She was left an impossibly ideal woman--all Mother, Sister, Lover.... Against his will, by immutable laws of nature, Hammen fell monstrously in love with her. * * * * * Hammen was among the first of Companions or Witches to join the Suicide Squadron. He did it to protect Isodel and her descendants for all time to come, and he did it in impotent fury at his reason for doing it. The Companions transmitted in droves to abolish their profession. They transmitted against the Mindsnake. The Federation on Earth had made use of Isodel's theories. They were only a formal mathematical statement of what had always been known--destruction reaches a critical mass and destroys itself by turning against itself. Where Hammen had refused to join one human mind, he joined countless ones in a huge drive against the Snake. They became one with each other and they became one with the Snake, and the Snake turned on itself and destroyed itself and them, and they turned on themselves--and stopped. They hung together for an unmeasurable time--and broke apart. They were a super-entity like the Snake. But where the Snake had been mad, they were sane. They drifted through the haze of twilight and broke apart, their hands gliding away into the shadows. Hammen was gloriously happy. He had never been happy before and he was not at all sure he liked it. "Jobs are so hard to find these days," Isodel said, her lovely face brightly sane. "What will you take up, darling?" "There's still need for Companions--and Witches," he explained. "There seems more of a tendency for members of the cargo to drift away than ever. The Mindsnake at least gave them something to resist, a foothold of friction. Now there is nothing--nothing to do but drift, drift, drift. People in transmission will need Companions for a long time to come." "I need a Companion," lovely Isodel said. His heart leaped ridiculously. "But not a Witch," said gorgeous Isodel. Pain, very great physical pain. "I love you," priceless Isodel went on. "How could I help it? I am a woman and I love the father image. You are my father--symbolically, fortunately, not biologically. You held the sane part of me while Gordus dragged off the unsane part. You gave me--_this_ me--birth. I love you. But I don't love your dog." "My dog?" said Hammen. "No woman can marry a man _and_ his dog." "I see," said Hammen, seeing it all, and living. * * * * * You could see everything about yourself and live. It wasn't easy, but you could do it. Especially if you had the training and experience of being a Companion. Or a Witch. "It would kill Lad to separate him from me for long, you know," Hammen said. Isodel's beautiful eyes misted. And she said in all her infuriating gentleness, "Then it is impossible for us, if we have to destroy a living--" "He's just a dog," he pointed out. "I would wring his neck cheerfully if it would do any good. But it wouldn't."