"It's all neutronium," said Peerssa. "It even has some of neutronium's crystalline structure, but that structure is constantly breaking up. I can see the X-ray flashes, like ripples."

"I wish I had some of your senses."

"The computer link-"

Behind them the Ring of Fire reddened further and was gone. The inner disk grew brighter and bluer and was suddenly past. In the last instant Corbell saw the black hole.

The onboard fusion drive roared beneath him, slammed him down into his chair. Light exploded in his face. It resolved: a blaze of violet light ahead of him, a broad ring of embers around it. Elsewhere, black.

Peerssa said, "There is something we must discuss."

"Wait a minute. Give me a chance to resume breathing." Peerssa waited.

Corbell said, "It's over? We lived through that?"

"Yes."

"Well done."

"Thank you."

"What's happening now?"

"Firing a reaction drive within the ergosphere of a black hole has driven us dangerously near light-speed. I am using the ram fields to ward interstellar matter from us. I won't be able to use them as a drive until we can shed some velocity. We will reach the vicinity of Sol in thirteen point eight years, ship's time, unless we overshoot."

"Did we really lose three million years?"

"Yes. Corbell, I must have your opinion. Will the State have collapsed over three million years?"

Corbell laughed a little shakily. "We'll be lucky if there's anything like human beings left. I can't guess what they'll be like. Three million years! I wish there'd been another way to do it." He stood up. He was suddenly ravenous.

Peerssa answered: "I was ordered to preserve your life and the integrity of the ship, but never your convenience. My loyalty is to the State."

Corbell stopped. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"There was another way to use the black hole, once we knew it existed. At midpoint we could have continued to accelerate. We would have spent perhaps eighty years reaching the galactic hub. If we passed near enough to the black hole, its spin would have bent our hyperbolic path back upon itself, though we would still have been well outside the ergosphere. Another eighty years of ship's time would have returned us to Sol, seventy thousand years after your departure."

"You thought of that? And you didn't do it?"

"Corbel, I have no data on the nature of water-monopoly empires. I had to take your word entirely."

"What are you talking about?"

His answer came in Corbel's recorded voice. "I think the State could last seventy or a hundred thousand. See, these water-monopoly empires, they don't collapse. They can rot from within, to the point where a single push from the barbarians outside can topple them. The levels of society lose touch with each other, and when it comes to the crunch, they can't fight. But it takes that push from outside. There's no revolution in a water empire."

Corbell said, "I don't-"

"A water empire can grow so feeble that a single barbarian horde can topple it. But, Peerssa, the State doesn't have any outside."

"-I don't understand."

"The State could last seventy or a hundred thousand years, because all of humanity was part of the State. There were no barbarians waiting hungrily for the State to show weakness. The State could have grown feeble beyond any precedent, feeble enough to fall before the hatred of a single barbarian. You, Corbell. You."

"Me?"

"Did you exaggerate the situation? I thought of that, but I couldn't risk it. And I couldn't ask."

He's a computer. Perfect memory, rigid logic, no judgment. I forgot. I talked to him like a human being, and now- "You have heroically saved the State from me. I'll be damned."

"Was the danger unreal? I couldn't ask. You might have lied."

"I never wanted to overthrow the damn government. All I wanted was a normal life. I was only forty-four years old! I didn't want to die!"

"You never could have had what you called a normal life. It was already impossible in twenty-one ninety Anno Domini."

"I guess not. I just didn't... didn't see it. Let's go home."

I

He remembered posters. He had bought them in a little shop in Kansas City and taped them to his bedroom wall. They had been there for a year before he tired of them: blown-up photographs of the planet Earth, taken from close orbit and from behind the Moon, by Apollo astronauts.

In his memory Earth was all the shades of blue, frosted with masses and clots of white cloud. Even the land was blue tinged with other colors, except where a rare red-brown patch of desert showed through.

Jerome Branch Corbell, bald and wrinkled and very thin from his time in the cold-sleep tank, hovered in black space in a contour couch surrounded by an arc of lighted dials and gauges. Clouds and landscape raced past three hundred miles below.

It could have been Earth. Even the shapes of seas and continents seemed vaguely familiar. There was far too much reddish-brown in the mix, but after all... three million years.

He tried his voice. It was husky, rusty with long sleep, and pitched too high. "Is it Earth?"

"I don't know," said Peerssa.

"Peerssa, that's silly. Is this the solar system or isn't it?"

"Try not to get excited, Corbell. I don't know if this is Sol system. The data conflict. This is the system from which came messages. I followed them to their source."

"Let's hear these messages. Why didn't you wake me earlier, before we were committed?"

"We were committed before I found the anomalies. I waited until we had achieved orbit before I woke you. I was afraid you might die of the shock. You can't tolerate another spell in cold sleep, Corbell. You would not live to reach another star."

Corbell nodded. This last of his thawings was the worst yet. It was like waking with Asian flu and a brandy hangover. He felt sick and ugly. Less than ten years ago, by the evidence of his memory, the State had brought a young man to life. Ten years awake, plus a century and a half in cold sleep, had left of the young man a withered stack of bones. He had grown mortally afraid of senility... but his thoughts seemed clear.

"Let's deal with the messages," he said.

What appeared on the Womb Room walls was not quite reality. Peerssa controlled those images; Peerssa projected what his senses picked up from the world below. Now Peerssa made a window appear in what had been deep space. Through the window Corbell saw two translucent cubes, slowly rotating. Within the cubes were shapes and figures formed in much tinier cubes-about a hundred per side.

"A laser was beamed at me while I was still thirty-two light-years distant from this star system," said Peerssa. "There were two separate messages, two sequences of dots and gaps, each totaling one million, thirty thousand, three hundred and one bits each. One hundred and one cubed. One hundred and one is prime. There is some ambiguity, of course; I may have reversed left for right."

It was not the best way to make pictures, but Corbell could recognize a man and a woman holding hands... the same figures in each cube. There were polygons of assorted sizes, in rows, and rough spheres. Peerssa created a red arrow for a pointer. "In your opinion, are these intended to represent human beings?"

"Sure."

He indicated the similar figures in the right-hand cube. "And these?"

"Yes."

The arrow returned to the left-hand cube. "This was the first message to arrive. These figures may represent atomss carbon and hydrogen and oxygen. Do you agree?"

"For all of me they do. Why would they be there?"

"They form the basis for protoplasmic chemistry. This bigger row, might it be a solar system? The large, nearly spherical hollow object would be the sun. The symbols inside may be four hydrogen atoms next to a helium atom. The row of smaller polygons would be planets."