He stared down into a rolling, viscous blackness and had time for a final thought: They would have been better off staying with Julius Graves. At the moment, a formal trial for lethal assault seemed positively inviting.

When Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial went scurrying into the darkness, Birdie Kelly was not at all sorry to see the back of them. Graves might want to arrest the pair, but the Karelian human Nenda had always struck Birdie as crude and violent, and the silent, winged Cecropian gave him the creeps.

Good riddance to both. Birdie pushed Julius Graves off him, struggled to his feet, and looked around.

Things were a mess. He was not sure where to begin.

Graves was winded and gasping for breath, but otherwise he seemed all right. Birdie ignored him. Kallik was unconscious, lying on the floor halfway to the center of the room, and Birdie could do nothing for her.

The body of E. C. Tally, a little closer, was in the worst shape. It lay motionless, with the cable trailing from the bleeding head and ending in a bare plug a few feet from where Birdie stood. There was nothing to be done for Tally, either, because his body was deep in the Lotus field.

Birdie looked for J’merlia. The Lo’tfian was lying on the curved floor, just inside the pattern of concentric rings, and he was still holding E. C. Tally’s disconnected brain firmly in two of his forelimbs. If he had been knocked out, too, or affected by the Lotus field…

But as Birdie watched, J’merlia began to move, crawling out toward the perimeter of the outer circle. Birdie took the loose end of the neural connect cable and went around to meet him.

“Where is Atvar H’sial?” J’merlia asked as soon as he crossed the boundary of the yellow ring.

“Ran for it. With Louis Nenda. We’ll worry about them later. Here.” Birdie held out the connector. “Turn Tally’s brain around this way, and let’s see if we can plug him in again.”

The connection was supposed to be handled delicately, but it had been yanked free with great force. Now the neural bundles refused to mesh easily into position. The plug slipped out of the socket when it was released. Birdie knew nothing about the care and maintenance of embodied computers, but he said a prayer, placed the connector into position again, and pushed — this time a lot harder.

Down on the curved bowl of the floor, the body of E. C. Tally jerked and spasmed. There was a grunt and a whoosh of lungs violently expelling air.

“Tally!” J’merlia called. “Can you hear me?”

The battered figure with its bloody head was on hands and knees, struggling to stand up. It failed on half a dozen tries, supporting itself on its bruised forearms each time it fell forward. At last the body stayed upright.

“I hee-ar… poo-erly.” The speech was garbled. “It is diffigult… to speag. Some of my gonnegtor interfaces were des-troyed when they were pulled out. Others are… degraded. I am seeging to gompensate. Do not worry, I was designed with high-cirguit redundancy. I am… improving. I will be all right. I will be fine.”

Birdie was not so sure. As Tally said those last words, he had fallen flat on his face again.

“Take it slowly, E.C. We have plenty of time.”

“Brr-err,” E.C. Tally replied. “Grarr-erff.” But he was making progress. He was standing again, shaky but upright. As Birdie and J’merlia watched, he took two tentative steps — in exactly the wrong direction.

“No. E.C.!” Birdie shouted. “Wrong way. Come toward the outside. You’re heading for the middle of the room.”

“I am well… aware of that.” The head turned slowly, to look back at them. The voice was reproving. “Since it will be necessary at some point to retrieve the Hymenopt Gallig, surely it is more efficient to do so now, and thereby egonomize on both time and motion.”

E. C. Tally was improving all right, Birdie thought — if a return to his usual wrongheadedness could be considered an improvement. But he carefully paid out neural cable while Tally limped forward until he reached Kallik. Blood streamed from the open skull as Tally bent down and laboriously cradled the little Hymenopt in his arms.

“We are goming out now. Prepare to restore me… to the granial gavity, as soon as I reach you. Sensory inputs via the gonnegt gable are degenerating. Please geep talging, so that I gan sense your diregtion. I gan no longer see.”

“This way — this way — this way—” J’merlia called, but he did not wait. When Tally was still inside the yellow ring the Lo’tfian rushed forward, took part of Kallik’s weight, and led the way back to Birdie Kelly. As Kallik was released, E. C. Tally groaned and sank to the floor beside her.

“Quickly.” Julius Graves had finally recovered his wind enough to be helpful. He was removing the bandage from Tally’s skull. “Steven says that there will be permanent damage if an impaired neural connector is used for more than a minute or two. We are close to that limit already.”

As the bandage came off Birdie turned the cranium on its hinged flap. “All right, E.C., here we go. We’ll have you back online in a few seconds.

“Now!” he said to J’merlia, who stood ready. The connector came free of the disembodied brain, at the same moment as Birdie pulled the cable out of the hindbrain socket. Tally’s body slumped against Birdie. The blue eyes closed.

Julius Graves took the short connecting spiral of the computer’s hindbrain connection and set it carefully into its usual position. There was a brief spasm of Tally’s limbs, but before anyone had time to worry the eyes had flickered open.

“Very good,” E. C. Tally said. “We suffered a loss of interface for only two-point-four seconds. All sensory and motor functions appear to be normal. Now, the closing of the cranial cavity is something that I prefer to do for myself. So if you do not mind—”

He reached up, pushed away Graves’s supporting hands, and grasped the open top of the skull. He turned it backward on its hinge. Birdie, standing behind him, had another quick view of a red network of blood vessels in the skull’s lining; then the cranium tilted to fit snugly over the protective membranes of Tally’s spherical brain. Tally exerted vertical pressure. There was a faint click. The skull was again a battered but seamless whole.

As E. C. Tally calmly reached up a forearm to wipe blood from his eyes, the other three could begin to attend to other worries. Birdie realized that Kallik was conscious and silently watching.

“Are you feeling all right?”

The Hymenopt shook her head. “Physically, I am functioning normally. But mentally, I am very confused. Confused as to how I came to be here, but even more as to how you came to be here. The last thing I remember was going down there.” She pointed toward the center of the chamber. “My master was at the center. Now he has vanished, and so has Atvar H’sial. Where are they?”

“Good question.” Birdie was automatically coiling up the neural cable. Old habits of neatness died hard. “J’merlia, can you bring Kallik up to date, while the rest of us decide where we go from here?”

He turned to Julius Graves. “I’m not in charge, never have been. But I want to find Professor Lang and Captain Rebka as much as you do, and help them if they need help. And I know you want to get your hands on Nenda and that Cecropian, and give ’em what’s due. But don’t you think it’s time we forgot all that and started acting rational? I mean, like getting out of here and going someplace where we know what’s happening to us.”

Listening to himself, Birdie was amazed at his own nerve. Here he was, a real nobody, telling a resentative of the central council what he ought to do. But Graves did not seem annoyed. The bald head was nodding slowly, and the radiation-scarred face wore a serious expression.