“If we let anybody escape the consequences of starting violence—”

“Suppose I took them aside. Suppose I got them to compose their differences and apologize to you. Wouldn’t that serve the cause better than an arrest and a summary punishment?”

“It might,” Freiwald said skeptically. “But why should I believe you can do it?”

“I am a deputy too,” Takh told him.

“What?” Freiwald goggled.

“Ask Reymont, when you can get him alone. I am not supposed to reveal that he recruited me, except to a regular deputy in an emergency situation. Which I judge this is.”

“Aber… why—?”

“He meets a good deal of resentment, resistance, and evasion himself,” Takh said. “His overt part-time agents, like you, have less trouble of that sort. You seldom have to do any dirty work. Still, a degree of opposition to you exists, and certainly no one will confide anything if he thinks Reymont might object. I am not a… a fink. We face no real crime problem. I am supposed to be a leaven, to the best of what abilities I have. As in this case today.”

“I thought you didn’t like Reymont,” Freiwald said weakly.

“I cannot say I do,” Takh answered. “Even so, he took me aside and convinced me I could perform a service for the ship. I assume you won’t let out the secret.”

“Oh no. Certainly not. Not even to Jane. What a surprise!”

“Will you let me handle Pedro and Michael?”

“Yes, do.” Freiwald spoke absently. “How many more of your kind are there?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Takh said, “but I suspect that he hopes eventually to include everybody.” He went out.

CHAPTER 14

The nebular masses which walled in the galaxy’s core loomed thunderhead black and betowered. Already Leonora Christine traversed their outer edge. No suns were visible forward; elsewhere, each hour, they shone fewer and fainter.

In this concentration of star stuff, she moved according to an eerie sort of aerodynamics. Her inverse tau was now so enormous that space density did not much trouble her. Rather, she swallowed matter still more greedily than before and was no longer confined to hydrogen atoms. Her readjusted selectors turned everything they met, gas or dust or meteoroids, into fuel and reaction mass. Her kinetic energy and time differential mounted at a dizzying rate. She flew as if through a wind blowing between the sun clusters.

Nonetheless, Reymont haled Nilsson to the interview room.

Ingrid Lindgren took her place behind its desk, in uniform. She had lost weight, and her eyes were shadowed. The cabin thrummed abnormally loud, and frequent shocks went through bulkheads and deck. The ship felt irregularities in the clouds as gusts, currents, vortices of an ongoing creation of worlds.

“Can this not wait till we have made our passage, Constable?” she asked, alike in anger and weariness.

“I don’t think so, madame,” Reymont replied. “Should an emergency arise, we need people convinced it’s worth coping with.”

“You accuse Professor Nilsson of spreading disaffection. The articles provide for free speech.”