“The blockade can’t last much longer, then your own supplies will be coming through.”

“You don’t understand. If you think my reaction to the orl blood is bad, wait until you see what the reconstituted blood will do to me after this.” He gestured with the glass. On the other hand, he felt much better.

“H’lim said it wouldn’t be as bad as if taken directly.”

“He doesn’t understand. It’ll be bad enough.”

Finally hurt by his rejection, she pulled away. “If I wanted gloom and doom I’d turn on a newscast.”

“Then why don’t you!” he snapped and instantly regretted it.

She whirled away and poked at the vidcom controls.

He set the glass aside, went up behind her and put his arms around her, pulling her suddenly pliant body against him. “I’m sorry. It helped. Obviously, it helped. H’lim’s right, it does make a difference. The heart’s electrical, you know. The impulses are perceptible in arterial blood. There’s nothing quite like it, and nothing at all like the strength it gives-or the mad desire for more. I love you more than life itself, and I’d have drunk from you until you’d died if you’d forced that on me just then. You hit a reflex, Inea. Now that you know what power you have over me, I hope you’ll exercise it with restraint.”

She kept her eyes on the screen where the reporter was reading lists of battle casualties. “H’lim says the orl have a kind or power over the luren, too, but they’re just animals and doru know how to use it. Titus, I’m not an animal. I won’t hurt you-And I know despite what you think, that you won’t hurt me. You’re afraid you would, but I can’t let that fear kill you-for nothing.”

“I’m a long way from dying of hunger.” The feeding frenzy would come first. No, I can’t chance that. I’ll have to take drastic action long before that. Since bodies would not be shipped back to Earth due to the quarantine, what he was contemplating meant a final death.

She twisted in his arms, locking her fingers behind his neck. “Titus, you didn’t see yourself on that bed a few minutes ago. When I came over there, I thought you had died, that I’d lost you even though we finally defeated Abbot!”

He couldn’t disillusion her about Abbot’s defeat. “I understand why you did what you did, but I don’t want you to do anything like that again. Inea, it could be dangerous for you. And-mutilated corpses are difficult to explain.”

His brutal phrasing finally got through to her, but before she could answer, the ground shook with an ominous rumble that rolled through the complex. The screen sizzled and went dark. The lights flickered, then steadied, and in the distance there was a brief shrieking of a decompression alarm.

She clamped herself to him with a whimper as he reached to shift the screen’s controls. Colby was on an internal channel, and the news was not good. “. land lines that control the Eighth Array have been cut, though the Array itself has not been damaged.”

Colby betrayed none of the hope that the supplies would come in on target, that the decoy would deplete the blockaders’ equipment when it blew up, and that W.S. would come out on top. She’d rather face despair on the station than risk a premature leak to the blockaders.

Courage. Human courage. Watching her, Titus felt his own courage revive and felt the line of kinship with humans that was so meaningful to Resident philosophy. “I think maybe you might be right, Inea, maybe-just maybe-I wouldn’t hurt you. I don’t want to try it, you understand, because it’s too risky, but-” me.

“Just don’t you dare try it with anyone else without telling.

“I don’t intend to try it at all. I just want you to know how much I love you, before I ask for more orl blood.”

At least the Array is safe. Titus struggled awake against the syrupy drag of nightmare. The Array is safe, but the probe is gone. Already the memory of horror was fading, as it always did, though the dream itself lingered in images of being buried alive under scentless bodies that screamed and writhed in slow motion. The nightmare was shorter now, and he was waking up sooner, healing inside.

And, he realized, for the first time since the sun had come up, he’d wakened refreshed, without the urge to vomit vying with ravening hunger. Still, what Inea had done to him the previous night rankled.

Sitting up, he discovered she had gone, turning off his magnetic field generator so he’d be sure to wake up eventually. A note was flashing on his screen. Scratching absently, he bent to read it.

“Couldn’t bear to wake you. I’m covering your shift with

“Hm, and I’ve switched our gym appointments, too, so you take over from Abbot this evening. Don’t forget your Medical at noon.

“ has it there’s some new treatment that takes an extra hour,

So “e early because you have the Department meeting right after Colby wants those reports this afternoon, too. I’m on K.P.”this evening. See you around midnight.“

“Whoever said life here would be dull and boring was flat-out wrong,” muttered Titus, knowing full well what the new medical treatment would involve. He wasn’t worried about Inea She wasn’t under any Influence. The Mark she wore wouldn’t show up, and the silencing would be evident only if they knew what questions to ask. But for him, it would be a challenge.

As he might have expected, Abbot was on top of things though he looked ten years older than he had a month ago. Just outside Biomed, he took Titus into a lavatory. “I’ve programmed the instruments to read normally, but there’s the problem of pupil dilation. Titus, we’re going to have to help each other on this one.”

“I can’t control my pupil contractions! And what about the contact lenses?”

“They’ll let you keep the lenses in. They don’t appear tinted. They want you to see normally, but think their way. I’ve read their recording and I know the cues. If you’ll let me, I can Influence your subconscious to provide the correct autonomic responses.”

Titus recoiled. Abbot pressed, “I’ll let you do it to me first. Titus, we don’t have much time!”

He still doesn’t know I got his transmitter out of the Array! Maybe Abbot hadn’t been able to get back into the observatory yet. He might be assuming the loss of control of the Eighth had come after his message was sent, under cover of Titus’s use of the Array. The Taurus window had been opening at the time though Titus’s message had gone a few degrees outside that window, to Earth, not deep space. The instruments had not registered any antennas pointed wrong, nor had there been any abnormal power drain. Still.

Titus assumed Abbot knew of the cargotainer project because he knew everything that went on. If Abbot thought that his message had gone out as planned, that he had summoned the aid he believed Earth’s luren needed, despite human opposition to revealing Earth’s location, and that his action remained undetected, then his offer of help in passing the medical could be genuine.

Even if Abbot thought he’d been defeated again, his offer of help ought to be genuine because he felt that the secret of Earth-luren’s existence had to be kept at all costs, at least until the galactic luren arrived.

On the third hand, Abbot might know what Titus had taken from the console and be totally unfazed by the theft. He might already have another plan brewing, despite loss of the Eighth. In that case, Abbot’s offer might be very dangerous.

What could he do to me besides plant physical-reflex controls? The exploitation of Influence had never been an interest of Titus’s, but Abbot was an expert.

“Come on, Titus. This will take at least five minutes.”

“All right. Show me what to do.”

Abbot had a notepad that displayed the list of verbal cues the hypnotist would use juxtaposed against a list of the proper responses. It took Abbot several minutes to teach Titus how to direct the pencil of Influence to induce the effects. Then Titus had to treat and test Abbot, to be sure he’d gotten it right.