They were about two days from starvation. Before long they would have been eating their shipmates who'd already crossed over to Valhalla. Let me tell you, the stink on that -- "

"You don't have much romance in your soul, Louise."

I thought it over.

"I can't afford it," I said, finally. "There's still too much work to do."

"That's my point. You've got a lot in common with Lars, whether you understand that or not."

"I hope I don't smell like him."

Some of my best comebacks just go right over people's heads; he went on like he hadn't heard me.

"Your will to keep going is the strongest I have ever encountered. There are no new frontiers to push back. In fact, the best you can do is push back the date of the final blackout by a day or a week -- but you push!"

He was making me uncomfortable. There's no doubt he'd read me right in one way: I don't have much truck with romantic notions of human destiny, or Gods, or Good Guys winning out in the end. I have seen destiny in anion, and I can tell you, it stinks.

"What's the consensus back there?" he said. "How are they taking my analysis of the situation?"

"Nobody's very happy about it. You said it's hopeless; I guess they all agree with you.

You're pretty much the voice of authority when it comes to the Gate and the timestream."

"So no one has anything to suggest? No course of action?"

"How could they? They're all looking to you to show them a way out. You said there wasn't any way out. If they had anybody to leave anything to, they'd all be writing their wills, I guess."

He looked at me, and smiled.

"Right. So what's your plan?"

There are nine people on the Council. I don't know why, though the BC might tell me if I asked, since it nominates and elects Council members. I've always fancied it's so, in case we ever screw up so totally that the universe does come apart at the seams and all eras coexist, we can field a team in the Never-neverland World Series.

Technically it's called the Programmers' Council. That's a polite fiction. They don't do any programming. Computers long ago grew too complex and too accurate to allow a mere human to fuck around with their instructions.

Yet there are qualities no one has ever succeeded in plating into the memory banks.

Don't ask me what they are.

Imagination might be one of them, empathy another. Or I could just be giving the human race credit for more than it deserves. Maybe the BC supports and maintains the Council to keep itself in check, to prevent it from actually becoming God. There is that hazard. Possibly the BC needs an element of foolhardiness and prejudice and meanness and ornery self-

interest to give it perspective. Or maybe, like the rest of us, it just needs a giggle now and then.

For whatever reason, the Council is the nearest thing we have to a government. To get on it you need to be incredibly ancient say thirty-six or thirty-seven; well beyond the median mortality age.

That they are gnomes goes without saying. Most are little more than a brain and a central nervous system. Sometimes only the cerebrum is left, and in more than one case I've suspected even that is gone.

There are requirements other than sheer age, but I've never been able to figure them out.

Intelligence is a good one, and so is eccentricity. If you're a thirty-eight-year-old super-genius and a real pain in the ass, your chances of ending up on the Council are excellent.

They are an odd lot. Most of them are not nearly as concerned with outward appearance as most gnomes. Several have elected to house their brains in full prosthetic bodies, but more often than not they don't look any more realistic than Sherman. Ali Teheran is like Larry: a torso fastened to a pedestal. Marybeth Brest is a talking head, a puss on a post, like from a cheap horror film. Nancy Yokohama is a brain in a tank, and The Nameless One is just a speaker sitting on a desk. Only the BC knows who, where, or what he is.

Who knows how important they are? I doubt if even they could answer that. But the fact is, I'd never heard of a case where the B C overruled one of the Council's decisions. And the Gate Project, the last feeble hope of the human race, had originated in the Council Chamber, not in the BC's supercooled synapses.

Understand then that I was a trifle twitchy to appear in their august presences. I'd known it was coming: the time capsule had said so. What I hadn't known was that I'd request the audience -- I had expected to be summoned. It didn't make me any happier to be there.

I wished Martin Coventry had come with me, but he had refused. Looking at them, I thought I knew why. He hated them, hated with an unreasoning passion I knew only too well.

Whereas I was destined to rot away until I was installed with the other gnomes in Operations, this is where Martin Coventry would come. He'd been a prime candidate for the Council since he was nine. I don't blame him for not wishing to see his future.

A Hollywood set designer would have loved the Council Chamber. It was futuristic as shit. You couldn't find the walls unless you blundered into them; it was like standing in a vast, featureless plain, all white, with nine oddballs sitting behind -- or on -- a curved, black table.

Well, if it made them happy, it was no skin off my suit.

I assumed Peter Phoenix was the leader since he sat in the middle. He looked more human than the rest of them put together, if a trifle like an Old Testament God. He started the festivities.

"I understand there has been a twonky, and that you have a plan for correcting it."

"Two twonkies," I said, wondering if that was the correct plural.

"And that you might have been responsible for one of them?" Phoenix lifted one massive eyebrow. I could almost hear the pulleys creaking.

"It may be. I stand ready to accept your judgement on that matter, and your penalty."

"Report, then."

I filled them in on the disastrous day that had seen the deaths of Pinky, Ralph, and probably Lilly. I told the tale of the hijacker as straight as I knew how, relating every circumstance I thought might have a bearing on the case. It had been about forty-eight hours, straight-time, since Pinky died. I had spent the last twenty-four of those, after my conversation with Coventry, peering into a time-scan tank, getting to know Mr Bill Smith better than probably even his ex-wife had ever known him. He's the man I wanted to talk to the Council about, but I thought it best to lead up to it gradually.

So I summarized Coventry's lecture of the previous day, telling them the tale of the first twonky, the one I had no responsibility for -- other than the transferred responsibility of being in command of someone who makes a mistake. I told them we had found no trace of it, and that the probability was nearly one hundred percent that whoever found it in the last five hundred centuries had done nothing with it, that it had not altered his, her, or its life.

"Some good news for a change," Nancy Yokohama opined.

You want some more, O disgusting one? I just released a school of piranha in that fishtank your gray matter swims in ...

I cut that thought short, I'm afraid. There are limits even to my irreverence.

"Yes, it is isn't it?" I beamed. "Now for the classical rejoinder. The bad news is that we have located the other weapon. It's going to be a bitch to get it back. Can I have the tank, please?"

A time-scan tank rose from the floor beside me. In rapid succession we watched the results of thirty hours of scanning by almost a thousand operatives.