They had no trouble commandeering a well-fueled vehicle. Since the quarantine, none were used beyond the station perimeter, and Colby, true to her absolute security on the operation, had not yet sent crews to stand by to collect the “tainers cargo. The vehicles, however, had been serviced and were ready to roll. The Brink’s guards, having nothing to do, were playing a modified version of Thizan on a crude board.

The three of them simply walked past the guards, cycled themselves through the lock, picked out a pressurized Toyota with a silver streak and a half-finished rendering of Disney’s Roadrunner hand painted on the side, climbed in, and drove off, just as easily as Abbot had.

Titus guided the windowless bus across station territory at a tentative creep, bemused by the idea of a Roadrunner as mascot of something that lumbered like a juggernaut over broken country, its tracks making its own road. H’lim Influenced those on duty at the scanners to “accidentally” turn the recorders off and to ignore the moving blip on their screens. “They’ll never notice,” he told Titus. “I’ve introduced a number of spurious failures into their efforts so that, should I need to move about another little problem wouldn’t stand out.”

“And you called us devious!” said Titus, jouncing over a boulder. His steering needed improvement.

“It’s a good thing you know how to drive these things,” gasped Inea, grabbing her helmet before it rolled away.

“I don’t. yet,” answered Titus. “I’ll get the hang of it in a bit. See if you can find a map stowed somewhere.”

“You mean,” she howled, “you don’t know where we’re going?”

He answered with a straight face. “I just don’t want to go the wrong way on a one-way street. Could cause gridlock.”

She sputtered. H’lim, barricading himself into an equipment locker he’d emptied, paused. He was the only one who hadn’t removed his helmet because the radiation level was already too painful. Noticing his agitation, Inea laughed so hard she doubled over. “Titus, he thinks you’re serious!”

Over his shoulder, Titus said, “H’lim, I know it’s that way.” He pointed then singled out the stellar markers. In the process, he began to realize the time. “How much of a head start do you think he has on us?”

“Maybe three hours, could be four,” said Inea, “depending on how long he spent. in H’lim’s room.”

“I’d guess it would take him at least a couple of hours to rig that transmitter,” said Titus. “He’ll have modified it into a mismatched nightmare. If just one fitting is the wrong size, we may get to him before he’s ready to send. But that’s the least of our problem.” Titus had studied the strategic maps carefully. “Blockaders will be crossing between us and the Erghfh right about the time we get there, unless I’ve misread the stars and the clock.”

Inea drew back warily. “How do you know?”

Promise or no promise, he had to tell them about the “tainers and the decoy loaded with explosive-and the blood Connie was sending him amidst the explosives she hadn’t known about. ”I don’t think Abbot knows, unless the Tourists among the blockaders found out the supply caravan from Luna Station’s a decoy and the real supplies are coming direct from Earth’s surface to our backyard. And somehow, I doubt Colby’s security has been broken this time.“

The little eight-passenger Toyota filled with the intense weight of H’lim’s Influence, potential energy that gathered like an approaching hurricane. They rode in silence while Inea puzzled out the Cobra control board, producing an occasional squawk of voices as she flicked across World Sovereignties channels.

Then, nosing past the station outbuildings, they heard the flurry of traffic as the station prepared to receive the “tainers, which, Titus was gratified to discover, were on course and on schedule. Listeners, not knowing of the plan and its code words, wouldn’t have made any sense out of the brief messages audible before scrambling was invoked and the Toyota’s radio lost the signal.

Titus found a double ribbon of tracks going off Project Station toward the Eighth, no doubt made by the maintenance crews now based at the station, the closest habitat to the Eighth. With a sigh of relief, he ran the shield over the direct vision port, cutting out the painful sunlight and Earthlight, fljen stepped down the screen images so the sun was bearable, Earth only hinted at, and the stars invisible.

Just past the station perimeter, he spotted a crude sign made from a dented oxygen bottle with an 8 painted on it and the glyph of a frowning face. As they passed it, he saw the reverse side showed a smile and a P.S. When they had lost sight of the station and had not yet seen the Array, he was very glad of the track, and the occasional frowning face painted or carved on rocks.

H’lim’s power pounded through him, reaching for Abbot, casting a shimmer of unreality over everything. Even the dim images of the sky, human symbols electronically cast, seemed unreal to his luren vision, arbitrarily manipulated.

He tried to shake free, building in his mind an image of how Earth would look to H’lim’s naked eye, five times brighter than the moon, faint swirls of infrared, throbbing with colors only luren could see. He knew all the graphs, but until this moment, they had remained just mathematics. Now, fighting the pall of Influence, he synthesized breathtaking spectacle, the Cosmic Artist at His best.

Then he thought of H’lim, suffering from the negligible particle flux within the Toyota, and knew what the luren had meant when he labeled his species a bioengineered failure. To see the spectral beauty they were designed to see, they must endure being scorched by their own sun! All his deductions from the output spectrum of the lighting panel had been hogwash. Luren built their lighting systems to suit their artificially designed senses, not to replicate a sun that had not guided the evolution of their genes.

He tried to explain this to Inea, but she shook her head, crouching over the scanner board, hunching inside her suit.

Titus became aware of Abbot’s presence, hurling a spear of outrage through the haze of H’lim’s power. It took no telepathy to know why. His son and his grandson were defying him, H’lim trying to paralyze Abbot even from this distance.

As the battle raged invisibly around her, Inea stifled a whimper. Titus hitched over as far as he could and gathered her up. Through the odd tactile effect of suit against suit, he created for her a bubble in the flow between H’lim and Abbot, explaining the battle. “So the overwash is getting to you, like a fourteen-cycle note. Understand? You’re afraid because it stimulates your nerves, not because you’re afraid.”

“Oh, that surely helps a lot.” Her voice quavered, but there was a thin smile on her lips now.

H’lim’s tinny voice issued from the helmets. “He’s slowing, but I can’t hold him.”

Titus read the suppressed agony in H’lim’s tone. The solar flux was depleting the luren’s strength. “I’m not expecting miracles,” Titus replied, “just do your best.”

They passed the left-hand cutoff up to Collector Six, the station’s furthest and largest outlying power source. It was plastered up an inside curve of a crater opposite a bulldozed rim so the panels got the most direct sun. Hundreds of panels sent energy to superconductor storage tanks for the long night ahead, keeping the station independent. The Sixth was the newest on the moon, so efficient the station sold power to refineries, factories, and supplied the Eighth Array.

The Collector fell behind them, the path becoming fainter and narrower. Gradually, Titus noticed he was struggling with the steering. Something was wrong with the left tread, but he refrained from mentioning it. H’lim’s power filled the cabin with such pressure, Titus thought it would surely burst. He wasn’t about to disrupt that kind of locked concentration. He’d heard tell of Influence duels to the death, but never witnessed one before. I don’t understand how H’lim can do it!