A moment ago magnification had showed it as a dim red globe. Now a small blue-white star showed on its surface. The white spot spread, dimming; it spread across the surface without rising in any kind of cloud. Brennan’s counters and needles began to chatter and twitch.

“That should kill him,” Brennan said with satisfaction. “Those Pak pilots probably aren’t too healthy anyway; they must have picked up a certain amount of radiation over thirty-one thousand light years riding behind a Bussard ramjet.”

“I presume that was a bullet?”

“Yah. A steel-jacketed bullet. And we’re moving against the spin of the star. I slowed it enough that the magnetic field would pick it up and slow it further, and keep on slowing it until it hit the star’s surface. There were some uncertainties. I wasn’t sure just when it would hit.”

“Very tricky, Captain.”

“The trailing ship probably has it worked out too, but there isn’t anything he can do about it.” Now the flare was a lemon glow across one flank of Plissthpok’s Star. Suddenly another white point glowed at one edge. “Even if they worked it out in advance, they couldn’t be sure I had the guns. And there’s only one course window they can follow me through. Either I dropped something or I didn’t. Let’s see what the last pair does.”

“Let’s put Protector back together. I think that must be the drive section ahead.”

“Right.”

They worked for hours. Protector was fairly spread across the sky. Roy worked with his shoulders hunched against deadly green light, but it never came. The second pair of Pak scouts was dead.

Midway they stopped to watch events that had happened an hour ago: the third pair of Pak scouts reconnecting their ships in frantic haste, then using precious reserve fuel to accelerate outward from the star. “Thought so,” Brennan grunted. “They don’t know what kind of variable velocity weapon I’ve got, and they can’t afford to die now. They’re the last. And that puts them on a course that’ll take them way the hell away from us. We’ll beat them to Home by at least half a year.”

Roy Truesdale was thirty-nine years old when he and Brennan rounded Phssthpok’s Star. He was forty-three when they slowed below ram speed outside the Epsilon Indi system.

There were times during those four years when Roy thought he would go mad.

He missed women. It wasn’t Alice Jordan be was missing now; he missed women, the varied score he had loved and the hundreds he had known slightly and the billions he had not. He missed his mother and his sister and his aunts and his ancestresses all the way back to Greatly ’Stelle.

He missed women and men and children and old people; people to fight with, to talk with, to love, to hate. One entire night he spent crying for all the people of Earth, taking care that Brennan shouldn’t hear him; crying not for what the Pak fleet could do to them but just because they weren’t here or he wasn’t there.

He spent long periods in his room with the door locked. Brennan had put the lock on it, and Brennan could have picked that lock in thirty seconds, or opened the door with a single kick; but it had a psychological effect, and Roy was grateful for it.

He missed the space. On any random beach on Earth you could run down the curve of wet hard sand between sea and shore until there was no strength left in you to do anything but breathe. On Earth you could walk forever. In his locked room aboard Protector, no longer hampered by Protector’s heavy acceleration, Roy paced endlessly between the walls.

Sometimes, alone, he cursed Brennan for using up all of the radon bombs. Otherwise he could have ridden this out in stasis. He wondered if Brennan had done it deliberately, for the company.

Sometimes he cursed Brennan for bringing him at all. A silly act for such an intelligence. At full acceleration Protector could have outrun the second and third pairs of scouts, with no need to fight. But three gravities might have injured Roy Truesdale.

He hadn’t been that much use during the battles. Had Brennan brought him only for company? Or as a kind of mascot? Or — he toyed with another idea. One of Brennan’s daughters had been named Estelle, hadn’t she? She might have passed the name to her own daughter. Greatly ’Stelle.

That was an angry thought: that he had been brought only because he belonged to the protector’s blood line, a living reminder of what Brennan was fighting for, to keep Brennan’s interest in the war alive. Because he smelled right. Roy never asked him. He didn’t really want to know.

“In a sense you’re being subjected to sensory deprivation,” Brennan told him once. That was not long before turnover, after they had tried something decidedly kooky: Brennan taking the parts of five experts of varying disciplines and accents, in a six-sided discussion of free will versus determinism. It hadn’t worked. They were both trying too hard.

Roy was losing the urge to talk.

“We’ve got all kinds of entertainment,” said Brennan, “but no conversation except mine. There’s a limit to how much illusion you can get from me. But let’s try something.”

Roy didn’t ask what he meant. He found out a few days later, when he walked into his room and found himself looking down a mountainside.

Now he spent more time in there than ever. Every so often Brennan would change the environment. The 270ш holograph vision tapes had come out of the computer memory, and they were all of worlds other than Earth. After a few false starts he avoided scenes that involved people. The people never noticed Roy; they behaved as if he did not exist. That was bad.

He would sit for hours, staring out into the faintly unearthly landscapes, wishing that he could walk out into them. Too much of that was bad too, and he would have to turn them off.

It was during such a time — with the walls around him nothing but walls — that he began wondering again as to just what Brennan was planning on Home.

The Pak scouts had veered wide during the pass around the neutron star. Now their enormous turning radius had finally aimed them toward Home; but their 5.5 gee acceleration would not compensate for the time they had lost. They were out of the running as far as Protector was concerned. And Home would have ten months to prepare for their arrival.

A peaceful people was not that easily persuaded to prepare for all-out defense. It took time to convert factories to make weapons. Just how big a threat was one pair of Pak scouts?

“I’m sure they could destroy a planet,” Brennan said judiciously when Roy put it to him. “A planet is a big target, and environmental systems are delicate, and it can’t dodge like a Bussard ramjet. Aside from that, a Pak scout was probably designed to wreck planets. If it can’t do that, what good is it?”

“We’ll have less than a year to get ready for them.”

“Stop worrying. That’s long enough. Home already has message lasers that can reach Earth. That speaks well for their accuracy and their power. We’ll use them as cannon. And I’ve got designs for induced gravity weapons.”

“But will they build them? These are peaceful people in a stable society!”

“We’ll talk them into it.”

Sitting in his room, staring into an empty, stormy seascape, Roy wondered at Brennan’s optimism. Had he grown unfamiliar with the way breeders thought? “I’ve stopped taking chances,” Brennan had said once. Well?

There had never been a war on Home, according to the tapes of their communications to Earth. Their novels rarely dealt in violence. Once they had used fusion bombs to shape harbors; but then they had the harbors, and now they didn’t even have the factories any more.

Had Brennan seen something in their novels — a buried violence — that Roy had not?

One day it occurred to him that there was a solution.