“That was my best guess. But,” said Brennan, “the direction of his exhaust shows him coming dead on. Now I have to assume he’s been watching for Phssthpok to leave here. I did send Phssthpok’s ship off toward Wunderland. I have to assume it didn’t fool him. If Phssthpok hasn’t left here, he may have found what he was looking for. So Pak number two is coming here.”

“And where would he be now?”

The sky surged again. Bright suns backed by tiny suns, dim-lit gas and dust clouds, a panorama of the universe flowed past and lurched to a stop. “There.”

“I don’t see him.”

“I don’t either.”

“So you haven’t found him. Do you still claim to understand the Pak?”

“I do.” Brennan didn’t hesitate. In all the time he knew him, Roy Truesdale only saw him hesitate once. “If they’re doing something unexpected it’s because of a change in their environment.”

Unexpectedly Alice spoke. “Could there be a lot of ships?”

“No. Why would the Pak send us a fleet?”

“I don’t know. But they’d be further away than you’d guess from the density of your funny chemicals. Harder to find,” she said. She was cross-legged on the floor, with her head thrown back to see the stars. Brennan didn’t seem to be listening — he was working the telescope controls — but she went on. “The exhaust would be more blurred. And if they were further away they’d be moving faster, wouldn’t they? You’d get higher velocity particles.”

“Not if they were carrying more cargo,” said Brennan. “That would slow them.” The sky surged toward them, and blurred. “But it’s so damn unlikely! There’s only one assumption that would fit. Please bear with me; this takes a lot of fiddling, getting these fields just right.” The starfield half-cleared, then blurred again. “I’d have had to do this eventually anyway. Then we can all stop worrying.”

The blur of the sky condensed into hard white points. Now there was no giant sun in the field of view.

But there were a couple of hundred blue points all the same size, tiny, set wide apart in what Roy gradually realized was a hexagonal array.

“I just didn’t believe it,” said Brennan. “It was too much coincidence.”

“It is. It’s a whole fleet!” Roy felt horror and the beginnings of panic. A fleet of Pak, coming here — and Brennan, the Protector of Man, hadn’t anticipated it.

He’d trusted Brennan.

“There must be more,” said Brennan. “Further in toward the galactic core. Too far to see with my instruments. A second wave. Maybe a third.”

“These aren’t enough?”

“They aren’t enough,” Brennan agreed. “Don’t you understand? Something’s happened to the galactic core. It’s the only thing that could bring this many ships this far. That implies that they’ve evacuated the Pak world. I don’t see enough ships to do it, not even with the wars that must have been fought, with each protector trying to get his descendants on the first ships.”

Little blue lights against a sky of too-bright stars. All that, from little blue lights?

Alice rubbed her neck. “What could have happened?”

“Any kind of thing. Black holes wandering through the core suns, picking up more and more mass, maybe wandering too near Pak. Or some kind of space-born life. Or the galactic core could be exploding in a rash of supernovae. It’s happened in other galaxies. What burns me is that it had to happen now!”

“Can’t you think of any other explanation?”

“None that fits. And it’s not quite as coincidental as it sounds,” Brennan said wearily. “Phssthpok built the best astronomical system in millennia, to chart his course as far as he could. After he left they must have looked around and found — something. Supernovae in a dense cluster of older suns. Stars disappearing. Places where light was warped. It’s still a Finagle’s Coincidence. I just didn’t believe it.”

“Maybe you didn’t want to,” said Alice.

“You can believe that!”

“Why here? Why come to us?”

“To the only known habitable world outside the galactic core? Besides that, we’ve had time to find them some others.”

“Yah.”

Brennan turned to look at them. “Are you hungry? I am.”

Deep within the eye-twisting maze of “Esher’s Relativity” was a miniature kitchen. It was a landing from one viewpoint, but from another it was a wall, and the wall held cookwear closets and a sink and a pair of ovens and a pull-down platform with burners in it. Raw materials had been dumped near the wall: a squash, a canteloupe, two rabbits whose necks were broken, carrots, celery, handfuls of spices.

“Let’s see how fast we can produce,” said Brennan. He became a many-armed blur. Roy and Alice stood back from his flashing hands. One held a knife, and it moved in silver streaks, so that carrots became rolling discs and the rabbits seemed simply to fall apart.

Roy felt disoriented, cut off from reality. Those little blue lights above the tower room had no intuitive connection with a fleet of superbeings bent on exterminating mankind. This pleasant domestic scene didn’t help. While a knife-wielding alien prepared his dinner, Roy Truesdale looked through the great castle door at a landscape tilted on its side.

Alice said, “That food is all from outside, isn’t it? Why didn’t you want us to eat anything?”

“Well, there’s always the chance that tree-of-life virus has gotten to something. Cooking kills it, and there’s precious little chance it can live in anything anyway unless I’ve spread thalium oxide through the soil.” Brennan did not look up or interrupt his work. “I had a Finagle’s Puzzle facing me when I cut loose from Earth. There was food, but what I needed was the virus in the tree-of-life roots. I tried to grow it in various things: apples, pomegranates—” He looked up then, to see if they’d catch the reference. “I got a variant that would grow in a yam. That was when I knew I could survive out here.”

Brennan had arranged rabbit and vegetables as for a still-life painting. He put the pot in the oven. “My kitchen had all kinds of freeze-dried produce. I used to like to eat well, luckily. Later I got seeds from Earth. I was never in danger; I could always just go home. But I didn’t like what was going to happen to civilization if I did.” He turned. “Dinner in fifteen minutes.”

She asked, “Weren’t you lonely?”

“Yah.” Brennan pulled a table out of the floor. It was not memory plastic extruding itself, but a thick slab of wood, heavy enough to require Brennan’s own muscles. A look back at Alice may have told him that she expected more of an answer. “Look, I’d have been lonely anywhere. You know that.”

“No, I don’t. You’d have been welcome.”

Brennan seemed to go off at a tangent. “Roy, you’ve been here before. You guessed that?”

Roy nodded.

“How did I wipe out just that section of your memory?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows.” Roy tensed inside himself.

“Simplest thing in the world. Just after I stunned you, I took a recording of your brain. Your complete memory. Before I left you in the Pinnacles I wiped your mind completely, then played the recording into it. It’s more complex than that — the process involves memory RNA, and very complex electrical fields — but I don’t have to select the memories I want to remove.”

Roy’s voice came out faint. “Brennan, that’s horrible.”

“Why? Because for awhile you were a mindless animal? I wasn’t going to leave you that way. I’ve done this twenty times now, and never had an accident.”

Roy shuddered. “You don’t understand. There was a me that spent four months with you. He’s gone. You murdered him.”

“You’re beginning to understand.”

Roy looked him in the eye. “You were right. You’re different. You’d be lonely anywhere.”

Brennan set the table. He held chairs for his guests, moving with the smooth lack of haste that marks a perfect headwaiter. He served, taking half the food for himself, then sat down and ate with the efficiency of a wolf. He was neat, but he finished long before they did. There was now a noticeable bulge beneath his sternum.