“Now, now.” She rose from her seat and walked toward the game dome. At the sound of that admonishing tone Hawkins hunched lower in his chair, while Shimoda’s face slid into its contemplative-Buddha mode.

For Follingston-Heath and Iranaputra there was no escape. Follingston-Heath fiddled with his monocle while Iranaputra looked around wildly. But the doors to the porch were shut against a wind which had come up earlier in the day, and blatant flight from the rec room would have been impolite. He envied the blue jay swinging on the feeder outside its winged freedom.

“Stop fighting and tell me what you think of this.” She held up the sketch she’d been working on.

Follingston-Heath breathed a barely imperceptible sigh of relief. Perhaps she wasn’t going to lecture them on the medical evils of verbal altercation after all. He focused gratefully on the drawing.

“It’s us. Vic and I.” He glanced up at her. “I thought you were working on one of your conceptual schematics.”

“I don’t spend all my time on schematics,” she reminded him. “I can draw other things, you know.”

“Most assuredly you can. Can’t she, Vic, old chap?”

Iranaputra glanced murderously at his friend and opponent, forcing a smile as he regarded the sketch. “Oh, yes, to be sure.” He ran a hand continuously through his black hair, a nervous gesture he was unable to repress. “Yes, I see. It is Wesley and I, fighting.”

Gelmann smiled. “I think I’ve caught your mood pretty well.” A finger traced the drawing. “See here, Victor, how I’ve shown the veins in your neck standing out?”

Iranaputra felt compelled to comment on the accuracy of the observation. “Surely that is exaggerated, Mina. I could not have been that angry.”

“You were at that moment.”

Follingston-Heath frowned at the picture. “And I am surely not so standoffish.”

“Feh! You haven’t got a nonsupercilious bone in your body, Wesley. You should be ashamed of yourself, taunting poor Victor like that.”

“I was not taunting him.” Follingston-Heath felt his blood pressure start to rise. “He accused me of cheating.”

“You were cheating,” Iranaputra insisted, but without as much determination this time. You couldn’t muster a whole lot of determination in Gelmann’s presence. She sort of sucked it all up, like a giant emotional vacuum cleaner, transformed it, and then threw it all back at you in the guise of help and concern.

“Don’t be like that, Victor.” He winced. A confident man in his early seventies, who’d spent years supervising several hundred employees, and she made him wince. It was a skill that never ceased to astonish.

Shimoda had theorized that women of Gelmann’s ilk possessed a sixth sense or power, a kind of nimbus of concentrated maternal energy tendrils which they could fling out with a single word or gesture to stun anyone within range like emotional nematocysts.

Iranaputra knew when he was beaten. “I know, I know,” he mumbled, not looking at her. “I should not let it get to me, it is only a game, it is bad for my blood pressure. I know.”

“Well, you don’t have to make it sound like I’m badgering you into admitting it.”

“I’m sorry.” Iranaputra wanted to scream. Displaying true friendship, Follingston-Heath came to his rescue.

“I was not cheating, but in the interests of good fellowship, I think we should call the contest a draw. How about it, old nut?”

“Well, why not?” He smiled thinly.

“There, now isn’t that better?” declared Gelmann. Neither man chose to comment.

“Can we have a look at your picture?” Follingston-Heath indicated the drawing.

“Of course, Wesley.” She handed over the sketch pad.

“Alone?” The good Colonel fought to keep a note of hopeful desperation from his voice. “If the artist is present during moments of criticism, it tends to influence the observer.”

“Don’t flatter me, Wesley. I know that you were trained in diplomacy as well as other tactics.”

“Sorry. It’s part of me.” He smiled at her, then turned to his friend, bending close over the sketch. “See what she’s done with the noble and dramatic line of my chin, here?” Iran’s gaze descended dubiously to the sketch.

“There is nothing noble or dramatic about it, my friend. It is a chin, like everyone else’s chin.”

“Ah, but see how she’s done the shading here? And here, on the neck.” Gelmann wandered away as Follingston-Heath discoursed, and the two men were able to relax.

Actually the picture wasn’t half-bad, Iranaputra had to admit. Even her rendering of the game dome was stylish.

Hawkins tried to withdraw into himself as she approached, wishing he was back in his apartment, while Shimoda kept his eyes riveted on the game, calmly awaiting his fate.

Hands clasped behind her, she halted and gazed at the checkers board. “Playing checkers?”

Her predilection for stating the obvious was one of her less endearing traits, Hawkins knew. “No, Mina. We’re symbolically realigning the space-time continuum.”

“Now, Wallace.” He flinched, afraid she was going to rumple his hair playfully. He did not care to have that discordant tangle of gray and brown rumpled, playfully or otherwise. Shaven Shimoda, of course, was immune to such a sally. Though she had been known to pat him reassuringly on his pate from time to time.

“Always the kidder,” she told Hawkins. “I see that Kahei is winning, as usual.”

“Not as usual,” said Shimoda placidly. “I’m having a good game, that’s all.” He glanced at his opponent. “Wal always moves in such a hurry. Sometimes it works for him, unless I manage to keep my perspective.” He blinked. “Why am I telling you all this, which you know already?”

“Beats me.” She cocked her head knowingly to one side. “You men are always making these confessions to me. I don’t know why. Have you heard anything new about the crazed-machine problem?”

“No.” Hawkins leaned back resignedly. The checker game with Shimoda had slipped into Gelmann-stasis. There would be no continuing until she moved on. Only then could normal life resume. “I don’t suppose you have?”

His sarcasm was thick as blackstrap molasses. As usual, it had no effect on her. “Well, since you ask. There’s news from the Candomblean League. You know how those people are. That peculiar religion of theirs.”

“They have a good time.” Hawkins wondered why he felt a sudden urge to defend the spiritual precepts of distant Candomble.

“Hedonists, the lot of them. An irresponsible bunch. Anyway, it seems that one of their innumerable holidays was about to conclude on Amado III when the climate controller monitoring equipment took itself off-line to go hunting for this mythical suprahuman intelligence. The most noticeable consequence was that heavy unprogrammed cloud-seeding resulted in six centimeters of snow. Can you imagine? Have you ever seen pictures of the Candomblean worlds? All tropical, or at least warm.

“So everyone was running around freezing in their silly little costumes and clothes, all strings and diaphanous material and that nonsensical peek-a-boo stuff the women there seem so fond of.”

A faint gleam came into Hawkins’s eye. He’d seen pictures of the famous Candomblean festivals. The participants wore very little indeed. Hawkins was old, but he wasn’t dead, and there was nothing wrong with his memory.

Gelmann was going on about failed robotics and how they didn’t build optical circuits the way they used to, but Hawkins’s mind was filled with images of scantily clad young women. The sheer bulk of her spiel, however, eventually drove them away.

“You would think that in this day and age someone could fix these things, find the source of this problem, but oh no, they don’t know where to start, the schmucks.”

“We all know that robotics were your specialty, Mina.” Shimoda’s tone was tolerant. “If only they would ask for your help.”

“I would know what to do,” she insisted. “At least how to begin.”

“Has it occurred to you,” said Hawkins solemnly, “that if the cream of the cybernetics staff of the federation and the Keiretsu and the Eeck and the Victoria League can’t figure out what the problem is, it might be even beyond your grasp?”

“No,” she replied blithely. “My perspective is different, I’m sure. I have more experience. I always had a special relationship with the machinery I worked on, you should excuse my saying so.”