Krake was careful with all the instruments in the radio-clave, giving each one its full time in the germ-destroying radiation, carefully setting each one down in a sterile bed of cotton with his gloved hand. But he could not help listening for sounds from outside. He had not forgotten that silent, petrified row of killer machines, immobile no more than a dozen meters away; he knew that that huge, strange Sh'shrane spaceship was still just outside the hull of the Hind. He knew most of all that his ship had been boarded by inimical aliens, and against them he had been as helpless as a child.
But it was all so incredible! No ship could have caught them in wave-drive! He could hardly accept the fact that he had seen what he had seen . . . especially could not believe that they had been reprieved by—by whatever it was that was living in the body of the Taur, Thrayl. It was all too much. Too many shocks. Too many marvels. . . .
He closed his mind to it all. He hardly even glanced at what was happening on the operating table. He took the soiled scalpels and forceps as Daisy Fay or Marco handed them to him, cleaned them, sterilized them, readied them for their next use—and went on doing that, for hours he did not count.
It was only when Sue-ling at last said, her voice bone-weary, hardly more than a whisper, "We can close now," that he gave himself the freedom to act on his own. He turned away from the table and toward the door. Halfway along the silent, empty corridor—where were the Sh'shrane?—he began to run.
When he burst into the control room, once again, he was ready for anything—anything but what he saw.
His first look was at the screens.
What he saw there made him swear in consternation and rage. The milky glow was gone, but the sky around The Golden Hind was not empty. It was littered with the great, gleaming eggs that were the Sh'shrane spacecraft. There were hundreds of them, all in easy optical range!
He turned toward the figures at the control board, and stopped short. The Taur was gazing at him peacefully. "Do nod vear," said the voice that was not Thrayl's. "They are here by my will. They are to do whad musd be done vor you."
"And what's that?" Krake asked.
The Taur did not answer, but the horns were so bright that Krake could hardly bear to look at them. He turned and looked around the control room.
It was only then that Krake's mind registered the fact that the five Sh'shrane robots were no longer in his ship. "They're gone?" he said, meaning it as a statement, worry turning it into a question.
Moon Bunderan put her hand on his. "He made them go, Francis," she explained. "He even made them clean up first."
"Clean up?" And then he saw that some of the gore that had splattered the control room was gone. Moon Bunderan nodded toward a heap of something in a corner of the room, covered with a cloth. But from under the edge of the cloth one detached red eye was glaring sighdessly at the world.
The Taur was standing there, silent and benign, regarding them with kindness. Krake opened his mouth to ask a question, but the Taur was turning toward the doorway.
Flapping and squawking, Lidun came hurrying in, his memo disk in his hand. The Turtle's first look around was as startled as Krake's. He saw the little pile of parts that was all that was left of the Proctor for Humankind and snatched the cloth off, to make sure everything was there. Only after that did he look up at the screens.
Litlun shrieked, pointing at the vast fleet outside. Moon hastened to reassure him. "It's all right, Facilitator. See, they're doing what he wants them to do."
The Turtle turned both eyes on Thrayl, then back at the screen.
And Krake saw it too. Something was happening with that vast congeries of Sh'shrane vessels. They were not just a milling mob, nor were they assembling to attack. They seemed to be forming in a kind of pattern, two-dimensional, radially symmetric. They were taking position as though creating the nodes of an immense spiderweb in space near The Golden Hind.
And in the middle of that giant web, a faint discoloration was beginning to appear.
Thrayl spoke. "They are opening the way vor you," said the organ voice. "Id is whad they do. Id is the lasd time they will do thad, vor anyone." The being was silent for a moment, then, sounding almost regretful, said, "This will take you where you wish to go."
Litlun cawed excitedly, "To the Mother planet? But it was destroyed!"
"Id was destroyed then. Id is nod destroyed now. All rime is one time," the voice said, as the great purple-blue eyes gazed once more around the room, and the huge Taur face seemed to smile.
Then, "Id is finishd," the voice said. And Thrayl's body slumped to the floor, the eyes suddenly sightless, while the horns went almost black.
Moon Bunderan cried out and flung herself on the body of her friend, hugging the huge head in her arms. For a moment she looked desolated.
Then the eyes began to live again, and the great horns once more became milkily opalescent.
The Taur sat up. Thrayl stretched, yawned, touched Moon with an affectionate paw. He muttered something to her . . . and then lay peacefully down on the floor of the control room and went to sleep.
Francis Krake shivered, aware that there was one less person in the room. "What did he say?" he demanded.
Moon looked at him wonderingly. "He said you can take the ship through that wormhole out there now, Francis," she whispered in awe. She looked down lovingly at her Taur, restored to her, and when she looked up again at the captain her eyes were brimming with glad tears. "Oh, Francis," she said, "I really think it's going to be all right now!"
The songs of the aiodoi swelled in triumph and welcoming as the one who had gone from among them returned, and they listened to the old smallsongs from Earth:
"When we talked about that other dimension we call time, we noted that the strangest thing about it is that it only goes one way. We are always going toward the future. We never see time going from the future to the past. It's as if there were an arrow on a one-way street, an 'arrow of time,' as some people call it.
"That arrow has a name. It's called 'entropy.'
"The figure of merit for the entropy of a system is the logarithm of the number of microscopic states the system can assume. You have to remember that, because you might easily get it on a test, but there's a more common way of putting it.
"Entropy can be called a measure of increasing randomness. That's why my brother-in-law calls their two-year-old 'Entropy' for short, because when she enters a room disorganization begins at once.
"We always observe that things proceed toward increasing disorder. For instance, consider a watch.
"A watch is made up of hundreds of parts, all complicated. There are gears and springs and jeweled bearings and case and cover—remember, I'm talking about the real watch, the wind-up kind, not what you all have on your wrists these days. A watch is highly ordered. If anything changes in it, it has nowhere to go but downhill. It may rust, or fall apart, or be stepped on and crushed. Or it may fall into a vat of molten metal and cease to have any recognizable identity at all. And you know that any of those things can happen, and you also know that if they do there is no way in which the disordered parts can turn themselves into a watch again.