“This is Kallik. The whereabouts of Captain Rebka and Professor Lang are unknown to me. I am alone on the surface of Glister…”

The Hymenopt gave a concise and unhappy summary of events since Darya Lang’s last message. She ended: “It is unclear whether Masters Nenda and Atvar H’sial are living or dead. The same is true of Professor Lang and Captain Rebka. Logic suggests that regardless of their condition they will be found, if anywhere near here, in the interior of Glister. I know of no way to achieve entry to the sphere. I propose to fly the Have-It-All on a low-altitude survey, seeking possible entry points. Such a discovery is a low-probability event, but I will try it before exploring more risky alternatives.”

J’merlia looked at the message-source locator. Kallik was on a planetoid in a higher orbit than Dreyfus-27, so she was steadily falling behind. In another half hour Glister would be hidden behind the curved bulk of Gargantua. Messages would become impossible for a while. Already the signal was distorted by electronic noise, faded and broken.

J’merlia switched to his own transmission mode. “Kallik. What are we going to do? The masters are gone.” His voice rose to a wail. “There is no one left to direct us!”

He waited impatiently through the three-second round-trip delay. Kallik was the smart one; she would have answers.

“I understand,” a faint voice said, “and I have the same problem. All we can do is try to imagine what the masters would want, and function accordingly. For the moment, your position is clear. You were instructed to remain on Dreyfus-27. You should do so. My own position is more… difficult.”

There was a long pause. J’merlia could guess at Kallik’s suffering, and he sympathized strongly with it. The Hymenopt had disobeyed an order from Rebka when she walked forward into the fog, but that was not the problem. J’merlia would have done the same thing, to keep humans from risk. But Kallik had then been convinced by her own safe passage that Rebka and Lang could proceed unharmed through the shining mist. She had told them so — and she had been wrong. Her action may have led to their deaths. Kallik could not sit and wait, as J’merlia was waiting. She had to find a way to atone for her mistake.

“If my survey does not reveal an entry point,” Kallik went on at last, “and I have little confidence that it will, then one other avenue is open to me. Our first attempts to penetrate the surface of Glister were unsuccessful. We could not cut into it or burn any mark in it. But the cloud that we saw came from within Glister. It emerged from an apparently solid surface. And yet when the cloud touched me, I feel sure that it possessed solid components. We tend to ascribe supernatural powers to the Builders, and therefore we ignore simple explanations. But it occurs to me that a gaseous or liquid form of surface, held to rigidity by an intense electromagnetic field, would be easy to achieve even with our technology. If that is the case, local cancellation of the field will permit entry to or exit from Glister. The instruments to explore that possibility are here, on the Have-It-All…” Her voice disappeared, then came back more weakly. “…prefer a more conventional mode of access, but… as last resort.”

The signal was going, but Kallik sounded determined again, free of J’merlia’s own sense of desolation and foreboding. Perhaps it was because she had the ships available to her, he thought. She could do something. If everyone on Glister was dead, Kallik could even fly home to seek a new master. J’merlia could not go anywhere, could not imagine any other master than Atvar H’sial. Maybe Kallik was less accustomed to slave status, with its freedom from difficult choices.

“Kallik, please call me. As soon as you can. I do not like to be alone.”

After a too-long delay: “Certainly. I will contact you… line-of-sight communication… but… fading again… six hours…”

The signal was almost gone. “If you do not hear… whatever you must… patient.” The final word was a whisper against the hiss of interference.

J’merlia huddled over the communication set. Be patient. What else could he do?

First Atvar H’sial and Louis Nenda. Then Darya Lang and Hans Rebka. Everything and everyone, little by little, taken away from J’merlia.

Kallik was all he had left, the only remaining contact within hundreds of millions of kilometers. And now?

He listened and listened. She was gone.

By the standards of any normal inhabitant of Lo’tfi, J’merlia was already insane.

He had to be. Lo’tfians were communal animals. Only a crazy being could stand to be plucked out of the home environment to serve a Cecropian dominatrix as her interpreter. As far as the Cecropians were concerned, Lo’tfian slaves were selected for their ability to learn the Cecropian pheromonal form of speech; but from the Lo’tfian perspective, selection took care of itself through quite a different mechanism.

Any Lo’tfian could learn the Cecropian form of communication; with their talent for languages, that was easy. But only a few rare males, mentally off-balance to the point of madness, could bear to be yanked away from the society of the warrens.

Separation was worse than it could ever be for a human. When Lo’tfi was first discovered by the Cecropians, the dominant species roaming the surface of that planet possessed intelligence without technology. For millions of years, male Lo’tfians had lived most of their pleasant and peaceful lives out under the clear, cold skies of Lo’tfi. They had minimal intellectual curiosity. Any difficult decisions were made for them by the blind females, snuggled away in the burrows. The food-seeking males had seen the stars, but incuriously, as an element of the world that told them only when certain plants would be available to collect.

The arrival of the Cecropians, bearing the news that around those bright points of light circled other worlds populated by other beings, had been received with tolerant disinterest by the burrow females. They had little interest in the surface, and even less in what lay beyond. Communication had been established at a leisurely pace. The Cecropians, it transpired, had no interest in conquering the planet, or in living there. They hated those cold, clear skies. And they did not want to exploit Lo’tfi. The Cecropian terms for peaceful coexistence were simple. All they sought were beings with the sense organs to understand human sonic and Cecropian pheromonal speech, and the intelligence to learn both forms of language.

The loss of a small number of surplus Lo’tfian males, as the only price for being left alone, was acceptable to the negotiators — and anyway, argued the burrow females making the deal, wasn’t anyone crazy enough to go of bad breeding stock, even if he stayed?

J’merlia had left Lo’tfi, to become servant and interpreter to Atvar H’sial. In Lo’tfian terms he was therefore demented already. Now he was contemplating an action that would put his previous insanities into the shade.

Six hours. Twelve hours. Twenty. And never a signal from Kallik, or anyone else. Never a reply to his own, increasingly frantic, messages.

The orbits of Dreyfus-27 and Glister had passed and re-passed. At first J’merlia had been able to force himself to set the unit into recording mode while he did a little work on the interior of Dreyfus-27. As the hours passed, the urge to remain near the communicator became stronger and stronger.

At thirty hours he had waited as long as he could stand. Hans Rebka had told him to remain on Dreyfus-27. Kallik had told him the same thing. But they and Darya Lang were in danger.

The Summer Dreamboat was already in remote-controlled status. He used the communicator to bring it on a maximum-velocity trajectory to Dreyfus-27.