The wall opened. White light spilled out to meet her, and Seria Mau Genlicher carried the package up into navigational space, where she intended to do what she should have done all along, and introduce it to the ship’s mathematics. The shadow operators, rendered suddenly thoughtful by this decision, went up after her as demure as lace. The wall closed behind them all.

The Nastic commander watched from his corner. He made one more attempt to attract her attention.

“Seria Mau Genlicher,” he whispered, “you really must listen—”

But—rapt, dissociated, pixilated in the way only a human being can be with the vertigo of commitment—she gave no sign of having noticed him, and all that happened was that the shadow operators chivvied him away. They were worried he would become involved with the train of her dress. That would have spoiled everything.

I hate to feel so weak and useless, he thought.

Shortly after that, events on his own bridge intervened. Uncle Zip, puzzled by what was going on and suddenly growing suspicious, had him shot. A realtime vacuum commando unit, which had been hacking its way grimly through the Nastic ship since the collision, finally broke into the command-and-control section and hosed it out with hand-held gamma ray lasers. The walls melted and dripped. The computers went down. The commander felt himself fade. It was a feeling of intolerable weariness, sudden cold. For a nanosecond he hung in the balance, beguiled by a shard of memory, the tiniest part of a dream. The papery structures of his home, a drowsy buzzing sound, some complex gesture he had once loved, gone too quickly to be pinned down. Curiously enough, his last thought was not for that but for Seria Mau Genlicher, chained to her horrible ship yet still fighting to be human. He was amused to find himself thinking this.

After all, he reminded himself. She was the enemy.

Two hours later and a thousand kilometres away, shrouded in blue light from the signature displays in the human quarters of El Rayo X, Uncle Zip the tailor sat on the three-legged wooden stool he had brought with him from Motel Splendido and tried to understand what was happening.

Touching the Void was under his control. He had nothing more to worry about in that direction. Nothing was alive down there in that rotten apple but his entradistas. Like the good team of lawyers they were they had begun to chop him out of his inadvertent contract with the Nastic vessel. It was a civil engineering project down there, with all the dull concussions and sudden flares you had to expect from that. Guys were getting a line open and saying, “Hey Unc, could you give that a little more?” “Could you give that a little less, Unc?” They were competing for his attention. And all the time now, his ship was gently trying to withdraw itself from the embrace of the cruiser. Uncle Zip thought of that embrace as a soft wet rottenness he would be glad to be out of. Trickles of particles flickered through the hull of El Rayo X, spun off from the destruction of the Nastic bridge. It was still hot down there. You had to give the guys their due, they were working in a heavily compromised environment. They had been dying for two hours now.