"I'm sure that would be fine," Chandris put in, letting a little acid drip off her tone. "Look us up in about six months. Eight, if we keep getting interrupted."

Kosta reddened. "I'm sorry," he said, taking a step back toward the gate. "I didn't mean to interrupt your work."

"Oh, don't mind Chandris," Hanan told him. "Though if you've got the time, we actually could use an extra pair of hands. You interested?"

"Uh—" Kosta looked at Chandris, a wary look on his face. "Well... sure. Sure, why not?"

"Good." Hanan stepped away from Chandris's side. "Why don't you give Chandris a hand with the connector replacements while I go inside and get the leak-checker warmed up."

Without waiting for a reply he ducked under the Gazelle's hull and headed back toward the hatchway. Kosta looked at Chandris, seemed to brace himself. "Okay," he said, coming forward, his expression that of someone approaching a large dog. "What can I do to help?"

"Absolutely nothing," Chandris growled, turning her back on him. She reached into the access hatch and started unscrewing the loosened connector. "I mean that. You want to be helpful, go follow Hanan around. Better yet, go away."

She felt him come up behind her. "Look, I'm sorry you don't like me," he said. "I'm not exactly crazy about you, either, if you want to know the truth. But the fact of the matter is that Hanan and Ornina did me a big favor, and I'd like to try and pay them back a little. I don't know if you can understand that or not."

Chandris clenched her teeth hard enough to hurt... but under the circumstances there wasn't a single nurking thing she could say to that. "Give me one of those grommets," she ordered.

They worked in silence for a few minutes; Chandris doing the real work, Kosta handing her tools and parts as requested. She had just finished tightening the last connector when the phone hanging on the tool tray's handle trilled. "Chandris?" Hanan's voice called.

"Right here," she called back, giving each connector one last check, "I think we're ready to give it a test."

"Great," Hanan said. "Is Kosta still there?"

She resisted the temptation to say something sarcastic. "Yes," she said.

"Good." The click of a transfer—"Go ahead, Mr. Gyasi."

"Jereko?" an unfamiliar voice said.

Chandris felt Kosta start. "Yaezon?"

"Yeah," Gyasi said. "Finally. I've been looking all over for you—calling the Gazelle was a long shot.

Listen, you've got to get back here right away."

"What's wrong?"

Something in the way he said those two words made Chandris twist her head around to look at him—

To find that it wasn't just in his voice. On his face was the rigid expression of someone not facing just a large dog, but a large dog with its teeth already bared.

"Nothing's wrong," Yaezon said, as if he hadn't noticed anything in Kosta's voice. Which he probably hadn't. "At least, not in the traditional sense of the word wrong. But you're going to want to see this."

Kosta threw a look at Chandris, his tongue swiping across his upper lip. "Sure. I'll be there as soon as I can."

"Good. Room 2205—Che Kruyrov's lab."

"Right."

There was the click as the secondary connection was terminated. "Jereko? Anything wrong?"

Hanan's voice came back on the circuit.

"No, I'm sure there isn't," Kosta told him. But his face was still tight. "But I have to get back. I'm sorry."

"That's all right," Hanan assured him. "I'm sure we'll see you again."

"I hope so." He gave Chandris a nod. "See you," he said absently, and headed for the gate.

Chandris watched him go, an eerie feeling tingling along her back. It had happened again. Kosta had been acting like a relatively normal human being... and then suddenly, for no apparent reason, he'd gone all strange.

What the hell was the matter with the man?

She turned back to the access panel, frustrated anger swirling within her. Because the bottom line was that it didn't much matter what Kosta's problem was. If he was going to start hanging around the Gazelle—and Hanan had all but given him an engraved invitation to do so—then she had no choice but to stay, too. Whatever Kosta was up to, there was no way she was going to leave the Daviees to handle him alone.

And if he thought he could irritate her out of the way, he was in for a big disappointment. She'd been irritated by people far better at it than he was. He might as well get one of those aphrodisiac perfumes he'd once mentioned and try to charm her out of the way.

A frown went off at the back of her mind. Aphrodisiac perfumes...?

"Chandris?" Hanan called from the phone. "You still there?"

With an effort, Chandris forced her thoughts back to the job at hand. "Sure," she said. "Ready at this end."

"Okay. Here we go."

The faint hiss of fluid through tubing came from the access hatch... and as she watched carefully for the telltale frosting of a leak, she swore.

Damn Kosta, anyway.

The blip traced across the screen; a nice simple horizontal line, nothing special. "Okay; got that?"

Che Kruyrov asked.

"Got it," Kosta nodded.

"Okay." Kruyrov tapped a couple of keys. "Watch now."

The blip again began a horizontal line; but this time it seemed to hesitate halfway across the screen.

Dipping suddenly, it tracked out what looked like half a parabola and then resumed its horizontal motion at a lower level. "There," Kruyrov said with a sort of grim satisfaction. "That look at all familiar?"

Kosta shook his head. "Not really. Should it?"

"Jees, where've you been burying your head?" Kruyrov snorted. "That's the response curve of a classical Lantryllyn logic circuit. You have heard of Lantryllyn logic circuits, haven't you?"

Kosta nodded, an unreal sort of numbness drifting across his mind. He'd heard of Lantryllyn logic circuits, all right. As recently as fifty years ago they'd been the basis of most of the Pax's SuperMaster computer systems, and at one time had been thought to be the breakthrough that would allow a genuinely sentient artificial intelligence.

And for the Lantryllyn response to be mimicked by—"And all you've got there is nine angels?" he asked, his voice sounding hollow in his ears.

"That's all," Kruyrov said, his voice sounding a little strange, too. "A three-by-three cubic lattice.

And yes, that's all that's there, unless you want to count the lattice itself."

"Which is supposed to be electronically inert," Gyasi added.

"Theoretically," Kruyrov grunted. "But then, there's no theory that says angels can do this, either, so who knows?"

Kosta tried to unfog his mind. "When are you going to put this on the nets?" he asked.

Kruyrov's eyes widened. "Give me a chance, Jereko," he protested. "I only ran across the effect this morning, and even then it was ninety-eight percent accident. We haven't even gotten this thing off the ground yet."

"I realize that," Kosta said. "But it seems to me a preliminary report would—"

"Would kick up a firestorm," Gyasi put in. "Face it, Jereko, there are enough people even here at the Institute who are uncomfortable with the idea that angels are quanta of good. You try and tell them that they might be quanta of intelligence, too, and the reaction isn't going to be pretty."

"And it's wholly premature besides," Kruyrov said. "Fine; so a three-by-three cubic array can mimic one of the Lantryllyn reactions. What about a three-by-two? Or a four-by-four? Or a three-by-three with one missing? Or a spherical arrangement, or a cubic array with the angels farther apart, or—"

"Peace," Kosta interrupted, holding up a hand. "I concede the point."

"Good." Kruyrov's eyes bored into his. "I trust, too, that you're willing to concede more than that.

The only reason you're here is that Yaezon said you'd be interested and then bullied me into showing it to you. You leak it before Dr. Frashni gives the okay and I'll wind up washing test tubes down in the bio section."