When the carm moved, flame had spurted from nostrils at the rear. It seemed that something must burn to move the carm . . . a good deal of it, if it occupied most of the carm's bulk . . . and pumps to move the fuel, and mysteries whose names he'd glimpsed in the cassettes:

attitude jet ljfe support system, computer, mass sensor, echo laser.

The calm left by the needle had almost left his blood. He was starting to be afraid. Could he learn to read those numbers in the glass? Would he have the chance?

A man in blue lounged before the box window. A big-boned man of average height, he was still too tall for the chair; what would have been a curved head rest poked him between the shoulder blades. The Scientist's Apprentice spoke briskly. "Please take us to the Citadel."

"I don't have orders to do that."

"Just what are your orders?" Her voice was casual, peremptory.

"I don't have orders yet. The Navy may be interested in these.

scientific items."

"Confiscate them, if you're sure enough. And I'll tell the Scientist what happened to them, as soon as I'm allowed to contact him. Will you confiscate the copsik too? He says he knows how to work them. Maybe you'd better confiscate me, to talk to him."

The pilot was looking nervous. His glance at the Grad was venomous. A witness to his discomfiture. . . He decided. "Citadel, right."

His hands moved.

The girl, forewarned, was clutching the back of a chair. The Grad

wasn't. The lurch threw him off balance. He grabbed at something to

stop his fall. A handleon the back wall: it twisted in his hand, and dirty water spilled from a nozzle. He turned it off quick and met the girl's look of disgust.

After perhaps twenty heartbeats the pilot lifted his fingers The familiar whistling roar-barely audible through the metal walls, but still fearfully strange-went quiet. The Grad immediately made his way to one of the chairs.

The carm was moving away from the tuft, east and out. Were they leaving London Tree? Why? He didn't ask. He was uncharacteristically leery of playing the fool. He watched the pilot's hands. Symbols and numbers glowed in the bow window and in the panel below it, but the pilot touched only the panel, and only the blue. He could feel the response in shifting sound and shifting tide. Blue moves the carm?

"Jeffer. How did you get those wounds?" The blond girl spoke as if she didn't care very much.

Wounds? Oh, his face. "The tree came apart," he said. "They do that if they fall too far out of the Smoke Ring. We had a close encounter with Gold some years ago."

That touched her curiosity nerve. "What happens to the people?"

"Quinn Tuft must be dead except for us. Five of us now." He'd accepted that Clave and Merril were gone too.