Very carefully, she thought back.
It was hard to distil a sense of time out of the chaos of memory. It had been as if she had spent most of her life in a whirlpool, performing such meaningless actions as piloting a ship, opening airlocks, making equations on pads that flowed away from her and disappeared.
There had been periods when the turmoil of the whirlpool had abated - sane periods where she had hovered on the brink of insanity but never quite succumbed. There had been the first arrival at the Shifter, looking for the knowledge she had found on Golund. There had been a landing on Entropium, and then a chaotic journey among the planets through space that contained no laws, only a turbulent inconsistency; landing, finding nothing, keeping a hold on her sanity which kept threatening to crack; and finally to Roth where her mind had gone completely. Aware of warmth. Then away from Roth in a manner she could never remember, back to Entropium; a man who asked her questions - Jon Renark - and the horror of half-sanity finally smashed by the cataclysm that had turned Entropium into rubble; the dash for the Hauser, crashing on a peaceful planet - Ekiversh, perhaps? - and resting, resting - then on to Roth… chaos… warmth… chaos…
Why?
What had kept pulling her back to Roth, so that every time she returned her sanity had given out a little more, a little more? But the last time there had been something extra - a turning point, as if she had gone full circle, on the road back to sanity. She had met entities there, things of formless light that had spoken to her. No, that was probably a hallucination…
With a healthy sigh she opened her eyes. Willow Kovacs stood over her. Mary recognised the woman who had comforted her. Mary smiled.
'Where's my husband?' she said quietly, and composed her features.
'Feel better now?' Willow said. The smile she gave in reply was sorrowful, but Mary saw it was not her that Willow pitied.
'Much. Is Adam…?'
'He's been recruited to play this Game.' Briefly Willow explained all she knew. 'He should be getting in touch soon.'
Mary nodded. She felt rested, at peace. The horror of her madness was a faint memory which she pushed further and further back. Never again, she thought. That was it - I'm all right now. That was the last time. She felt herself drifting into a deeper, more natural sleep.
Roffrey and Talfryn entered Selinsky's lab. Roffrey, huge and powerful, his black beard seeming to bristle with vitality, said:
'More tests, professor?'
'No captain. We wish merely to question you on one or two points which have cropped up. To tell you the truth, neither of you appears to possess any strong trait which can account for your besting so many opponents. We have discovered that the reason you were able to beat those ships with such apparent ease was that every one of their Gamblers was beaten - put out of action by some force so powerful that it crossed space without any sending equipment to aid it. Their receivers turned the emanations into a force which destroyed their minds completely. But you possess no qualities of sufficient strength which could account for this. It is as if you needed an… amplifier of some kind. Can you explain that?'
Roffrey shook his head.
But Talfryn was frowning and said nothing. He appeared thoughtful. 'What about Mary?' he said slowly.
'Yes, that may be it!' Zung looked up from his notes.
'No, it isn't,' Roffrey said grimly.
Talfryn broke in: 'She's the one. Your wife, Roffrey. She was absolutely crazy on Entropium. She travelled between the Shifter's planets when space was wild and chaotic. She must have had a tremendous reserve of control somewhere in her if she could stand what she did. She could have picked up all kinds of strange impressions that worked on her brain. She did, in fact. She's our amplifier!'
'Well, what about it?' Roffrey turned round and looked at the three scientists standing there eagerly, live vultures who had spotted a dying traveller.
Selinsky sighed.
'I think we're right,' he said.
Mary stared out at the hazy light of the fleet dropping through darkness towards the far-off stars gleaming like lights at the end of a long, long tunnel.
'Adam Roffrey,' she said aloud, and wondered what she would feel when she saw him.
'How did you get to the Shifter?' Willow asked from where she sat.
'I ran away from Adam. I got tired of his restless life, his constant hatred of civilisation and ordered society. I even tired of his conversation and his jokes.
'Yet I loved him. Still do. I'm an anthropologist by profession, and took advantage of Adam's trips to the remote outworlds to keep my hand in. One time, we landed on Golund - the planet with signs of having been visited by a race from another galaxy. I hunted around the planet but got no more than the scant information available. So I left Adam and went to the Shifter when it materialised in our space-time, hoping to find some clues there. I searched the Shifter system, I searched it and clung to my sanity by a thread. But Roth was the last straw, Roth finished me.
She turned back to look at Willow, smiling. 'But now I feel saner than I've ever done - and I'm thinking of settling down if I can. Becoming a good little wife to Adam. What do you think of that, Willow?' Her eyes were serious.
'I think you're nuts,' Willow said tactlessly. 'Don't sell out for the easy life. Look at me…'
'It's been hard, though,' said Mary, staring at the floor. Tar too hard, Willow.'
'I know,' she said.
The communicator whistled. Mary went to it, operated the control.
It was Roffrey.
'Hello, Adam,' she said. Her throat felt constricted. She put her hand to it.
"Thank God,' he said, his weary face impassive.
She knew she still loved him. That alone was comforting.
'You got a doctor, then?' he said.
'No,' she said smiling. 'Don't ask me how - just accept that I'm sane. Something happened - the fight with the aliens, something on Roth, maybe just Willow's nursing. I don't know. I feel a new woman.'
His face softened as he relaxed. He grinned at her. 'I can't wait,' he said. 'Can you and Willow come over to the Game Ship right away? That's what I contacted you for - before I knew.'
'Certainly,' she said. 'But why?'
'The people here think that all four of us, as a sort of team, managed to beat off the alien sense-impression attack. They want to give you a few routine tests along with Willow. Okay?'
Tine,' she said. 'Send over a launch to collect us and we'll be with you.'
She thought she saw him frown just before he switched out.
Much later, Selinsky screwed up his tired face and pushed his hand over it. He shook his head briskly as if to clear it, staring at the two women who, under sedatives, lay asleep in the testing chairs.
'There's certainly something there,' he said, rolling a small light-tube between his palms. 'Why couldn't we have tested all four of you together? A stupid oversight.' He glanced at the chronometer on his right index finger.
'I've no idea why, but Asquiol is to broadcast to the entire fleet in a little while. About the Game, I think. I hope the news is good - we could do with some.'
Roffrey was ill at ease, brooding, paying scant attention to the scientist. He stared down at Mary and he suddenly felt weak, ineffectual, as if he no longer played a part in her life, and could hardly control his own. An unusual feeling - connected, perhaps, with the shape that events seemed to be taking…
Now she remembered. As she slept, physically, her mind was alert. She remembered landing on Roth, of stumbling over the surface, of falling down an abyss that took her upwards; of the strange, warm things that had entered her brain… She remembered all this because she could sense something similar quite close to her. She reached out to try and contact it, but failed - only just failed. She felt like a climber on a cliff-face who was reaching for the hand of the climber just above, the fingers stretching out carefully, desperately, but not quite touching.