Zebbie and Jacob decided that we all must be able to control Gay Deceiver all four ways, on the road, in the air, in trajectory (she's not a spaceship but can make high-trajectory jumps), and in space-time, i.e. among the universes to the Number of the Beast, plus variants impossible to count.

I had fingers crossed about being able to learn that, but both men assured me that they had worked out a fail-safe that would get me out of a crunch if I ever had to do it alone.

Part of the problem lay in the fact that Gay Deceiver was a one-man girl; her doors unlocked only to her master's voice or to his thumbprint, or to a tapping code if he were shy both voice and right thumb; Zeb tended to plan ahead-"Outwitting Murphy's Law," he called it, "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." (Grandma called it "The Butter-Side Down Rule.")

First priority was to introduce us to Gay Deceiver-teach her that all four voices and right thumbprints were acceptable.

That took a couple of hours, with Deety helping Zebbie. The tapping code took even less, it being based on an old military cadence-its trickiness being that a thief would be unlikely to guess that this car would open if tapped a certain way and in guessing the correct cadence. Zebbie called the cadence "Drunken Soldier." Jacob said that it was "Bumboat." Deety claimed that its title was "Pay Day," because she had heard it from Jane's grandfather.

Our men conceded that she must be right, as she had words for it. Her words included "Drunken Sailor" instead of "Drunken Soldier"-plus both "Pay Day" and "Bumboat."

Introductions taken care of, Zeb dug out Gay's anatomy, one volume her body, one her brain. He handed the latter to Deety, took the other into our basement. The next two days were easy for me, hard for Deety. I held lights and made notes on a clip board while she studied that book and frowned and got smudged and sweaty getting herself into impossible positions and once she cursed in a fashion that would have caused Jane to scold. She added, "Aunt Nanny Goat, your step-son-in-law has done things to this mass of spaghetti that no decent computer should put up with! It's a bastard hybrid."

"You shouldn't call Gay 'it,' Deety. And she's not a bastard."

"She can't hear us; I've got her ears unhooked-except that piece that is monitoring news retrieval programs-and that goes through this wire to that jack in the wall; she can talk with Zebadiah only in the basement now. Oh, I'm sure she was a nice girl until that big ape of mine raped her. Aunt Hilda, don't worry about hurting Gay's feelings; she hasn't any. This is an idiot as computers go. Any one-horse college and most high schools own or share time in computers much more complex. This one is primarily cybernetics, an autopilot plus limited digital capacity and limited storage. But the mods Zebadiah has tacked on make it more than an autopilot but not a general-purpose computer. A misbegotten hybrid. It has far more random-number options than it needs and it has extra functions that IBM never dreamed of."

"Deety, why are you taking off cover plates? I thought you were strictly a programmer? Software. Not a mechanic."

"I am strictly a software mathematician. I wouldn't attempt to modify this monster even on written orders from my lovable but sneaky husband. But how in the name of Allah can a software hack think about simplification analysis for program if she doesn't know the circuitry? The first half of this book shows what this autopilot was manufactured to do... and the second half, the Xeroxed pages, show the follies Zebadiah has seduced her into. This bleedin' bundle of chips now speaks three logic languages, interfaced-when it was built to use only one. But it won't accept any of them until it has been wheedled with Zebadiah's double talk. Even then it rarely answers a code phrase with the same answer twice in a row. What does it say in answer to: 'You're a smart girl, Gay.'?"

"I remember. 'Boss, I bet you tell that to all the girls. Over."

"Sometimes. Oftenest, as that answer is weighted to come up three times as often as any of the others. But listen to this:

"Zeb, I'm so smart I scare myself.'

"Then why did you turn me down for that raise?'

"Never mind the compliments! Take your hand off my knee!'

"Not so loud, dear. I don't want my boyfriend to hear.'

"-and there are more. There are at least four answers to any of Zebadiah's code phrases. He uses just one list, but the autopilot answers several ways for each of his phrases-and all any of them mean is either 'Roger' or 'Null program; rephrase."

"I like the idea. Fun."

"Well... I do myself. I animize a computer; I think of them as people....nd this semirandom answer list makes Gay Deceiver feel much more alive....hen she isn't. Not even versatile compared with a ground-based computer. But-" Deety gave a quick smile. "I'm going to hand my husband some surprises."

"How, Deety?"

"You know how he says, 'Good morning, Gay. How are you?' when we sit down for breakfast."

"Yes. I like it. Friendly. She usually answers, 'I'm fine, Zeb."

"Yes. It's a test code. It orders the autopilot to run a self-check throughout and to report any running instruction. Which takes less than a millisecond. If he didn't get that or an equivalent answer, he would rush straight here to find out what's wrong. But I'm going to add another answer. Or more."

"I thought you refused to modify anything."

"Aunt Hillbilly, this is software, not hardware. I'm authorized and directed to amplify the answers to include all of us, by name for each of our voices. That is programming, elementary. You say good morning to this gadget and it will-when I'm finished-answer you and call you either 'Hilda' or 'Mrs. Burroughs."

"Oh, let her call me 'Hilda.'"

"All right, but let her call you 'Mrs. Burroughs' now and then for variety."

"Well... all right. Keep her a personality."

"I could even have her call you-low weighting!-'Nanny Goat."

I guffawed. "Do, Deety, please do. But I want to be around to see Jacob's face."

"You will be; it won't be programmed to answer that way to any voice but yours. Just don't say, 'Good morning, Gay' unless Pop is listening. But here's one for my husband: Zebadiah says, 'Good morning, Gay. How are you?'-and the speaker answers, 'I'm fine, Zeb. But your fly is unzipped and your eyes are bloodshot. Are you hung over again?"

Deety is so solemn and yet playful. "Do it, dear! Poor Zebbie-who drinks least of any of us. But he might not be wearing anything zippered."

"Zebadiah always wears something at meals. Even his underwear shorts are zippered. He dislikes elastic."

"But he'll recognize your voice, Deety."

"Nope. Because it will be your voice-modified."

And it was. I'm contralto about the range of the actress-or girl friend- who recorded Gay Deceiver's voice originally. I don't think my voice has her sultry, bedroom quality but I'm a natural mimic. Deety borrowed a wigglescope-oscilloscope?-from her father, my Jacob, and I practiced until my patterns for Gay Deceiver's original repertoire matched hers well enough- Deety said she could not tell them apart without close checking.

I got into the spirit of it, such as having Deety cause Gay Deceiver occasionally to say to my husband, "Fine-except for my back ache, you wicked old Billy Goat!"-and Jacob tripped that reply one morning when I did have a back ache, and I feel sure he had one, too.

We didn't put in answers that Deety felt might be too bawdy for Jacob's "innocent" mind-I didn't even hint how her father actually talked, to me in private. Let us all preserve our illusions; it lubricates social relations. Possibly Deety and Zebbie talked the same way to each other in private-and regarded us "old folks" as hopelessly square.

IX

Most males have an unhealthy tendency to obey laws.

Deety:

Aunt Hilda and I finished reprogramming in the time it took Zebadiah and Pop to design and make the fail-safes and other mods needed to turn Gay Deceiver, with the time-space widget installed, into a continua traveler- which included placing the back seats twenty centimeters farther back (for leg room) after they had. bee~p~11ed out to place the widget abaft the bulkhead md ~~eld it to the shell The ~P~essing contiols and triple verniers wcic

remoted to the driver's instrument board-with one voice control for the widget, all others manual:

If any of our voices said, "Gay Deceiver, take us home!" car and passengers would instantly return to Snug Harbor.

I don't know but I trust my Pop. He brought us home safe twice, doing it with no fail-safes and no dead-man switch. The latter paralleled the "Take us home!" voice order, was normally clamped closed and covered-but could be uncovered and held in a fist, closed. There were other fail-safes for temperature, pressure, air, radar collision course, and other dangers. If we wound up inside a star or planet, none of this could save us, but it is easy to prove that the chances of falling downstairs and breaking your neck are enormously higher than the chance of co-occupying space with other matter in our native universe-space is plentiful, mass is scarce. We hoped that this would be true of other universes.

No way ahead of time to check on the Number-of-the-Beast spaces-but "The cowards never started and the weaklings d~jed on the way." None of us

ever mentioned not trying to travel the universes. Besides, our home planet had turned unfriendly. We didn't discuss "Black Hats" but we all knew that they were still here, and that we remained alive by lying doggo and letting the world think we were dead.

We ate breakfast better each morning after hearing Gay Deceiver offer "null report" on news retrievals. Zebadiah, I am fairly certain, had given up his cousin for dead. I feel sure Zebadiah would have gone to Sumatra to follow a lost hope, were it not that he had acquired a wife and a prospective child. I missed my next period, so did Hilda. Our men toasted our not-yet bulging bellies; Hilda and I smugly resolved to be good girls, yes, sir!-and careful. Hilda joined my morning toning up, and the men joined us the first time they caught us at it.

Zebadiah did not need it but seemed to enjoy it. Pop brought his waistline down five centimeters in one week.

Shortly after that toast Zebadiah pressure-tested Gay Deceiver's shell-four atmospheres inside her and a pressure gauge sticking out through a fitting in her shell.

There being little we could do while our space-time rover was sealed, we knocked off early. "Swim, anybody?" I asked. Snug Harbor doesn't have a citytype pool, and a mountain stream is too cooold. Pop had fixed that when he concealed our spring. Overflow was piped underground to a clump of bushes and thereby created a "natural" mountain rivulet that passed near the house; then Pop had made use of a huge fallen boulder, plus biggish ones, to create a pool, one that filled and spilled. He had done work with pigments in concrete to make this look like an accident of water flow.

This makes Pop sound like Paul Bunyan. Pop could have built Snug Harbor with his own hands. But Spanish-speaking labor from Nogales built the underground and assembled the prefab shell of the cabin. An air crane fetched parts and materials from an Albuquerque engineering company Jane had bought for Pop through a front-lawyers in Dallas. The company's manager drove the air crane himself, having had it impressed on him that this was for a rich client of the law firm, and that it would be prudent to do the job and forget it. Pop bossed the work in TexMex, with help from his secretary-me- Spanish being one language I had picked for my doctorate.

Laborers and mechanics never got a chance to pinpoint where they were, but they were well paid, well fed, comfortably housed in prefabs brought in by crane, and the backbreaking labor was done by power-who cares what "locos gringos" do? Two pilots had to know where we were building, but they homed in on a radar beacon that is no longer there.

"Blokes in Black Hats" had nothing to do with this secrecy; it was jungle caution I had learned from Mama: Never let the revenooers know anything. Pay cash, keep your lips closed, put nothing through banks that does not appear later in tax returns-pay taxes greater than your apparent standard of living and declare income accordingly. We had been audited three times since Mama died; each time the government returned a small "overpayment"- I was building a reputation of being stupid and honest.

My inquiry of "Swim, anybody?" was greeted with silence. Then Pop said, "Zeb, your wife is too energetic. Deety, later the water will be warmer and the trees will give us shade. Then we can walk slowly down to the pool. Zeb?"

"I agree, Jake. I need to conserve ergs."

"Nap?"

"I don't have the energy to take one. What were you saying this morning about reengineering the system?"

Aunt Hilda looked startled. "I thought Miss Gay Deceiver was already engineered? Are you thinking of changing everything?"

"Take it easy, Sharpie darlin'. Gay Deceiver is finished. A few things to stow that have been weighed and their moment arms calculated."

I could have told her. In the course of figuring what could be stowed in every nook and cranny and what that would do to Gay's balance, I had discovered that my husband had a highly illegal laser cannon. I said nothing, merely included its mass and distance from optimum center of weight in my calculations. I sometimes wonder which of us is the outlaw: Zebadiah or I? Most males have an unhealthy tendency to ob&y laws. But that concealed Lcannon made me wonder.

"Why not leave well enough alone?" Aunt Hilda demanded. "Jacob and God know I'm happy here... But You All Know Why We Should Not Stay Here Longer Than We Must."

"We weren't talking about Gay Deceiver; Jake and I were discussing reengineering the Solar System."

"The Solar System! What's wrong with it the way it is?"

"Lots of things," Zebadiah told Aunt Hilda. "It's untidy. Real estate going to waste. This tired old planet is crowded and sort o' worn in spots. True, industry in orbit and power from orbit have helped, and both Lagrange-Four and -Five have self-supporting populations; anybody who invested in space stations early enough made a pile." (Including Pop, Zebadiah!) "But these are minor compared with what can be done-and this planet is in worse shape each year. Jake's six-dimensional principle can change that."

"Move people into another universe? Would they go?"

"We weren't thinking of that, Hilda. We're trying to apply Clarke's Law."

"I don't recall it. Maybe it was while I was out with mumps."

"Arthur C. Clarke," Pop told her. "Great man-too bad he was liquidated in The Purge. Clarke defined how to make a great discovery or create a key invention. Study what the most respected authorities agree can not be done- then do it. My continua craft is a godchild of Clarke via his Law. His insight inspired my treatment of six-dimensional continua. But this morning Zeb added corollaries."

"Jake, don't kid the ladies. I asked a question; you grabbed the ball and ran."