“What would it mean if there were?”

“Not a whole lot. But I knew the people who worked in here. I’d like to know what happened to them.”

With shame in her voice, the engineer told him, “No, there weren’t any bodies. Would they normally work with the door locked?”

“Of course.”

“Then you know what they did in here?”

“Of course not. Astrogation is a very tight union, and besides the math is way too difficult for me. Only those who enter the pool ever learn it, and that naturally is a very private business.” He said this as if it made perfect sense.

“Astrogation?” The engineer latched onto the word. “This is a guidance center? Then where are the computers?”

“Oh, that kind of math is too hard for computers.”

Titus was holding his breath, afraid his respirator would drown out H’lim’s soft voice, reminding himself that H’lim, for the first time, felt stuck here and obliged to make long-term accommodations. He wouldn’t by lying, or even kidding. But he couldn’t be serious. Unaware of the effect his words had on the scientific minds around him, H’lim added in genuine relief, “But at least there were no bodies. They must have gotten out.” There was an odd tone in his voice.

“And left the door locked? From the inside?”

He examined the door mechanism, everyone crowding back out of his way. “Yes, it does appear to have been locked from the inside. Good.” He sounded serious.

Suddenly the engineer threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, you almost had me!” she gasped. “That’s good, Dr. Sa’ar, that’s very good!”

Others joined in as they realized that H’lim had to be joking. There was no way out of the bare room with the bank vault walls. And what sort of math could a living person do that would be too much for a computer?

At length, the chuckles died down, and the engineer said “Well, you did warn us that you wouldn’t answer all our questions. But now this room is going to get more attention than you’d ever believe. Dr. Shiddehara, if this is astrogation, not the interstellar drive room, it’s in your department. Would you care to ask some questions? Perhaps walk inside? The designs could be” a map of some sort. We’ve made records of them, of course, for study after we tear up the floor. But it’s not the same as the real thing.“ Over her shoulder, she said to a colleague, ”Martha, the computers have to be under that floor, and the central area must be the display tank. It just can’t be any other way.“

“Lack of imagination will prevent you from solving the puzzle,” warned H’lim. “It is another way. You won’t find any computers or other equipment inside that room. That’s the reason the walls are insulated-for silence.”

As H’lim gestured for the engineer to precede him into the room, Titus thought the luren was finally giving them something new, but the other engineer, Martha, said, “So! I win! It is insulation for the luren senses. But why, if it’s not a temple?”

“Not luren senses,” corrected H’lim. Then in an odd tone, he added, “There are no luren astrogators, at least not yet.” He paused at the door and looked back at Titus with that same distant gaze he’d had in the lab a while ago, speculating, weighing, looking into a distant future while simultaneously groping for something only dimly remembered.

And he did say that a genetic code could be the key to a giant leap forward in space-faring technology. For the first time, Titus recalled how H’lim had lumped the study of the relationship of space to time in with human will, vision, and the life force. By “life force” he might have meant genetic code. Genetic codes and space technology.

And he remembered the time when H’lim had dealt with the pain of a woman’s broken bones and explained that Earth’s customary divisions of disciplines were not his own. In that kind of a science, could astrogation and interstellar drive be one and the same thing?

Unbearably excited, Titus stepped up to the threshold to stand at H’lim’s side. He felt the subtle resistance of a mild threshold effect, something like a hotel room, and recalled all his attempts to prove mathematically that Influence could not exist. Yet it did.

“H’lim,” he asked, “why would the room be insulated like this, if luren don’t use it?” He was almost afraid of the answer.

“I really don’t know. I told you, Astrogation is a very tight union.”

“Well, come on in,” said the engineer, “and tell us what you can of all this. Please.”

H’lim gracefully stepped across the threshold. “Come, Titus, you may want to look this over.” To the engineer and everyone else, he said, “I don’t know how astrogation is done, but I can guess that from the time the collision course with your moon was known, they must have been in here trying to alter our course to prevent the crash. They must have been the first to know that our situation was hopeless.”

“And they would have bailed out?”

From the tilt of H’lim’s body, Titus thought the luren was struggling with the idiom. Since H’lim hadn’t had time to look at any fiction, it was small wonder he’d never heard the term. “To abandon ship,” supplied Titus.

“Ah! Yes, I suppose they would have tried. I can only hope they succeeded. Just hope. Please believe me, I know nothing about the exercise of their skills, or the way they use this room. Such matters are a specialty for the talented and trained. I couldn’t begin to assess their chances of getting out alive. I can only hope they did.”

Talented. Genes reveal talent?

“And if they did survive,” prompted Titus, “they’ll send help for you.”

“No. If they survived, they’d assume total destruction.” He gestured at the ship. “Hardly an unwarranted assumption.”

“I hate to be a killjoy,” said the engineer, “but except for the door which was locked from the inside, there’s no way out of this room.”

“Not at the moment, no.”

Ah! “So the motion of the ship through the galactic fields creates something in this room-a vortex, an anomaly, a singularity which interfaces with-what?” For that moment Titus forgot about Abbot, messages, threat of exposure to humans, and Inea’s diabolical self-determination. He felt tremendously alive for the first time since the takeoff from Quito!

Disjointed. Our science is disjointed! Little bits and pieces of comments and allusions H’lim had made coalesced. “A pool,” said Titus aloud. “You said a pool must be entered to learn this variety of math. A singularity might look like a pool.” He was standing on the black glass at the center of the design. He tapped one foot. “This looks like a pool! It makes some kind of a spacewarp, doesn’t it?”

H’lim was utterly still, his boots no longer scuffing at the mosaic. Even the susurration of everyone else breathing vanished as they waited.

“Spacewarp?” asked H’lim.

The word was part of Titus’s vocabulary, but mentally filed under “fantasy” along with everything else he knew about philosophy, psychology, Tarot, palmistry, and dream interpretation-unreal and therefore unimportant. Mysticism. He had dismissed the most important clue H’lim had given him as mysticism, not physics.

It’s real. It’s not mysticism, it’s real. They can really make spacewarps. It was the simplest explanation for everything they had found-and not found-on this ship.

“Explain it to him, Titus,” said one of the engineers, and Titus could hear the suppressed chuckle.

“I’m sorry, H’lim.” Titus sketched a definition, stumbling embarrassedly as he gave his sources.

“Science fiction? And I thought science training knocked all the imagination out of humans.”

They were all breathing again, but softly, tentatively. Titus replied, “Oh, we still dream, even as adults.”

With intense, searching curiosity, H’lim asked, “What do you dream of achieving, Titus? Travel among the stars you study?” His tone made it a personal, private moment, almost as if he were seriously offering Titus the stars.