Pierce tried to hear the conversation but couldn"t make out much of it.

Finally the general shut it off and put it back on his belt. He gestured to Pierce. "Let"s go," he ordered.

The human had a sinking sensation in his stomach. "They found the proper forms?"

The alien shook his ma.s.sive head. "No, not there.Forward. Into your cabin. It seems your nav computer and ours have been talking to each other, and we may get some answers now."

Pierce looked at the place and shook his head in misery. "Did you have to make this much of a mess?"

The alien who"d found the log and the other papers shrugged. "Standard procedure from the Ransacking Manual."

"I tried to talk him out of it," the computer"s voice came to them. "I really did! But no, he just kept quoting some stupid rules and regulations and going at it. I had to tell him where everything was to keep it to this level."

Pierce was thunderstruck. "You told him where the log and papers were? That"s treason!"

"I knew it! I knew it!" moaned the computer. "I try to do something decent and humane, not to mention saving tens of thousands of credits of wanton destruction, and all I get are insults and criticism!"

"Enough of that!" snapped the alien general. "We understand you have the answer to all this."

"The answer to what?" the computer came back. "To this!" the alien responded with a sweeping gesture.

"But you already know the answer to that," the computer told him.

"Not this!" the general almost shouted. "The answers to who and what you and this creature really are!"

"Must you use that tone of voice?" the computer admonished. "I"m really quite sensitive, you know. Here I am, working as hard as I can and doing whatever I can and all I get is abuse, shouting, insults! I have half a mind not to tell you anything at all-so there!"

"Half a mind is right," the general muttered. Pierce idly wondered if the creatures had problems with high blood pressure. If they didn"t before, they certainly would now.

"You can see now why I keep a written log," he said quietly.

The general glared at him. "You! Computer! You"ll answer what questions I put to you when I put them to you or I"ll start disa.s.sembling you module by module!"

"Beat me! Whip me!" the computer cried. "See if I care!"

"Start dismantling the d.a.m.ned thing," the general growled. "Slowly. I want to hear it suffer."

"Go ahead," the computer responded petulantly. "It won"t matter. You"ll just be cutting off your snout to spite your face, is all. If you take me apart, how will you ever get the answers?"

"We already have the answers," the general responded confidently. "What you know our computer knows, too."

"But she won"t tell you if you"re mean to me," the computer replied. "We"ve become quite close, you know." The general seemed totally exasperated. "Look, will you just answer the questions?"

The computer was silent for a moment. Finally it said, "Only if you apologize."

"Apologize?"

Pierce now knew that, indeed, the aliens could suffer from high blood pressure.

"I am a general! Commander of the Invasion Strike Force!" the alien roared. "I do not apologize. People apologize to me!"

"That"s just like all you military types," the computer said knowingly. "Always marching, yelling orders, screaming "Do this!" and "Do that!" Never once considering that a little politeness and civility will get you the same thing!"

The general seemed about to say something in response when his communicator buzzed again. He answered it, then shut it off and reclipped it with some violence. He turned and looked at the other members of the boarding party.

"It seems our computer has been talking a little too much to this thing," he snarled. "That was Captain Glondor himself. Says I should apologize. Says that our computer just threatened to swab our decks with the sewage water unless I do."

The others seemed suitably shocked, but Pierce, for one, felt a little better. It was the first time that the d.a.m.ned computer had actually come in handy.

"All right, all right, I"m sorry," mumbled the general. "What was that?" the computer asked.

"I said I"m sorry, d.a.m.n it!" the general roared. "Now can we get on with this?"

"Say please."

Had the deck been made of anything more fragile, the heat from the general"s fury would have melted it. "All right! All right! Please!"

"Please what?"

Slow disa.s.sembly of Pierce"s entire ship was clearly the only image preserving the general"s sanity.

"Please give me the information we seek. Who are you? Who is this man? How is it that you both speak English and how is it that you can converse so freely in a common computer language on our frequencies with our own computer?"

"Say pretty please with sugar on it," the computer teased.

Before the general broke completely and went on a rampage that might include him, Pierce decided to step in.

"Pretty please with sugar on it," said the human.

"That doesn"t count," responded the computer. "You didn"t ask me for anything."

"If you answer, I"ll explain page 187 of f.a.n.n.y Hill," Pierce offered tantalizingly.

The computer was silent for a moment. Then it said, "Promise?"

"Cross my heart," Pierce replied sincerely.

"All right. I"ll do it. But only because it"s you. It"s really quite simple, you know. There"s no deception here at all. You are Millard Fillmore Pierce. So is he. You"re both the same person, you see."

"Huh?" said both Pierces at once.

"It was that new drive you put into your ship," the computer explained to the reptilian Pierce.

"It takes a tremendous amount of energy to cross from the Milky Way all the way to Andromeda, and it"s all uncharted s.p.a.ce. You were doing fine, but you never should"ve taken that left turn at New Albuquerque. It put you directly in the path of a nice, fat black hole-one of the better ones around, I think. You got whipped around so you were heading the wrong way-back into the galaxy you were trying to leave. And you got too close to the event horizon. If you had been going on conventional drive you"d have been sucked in and crushed to the size of a pinhead. As it was, you pa.s.sed through so fast and with so much energy, well-you squirted out the other side."

"The other side?" the general sputtered. "What do you mean?"

"Surely you know what a black hole is," the computer responded in the tone of one who is speaking to a small child. "It"s a chunk of dead star that"s collapsed inward so densely that nothing can get out, not even light. It just keeps compressing and compressing and compressing and, well, there"s a limit. All that energy"s got to come out somewhere, you know."

"Get to the point." The general sighed.

"I hope you won"t blame your own computer, General," the computer went on. "After all, she"s really quite competent and far more advanced than I am. It"s just that the new drive was never really tested under true field conditions and there was no way she could have known."

"I forgive her! I forgive her!" the general muttered defeatedly. "So what happened to us when we went in the black hole?"

"Oh-I thought that would be obvious, even to a noncomputer," came the reply. "Still, I guess I"m just too optimistic about you organic life-forms. It"s hard to adjust to the basic idea that one"s creators aren"t greater than oneself."

"All right, I admit defeat, I admit slowness, I admit anything!" the general responded. "Only where did we come out?"

Pierce thought for a moment that he was going to witness a giant reptilian warrior cry like a baby, but the best the general could do was a plaintive whisper.

"A white hole, of course," the computer told them. "All that energy can"t be stored forever. It has to come out somewhere, and that somewhere is a white hole. There are a few around, mostly at the centers of galaxies. And since there"s no white hole near most of the black holes we know, there is only one place where they could come out."

"Where?" pleaded the general.

"In a parallel universe, naturally," the computer said. "Entropy requires them. You"re almost exactly where you left, only one universe over."

Pierce stood there a moment, digesting this, then decided he didn"t like it.

"But-but they"re lizards!" he protested..

At almost the same moment the reptilian alien who also called himself Pierce exclaimed, "But-but he"s an ape!"

"So what do you want, everything?" the computer replied to them both. "An amazing amount of your dual histories is parallel, until quite recently, anyway. What"s a little thing like a different turn of evolution between families? You living creatures are so strange, sometimes. Take, for example, their own ship"s computer. Strangely different in design, yet, somehow, so attractively different . . ." It lapsed into a wistful sort of silence.

The two Pierces stared at each other, saying nothing, but the human"s mind was racing.

Two universes, the same start, yet in one the mammals had risen to prominence after the huge and efficient dinosaurs had died out. In their universe, obviously, only the large ones didn"t make it. Maybe the catastrophe or whatever it was that killed off the race in our universe didn"t happen in his, Pierce thought. It would explain why the alien ship was so warm and, well, stinking. And yet, somehow, civilizations had arisen on each world that bore an almost uncanny resemblance to the one next to it. Language, perhaps most of the culture, who knew? Perhaps, somehow, they were linked by more than common histories. Perhaps, subconsciously, each individual in this universe was linked, somehow, to his reptilian brother in the other. It opened some fascinating possibilities.

"This is great!" he told his reptilian counterpart, relaxing a bit. "This makes us . . . well . . .

brothers, I guess." He put out his hand. The alien slapped him hard and made a menacing gesture with his gun.

"I don"t swallow all that for a second," the alien Pierce snapped. "In fact, I find the very idea repugnant and, more importantly, beside the point. Even if you looked just like me and everything it wouldn"t change anything at all, except maybe get you a little gold star when we take over."

Chastened, the human rubbed his side and gulped. "Wh-what do you mean, "take over"?"

"We set out to conquer, to extend the glorious rule of the Emperor Edsel x.x.xVI to other galaxies. This qualifies as another galaxy to me, bud. It all being so familiar just makes it easier.

Wonder if we have the same defense codes? Hmmm . . ."

"Wait a minute!" Pierce protested. "You mean-you"re still going to declare war?"

"Of course not," his reptilian counterpart responded indignantly. "Only weaklings bother to do that. We"ll just launch our surprise attacks and destroy everything and everybody we can"t subjugate."

Pierce looked to heaven and sat down, hard. "Oh, no!" he murmured, more to himself than the aliens. "Here we go again."

"Excuse me," the computer broke in, "but that absolutely ravishing computer of yours just asked me to relay a message to you boys."

The four reptilian warriors looked up. "What is it?" their leader snapped.

"Don"t take that tone with me," the computer admonished. "I have feelings, you know."

It was the alien"s turn to look heavenward and mutter. Instead he just sighed and said, "All right. I"m sorry. Will you please give me the message?"

"That"s better," the computer told him. "A little respect, that"s all I ask. Just a little respect. I don"t know why I have to keep going through this with you people again and again. Heaven knows . .

Pierce noted that the temperature of the room was rising once again.

"Would you please, Mr. Computer Sir, just give me the d.a.m.ned message?"

Pierce tried to suppress a smile and wondered if pointy-toothed carnivores could stand teeth- gnashing for very long.

The computer sighed. "Oh, very well. I don"t know exactly where we are even now, but it certainly is a crowded place. There"s a huge ship bearing down on us, armed to the teeth."

The aliens snapped to attention. "How big?" their leader asked crisply.

"That"s relative," the computer responded. "Compared to this ship, for example, it"s quite large. Huge, in fact."

"Compared to ours, you . . ." the general fumed, then calmed down when he realized where he was headed. "You . . . computer," he managed.

"Oh, perhaps ten percent of yours, no more," the machine told them. "Still, it seems very fast and heavily armed."

The general turned to the others. "We have to get back to the ship," he told them. "We may be needed in case of a fight." He turned to Pierce. "You-don"t try anything. You"re still hitched to us by tractor beam, remember. Any attempt to disengage will mean your instant obliteration- clear?"

Pierce nodded, but looked puzzled. "Why go?" he asked them. "After all, what can the four of you do to help?"

The alien stopped a moment and stared at him in amazement. "Why, we"re the army. The combat arm."

Pierce frowned. "All of it? You"re the entire invasion army? What do the rest of you on that huge ship do?" "There are only twenty thousand on the ship," the general responded. "There"s the naval staff, of course, andthe technical staff, and the lab people, and then there"s the rest-the support troops.

You people must be dumb." And with that, he stormed out.

Pierce was suddenly alone, staring blankly at the wall. Finally he said aloud, "They"re going to conquer our galaxy with four soldiers?"

"Maybe," the computer responded. "And then again, maybe it"s the three million genetically preprogrammed eggs in their storage bins that will provide the troops."

Pierce swallowed hard and sat back down again. "H-how many eggs did you say?"

"Three million, give or take," the computer con-firmed. "h.o.r.n.y b.u.g.g.e.rs, aren"t they?"

There seemed nothing to say to that, so instead he asked, "Can you tell me anything about the new ship? Is it one of ours? Is it attacking, ignorant, or what?"

"I can"t tell about their intellectual capacities," the machine responded, "but I would certainly say that it is from our own universe, is well armed but of no military arm I"ve ever seen or heard of before, and does in fact appear to be attacking-all of which, of course, is quite irrelevant."

"Irrelevant? Why?"

"Because there is no way it can stand up to the dreadnought we"re attached to. They"ll be lucky to be captured at the speed and angle of attack they"re using. I"d say they have about seventy seconds before they are blown out of existence."