A giant started stomping around me. I held onto my head and waited for the pounding to stop. I glimpsed wings, night-dark, hundreds of miles wide, beating over the planet, eclipsing the glowing gas.

The planet stopped shivering.

I tried to move. My muscles were like cardboard. Pieces crackled off the back of my suit, which was burnt to a crisp. I walked from the crater scattering scabs like an unearthly leper.

I reached the site of the Xeelee station. I was a fly at the edge of a saucer; the hole was a perfect hemisphere, a hundred yards wide. I skirted it carefully, heading for a sparkle of twisted metal beyond it.

The Statue lay like Kafka's cockroach, its sketch of a head battered into concavity, its limbs and torso crumpled. Fluid bubbled through a crack in the porthole, and something inside looked out at me listlessly.

The translator box was hesitant and scratchy, but intelligible. "I... wish to know."

I knelt beside it. "Know what?"

"How you knew when... they would come."

"Neat timing, huh?" I shrugged. "Well, the clues were there for both of us."

"Quantum inseparability?"

"Signals will pass instantaneously between a communicator's two halves. But those halves must once have been in physical contact. Once joined, they can never be truly parted. Like people," I mused. "It takes more than time or distance--"

"I begin to... understand."

"The components of this station, and all its clones throughout the Galaxy, must have been carried here from a central exchange. That's where the repairmen we've just, ah, encountered, must have come from. And the exchange has to be at the Xeelee home base, at the Galaxy core. Three days' travel for the Xeelee."

"So they had to come. But the Xeelee Prime Radiant is a matter of speculation. You did not know--"

I grinned ruefully. "Well, I knew for sure I'd had it unless I took a long shot. Your precious logic demonstrated that."

More bubbles from the stomach, and the voice grew weaker. "But your... ship is destroyed. Your victory does not bring success."

"Yeah." I sat in crunchy dirt beside the dying Statue. "I guess I didn't like to think this far ahead." The depth of focus seemed to shift; light years expanded around me.

Even the Statue was company. "You have been a worthy... opponent."

"You're repeating yourself," I said rudely.

"My ship is at... the planet's nearer pole, one day's journey from here. You may be able to adapt its life system to your purposes."

"Ah... thank you. Why?"

"Because you would probably find it anyway. And I hope your species will... be tolerant of mine in the future."

I stayed with the Statue until it bubbled to silence.

I looked back ruefully at the hole the Xeelee had left. There went a hundred fortunes.