“So you’ve got a hard-on for Elza. Go on; she’ll eat you alive.”

“Yeah, right. Did you see Namir and Dustin practicing martial arts yesterday?”

“I saw a little of it—I was in the study and heard them throwing each other around. He’s not bad for an old guy.”

“He’s not bad for anybody. Dustin is almost as good, but Namir is stronger and quicker—I did kapkido at the Academy for two years.” He shook his head. “Either one of those guys could kill me. I mean literally. In a split second.”

“So you better not offer to . . . Oh.” I saw what he meant. “Literally.”

“Maybe that’s their mission. They could kill all of us in seconds, without weapons. Remember? We talked about this right after we met them.”

“Yeah, vaguely . . . in VR, exercising. So why on earth would they want to?”

“On Earth, they wouldn’t have any reason. But you read that thing in Namir’s New York Times, the two-page debate about ad Astra.”

“Sure. The idiots wanted us to just floor it and ram the planet like a doomsday bomb. As if the Others would just sit there and let us do it.”

“That wasn’t the part that worried me. It was the business about surrender. Something like ‘We’re not going to all that trouble and expense just to have them kneel down and grovel.’ Did you see who signed that?”

“No. I vaguely remember it.”

“It was a four-star American general, Mark Spinoza. Ring a bell?”

“Not really.”

“He’s on the Committee. Liaison to the American military. Who, incidentally, had a big part in designing and building this machine . . . and choosing the crew.”

“But he couldn’t order them to do that. Namir’s not even under his authority.”

“Neither are Dustin and Elza, technically. They all had to suspend their commissions, remember? Nobody can give them orders, in theory, any more than they can give the rest of us orders.”

“Okay. So what are you worried about?”

“Just that they might agree with him. And do it on their own.”

“No. They’re not right-wing loonies. They’re not killers, either, even though they’re soldiers, ex-soldiers.”

“I know Namir has killed, at least as a young man in wartime. And we don’t really know anything about their politics. They seem reasonable, but they could just be following a script—and it wouldn’t have to be from General Spinoza or the Corporation or anybody. They’ve lived together as men and wife for five or six years. They might have devised their own plan.”

“Which would include killing us in case of cowardice. I don’t think so.”

“Or just overpowering and confining us. Then using the ship to try to destroy the Others.”

I turned his head and held his chin between thumb and forefinger and stared. “I never really know when you’re kidding.”

“What would you say if I asked you to take Namir to bed and coax the truth out of him?”