The game went to stalemate. We all sat there staring blankly at a problem that could not be resolved—like the one outside—and feeling the certainty settling tighter and tighter over the game, were cheated by it of having somesort of answer, to something. Lynn swore, mildly, an affectation aped from born-men. It seemed overall to be fit.

So the game was done. The evening was. Lance got up, undressed and went to bed ahead of the rest of us, while Viv sat in her lighted corner reading. I came and shoved my bed over on its tracks until it was up against his. Lance paid no attention, lying on his side with his back to me until I edged into his bed and up against his back.

He turned over then. “No,” he said, very quiet, just the motion of his lips in the light we had left from Viv’s reading, and the light from the bathroom door. Not a fierce no, as it might have been. There was pain; and I smoothed his curling hair and kissed his cheek.

“It’s all right,” I said. “just keep me warm.”

He shifted over and his arms went about me with a fervent strength; and mine about him; and maybe the others thought we made love: it was like that, for a long time, long after all the lights but Viv’s were out. Finally that one went. And then when we lay apart but not without our arms about each other, came a giving of the mattress from across Lance’s side, and Vivien lay down and snuggled up to him, not because she was interested in Lance, but just that we did that sometimes, lying close, when things were uncertain. It goes back to the farms; to our beginnings; to nightmares of being alone, to good memories of lying all close together, and touching, and being touched. It was comfort. It put no demands on Lance. In a moment more Percivale and Lynette moved a bed up and lay down there, crowding in on us, so that if someone had to get up in the night it was going to wake everyone. But all of us, I think, wanted closeness more than we wanted sleep.

I know I didn’t sleep much, and sometimes, in that kind of glow the ceiling let off when eyes had gotten used to the dark, I could make out Lance’s face. He lay on his back, and I think he stared at the ceiling, but I could not be sure. I kept my arm about his; and Percy was at my right keeping me warm on that side, with Lynette all tangled up with him; and Viv sleeping on Lance’s shoulder on the other side. No sex. Not at all. All I could think of was that sound: we had fallen into something that was never going to let us go; we clung like a parasite to something that maybe didn’t want us attached to it at all; and out there ... out there beyond the hull, if I let my senses go, was still that terrible chaos-stuff.

If this was death, I kept thinking, remembering my lady’s mad hypothesis, if this was death, I could wish we had not tangled some other creature up in our dying dream. But I believed now it was no dream, because I could never have imagined that sound out of my direst nightmares.

It came again in the night, that rumbling over com: Gawain came on the intercom telling Percy and Lynn so; and all of us scrambled out of bed and ran for the lift.

So had Griffin come running from my lady’s bedroom. He stood there in his robe and his bare feet like the rest of us; but no word from my lady, nothing. It left us with Griffin alone, and that rumbling and squealing came over the com fit to drive us all blank.

“Have you answered it?” Griffin asked of Gawain and Modred, who sat at controls still in their party clothes; and Percy and Lynn took their places in their chairs wearing just the robes they had thrown on. “No,” Modred replied. He turned in his place, calm as ever, with dark circles under his eyes. “I’m composing a transmission tape in pulses, to see if we can establish a common ground in mathematics.”

“Use it,” Griffin said. “If the beginning’s complete, use it.”

Modred hesitated. I stood there with my arms wrapped about me and thinking, no, he wouldn’t, not with my lady not here. But Modred gave one of those short, curious nods of his and pushed a button.

The transmission went out. At least after a moment the transmission from the other side stopped. “I should see to my lady,” I said.

“No,” Griffin said. “She’s resting. She took a pill.”

I stood there as either/or as Modred, clenched my arms about me and let this born-man tell me I wasn’t to go ... because I knew if my lady had taken a pill she wouldn’t want the disturbance. This terrible thing started up again and the crew asked help and Dela took a pill.

An arm went about me. It was Lance. Viv sat near us, on one of the benches near the door.

“You’d better trade off shifts,” Griffin said to the crew, marking, surely, how direly tired Gawain and Modred looked.

“Yes,” Gawain agreed. He would have sat there all the watch if Griffin hadn’t thought of that, which was one of the considerate things I had seen Griffin do ... but it gave me no comfort, and no comfort to any of the rest of us, I think. It was Dela who should have thought of that; Dela who should be here; and it was Griffin instead, who started acting as if he owned us and the Maid. Until now he had looked through us all and ignored us; and now he saw us and we were alone with him.

“We’ll dress,” Lynn said, “and come up and relieve you.”

“Get back to sleep,” Griffin said to those of us who were staff. “No need of your being here.”

We went back to the crew quarters and got in bed again, except Lynn and Percy, who dressed and went topside again. Then Gawain and Modred came down and undressed and lay down with us as Lynn and Percy had—I think they were glad of the company, and worked themselves up against us, cold and tense until they began to take our warmth, and until they fell asleep with the suddenness of exhaustion.

What went on out there, that noise, that thing outside our hull—it might go on again and again. It might not need to sleep.

VII

The huge pavilion slowly yielded up,

Thro’ those black foldings, that which housed therein.

High on a nightblack horse, in nightblack arms,

With white breastbone, and barren ribs of Death,

And crowned with fleshless laughter—some ten steps—

Into the half-light—thro’ the dim dawn—advanced

The monster, and then paused, and spake no word.

We went about in the morning on soft feet and small steps, listening. We stayed to our duties, what little of them there were. Even the makeshift lab was quiet, where Vivien was setting things up ... running tests, that took time, and we could do nothing there. Griffin and Dela stayed together in her bed, and I walked and paced feeling like a ghost in the Maid’s corridors, all too conscious how vast it was outside and how small we were and how huge that rumbling voice had sounded.

“It’s probably trapped here too,” Dela said when I came finally to do her hair, “and maybe it’s as scared as we are.”

“Maybe it is,” I said, thinking that scared beasts bit; and I feared this one might have guns. On the Maidwe had only the ancient weapons which decorated her dining hall and the lady’s quarters and some of the corridors. Precious good thosewere against this thing. I thought about knights and dragons and reckoned that they must have been insane.

I finished my lady’s hair ... made it beautiful, elaborate with braids, and dressed her in her green gown with the pale green trim. It encouraged me, that she was up and sober again, no longer lying in her chambers prostrate with fear: if my lady could face this day, then things might be better. If there was an answer to this, then born-men could find it; and she was our born-man, ours, who dictated all the world.