And they always answered obsequiously on the rare occasions when a machine had anything to say to them.

Flower, when she came back to see him again, had some kind of extra fabric wrapped around her now in an effort to keep warm, but Gift could see that she was still shivering. Under this extra wrapping, he noticed, she was wearing the dress she'd had on when they first met.

She was hungry too, but still she brought Gift a share of the miserable food one of the man-sized machines had given her; a pink-and-green cake from some rudimentary robotic life-support kitchen.

She was relieved to discover that the machines had already fed him, on stuff that looked and tasted better than her rations; evidently they considered him more important than her, and he wound up sharing his nicer meal with her.

"That does look better." She sniffed. "Smells better too." They threw hers away.

This time, when Flower went back to join the others, Laval renewed his interest. He grabbed her, and after he had enjoyed twisting her arm for a while, confined her, chaining her to a thick pipe of unknown purpose, that came up out of the deck and curved away to vanish in shadows far overhead. He used the chain he had been wearing as a belt, and secured it with the same padlock.

Goodlife and machines alike stood by and watched without interfering.

And Gift, watching unseen, could taste blood, where he had bitten his lower lip. He knew that any protest on his part would only make things worse for her.