"A victory of sorts," Yanevich observes. "Made them stand back for a minute."

By evading rather than risking engaging the Climber's missiles, our pursuer has complicated her inherent velocity vector with respect to her quarry. We can take hyper now and shake her easily.

Unfortunately, she has a lot of friends.

The enemy missiles head our way. We're the biggest moving target visible. The mother's energy batteries splatter them.

This is a complex game, played in all the accessible dimensions and levels of reality. The Training Climbers give the home team an edge. Each of then* appearances scrapes another hunter off the mother's trail, making her escorts more formidable against any attack.

"We're almost clear," Yanevich says. "Won't be long before we do a few false hyper takes to see what shakes."

The first of those comes up a half hour later. It lasts only four seconds. The mother jumps a scant four light-seconds. Her pursuers try to stay with her, but tune lags talcing and dropping hyper distort their formation. While they're trying to adjust, the mother skips twice more, in a random program generated beforehand and made available to our escort.

They're not dummies over there. They react quickly and well. They have one grand advantage over us. They have instantaneous interstellar communications gear, or instel. All their ships are equipped. We only have a handful scattered throughout the Fleet. Our normal communications are limited to the velocity of light.

Yanevich says, "Now a test fly to see if they've been holding anything back. And they are. They always are."

This tune there's a half hour interval between the take and drop hyper alarms. In the interim the opposition throws in a pair of singleships. They bust in out of deep space almost too fast for detection. For a few seconds a lot of firepower flashes around. No one gets hurt. The singleships bounce off the escort screen.

"Now a lot of stutter steps and mixing so they lose track of which ship is which. We hope." The mother's maneuvers have gained her a margin hi which she can commence grander maneuvers.

Alarms jangle almost continuously while the flotilla mixes its trails. I await the final maneuver, which I assume will be a flower, with every ship screaming off in a different direction, getting gone before the other firm decides which to chase.

I guess right. "What now?"

"We have lead time now," Yanevich assures me. "Next stop, Fuel Point."

First Climb

Christ, am I blown out. Seems like a week since I got any sleep. A couple catnaps since I left Sharon... Let's don't even think about that. An incident. Best forgotten. Sordid. And already looking good in retrospect.

The sleeplessness wouldn't be bad if it weren't for the stress. Enemy ships out there... Maybe we see them and maybe we don't. No wonder these men are lunatics.

We're in hyper now. I have to get some sleep while I can. If I don't sleep before Fuel Point I'll go hyper-bent when we go norm and the pressure comes on again.

The others aren't doing badly. But they're accustomed to it. Most of them have been here before.

Damn! Why did I pick such a crazy way to make a living?

A dull day is about done. Just finished a second bout with my hammock. Sleeping there is worse than I expected. Someone is going on or coming off watch all the time. And every man of them just has to stop to use the sink. If they aren't washing themselves or their socks, they're using the damned thing as a urinal.

This flying donut has only one head. Bradley says there were three in the original design. One low- grav and two universal-gravity stools. That last two went the way of the shower. Eliminated in favor of increased weaponry mass.

The lines form before watch change. The men going on watch want to take care of their business because they'll have no chance later. Those who need to squat line up outside the Admiral's stateroom. The others just hose into the sink and sprite with a flash of water. Sometimes it takes a half hour to get them all by.

Then it's time for a repeat performance from the retiring watch. That's good for another half hour. And all the while they're jostling and cursing one another, banging me around, and digging into their endless inventories of crude jokes and improbable anecdotes.

I'd hate to wash anything hi that sink. The odor alone keeps me awake.

I've been looking for a better home. And have concluded that said place doesn't exist, though I should be admired for my persistence. Like the men looking for the eido.

Eido. I thought the word came from eidolon when first I heard it. Ghost. Specter. Spook. Someone you don't see, slipping around behind you, watching over your shoulder. But no, it comes from eidetic, as in eidetic memory.

Crews have a game with which they begin each patrol. An intellectual recreation caused by, I

suspect, a grave error in Psych Bureau thinking. In extended hard times the eido might become a more abused scapegoat than the creature I call the gritch.

The eido is a human Mission Recorder, a crewman with a hypnotically augmented memory. He's supposed to see, hear, and remember everything, including the emotional impact of events. He's always one of the first-timers, supposedly because that maximizes objectivity.

This is a facet of Climber life they don't mention on the networks. A puzzling facet. When first I heard of the eido, I thought him a pointless redundancy. Then I began to wonder. He's a tool of Psych Bureau, not Climber Command. The Mission Recorder works for Command. The distinction is critical. Psych looks out for the men. The differences between Bureau and Command often become a wide, fiery chasm.

Psych is the only power in the universe able to overrule the Admiral, it seems.

Command's task is to turn the war around. Psych is supposed to put the right people in the right places so the job gets done efficiently. More importantly, Psych is supposed to minimize the damage done people's minds.

The point of the hunt here is to spot the eido so you know when to hold your tongue. You don't tell anyone else when you find him. You just stand back and grin when somebody says something that might haunt him later.

Now I understand the crew's coolness. It'll be a pain getting them to open up. I'm a prime suspect.

I've been running with the pack in hopes I can show them that I'm not the head spy. My work would be hard enough without the eido crap. Navy men are paranoid about having their secret thoughts fall into Psych Bureau's hands. Out here they're equally paranoid about their illustrious supreme commander.

A while ago I asked the First Watch Officer if he knew some way I could make the men more comfortable. He grinned that savage, sneering grin of his and said, "You sure the eido knows what he is?"

Hell of a man, friend Yanevich. Always knows the right thing to say to send you howling off into the swamps of your mind, hunting the million-word answer to his dozen-word question.

Fuel Point is a big patch of nothing in untenanted space within a tetrahedron of stars, the nearest of which is four light-years away. A look through my video screen shows me nothing familiar, though I know we aren't more than ten lights out of Canaan. Captured, I could reveal nothing.

"Has anyone ever been captured? In space?"

"I never heard about anybody," Fisherman replies. "Go ask the Patriot. He keeps up on that stuff."

Carmon says, "I don't know, Lieutenant. Not that I've heard of, anyway. Have we ever captured any of them?"

Well, yes, we have. But I can't tell him so. I'm not supposed to know myself.

A continuous shudder runs through the ship, transmitted from the mother. She has a lot of velocity to shed before we match courses for fueling. Throdahl has an open carrier feed into the Operations address speaker. Occasionally we hear chatter from someone aboard the mother, trying to contact the vessels we're to meet.

Junghaus looks concerned. "Maybe they didn't get away."

Last word we had, the tanker was dodging after an accidental brush with an enemy singleship.

"Maybe they called the heavies in time." He seems genuinely stricken.

"Then we'll just have to go back."

"No we won't. We'll stay here till they send another tanker."

Aha! comes the Light.

"Got you on the upside, Achernar," a remote voice says. "Tone it and decline. Metis, over."

Fisherman visibly relaxes. "That's the tug. Guess we were sending off the band.There's so much

security stuff sometimes, mere's mixups in stuff like wavelengths."