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By Root 1694 0

robot’s voice, Lando thought. It annoyed him; deception was supposed to be one of his major stocks-in-trade, and Vuffi Raa understood that as well as anyone. Besides, how else were they supposed to have gotten through the fleet? He lit a cigar and gazed out through the wedge-sectioned port at the Oswaft floating gently ahead of the motionless Falcon. Blockade or not, it was good to be out of circulation, beyond the reach of what passed for civilization—and of hired assassins—however temporarily. Knowing the navy, he had a pessimistic notion just how safe they were within the nebula and for how long. But he had a plan for that, too, and encouraged by his relatively easy victory over the fleet thus far, he intended to relax.

“I do not understand,” Lehesu protested in response to something Vuffi Raa had said when Lando wasn’t listening. “I believed that I had seen you and the Falcon utterly destroyed. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know it was you, but …”

Satisfaction suffused the droid’s tone, “It was my master’s idea, really. During the time I described to you, while he was spying upon the enemy under the guise of selling things and gambling, I fitted out a cylinder of powdered metallic shavings mixed with various volatiles, and attached it to the stern of the Falcon. This we left unshielded, so that the cruiser’s rays, upon striking it, would convey the illusion that …”

I wonder what we would have done if they’d simply used a tractor beam, Lando mused. He’d counted on the guns’ being manned by trigger-happy jerks, and, as usual, he’d been right. For a while he watched Lehesu, not really paying attention as that being and the little droid communicated. They seemed to get along automatically, he thought, had little trouble achieving understanding. Idly, he wondered why. For all the goodwill in the galaxy, he had to struggle to identify with a creature who had never known a planet’s surface, for whom empty space was a comfortable home, who could shift light-years at a time within it, somehow avoiding the necessity for those careful computations the gambler had learned so painfully as an inexperienced captain.

Against the charcoal backdrop of the nebula, a handful of stars twinkled merrily through the transparent innards of the space being. Lando laughed, dismissing every doubt and trouble he was feeling with a shake of his head, took another drag on his cigar through a wide grin, then rose from his seat.

“Pardon me, old gumball machine, if you can, but I’m going aft to change into my bathing togs. Care to join me?” Without waiting for a reply, he stubbed out the cigar and pulled himself between the jumpseats toward the rear of the cockpit.

The robot stirred from his conversation with the Oswaft. “If I interpret you correctly, Master, I think I should like that very much.” His five chromium-plated tentacles glittered over the control panels. “I shall inform our friend, and place the ship on automatic.”

“Swell. Don’t call me master.”

Ducking through the doorway, Lando floated along the corridor until he reached a locker where he changed from the well-worn shipclothes he’d been wearing for the navy’s benefit, into a spacesuit. By the time he’d sealed all the fittings and run through the checklist programmed into it, Vuffi Raa, who hadn’t needed to change, caught up with him. Together they made their way to the airlock and cycled out through it into the void.

Lehesu was there to meet them.

It was the gambler’s first good look at the ThonBoka from the inside, and the sight was eerie. Behind him, the nearly circular mouth of the nebula displayed the sky as he was accustomed to seeing it, a dense scattering of stars—with the occasional intrusion of an eruption of destructive energies from the fleet.

Everywhere else, the gas and dust shut out the rest of the universe with a solid wall of deep gray that appeared slightly phosphorescent, and through which gigantic bolts of lightning played intermittent natural counterpoint to the unnatural discharges from the navy. The eye, perhaps the mind itself, violently rejected proper