e bleeding was nothing, though: you should see
yourself. You were so tattered and bloody when you came in that I hardly
knew you. Knights should come in more properly shining armor."

He grinned wearily. "Wait till next time."

"Lee, where are we?" she said abruptly. Their eyes were becoming
adjusted to the darkness, and they could see rising around them a
complexity of machine relays, connectives, and pieces which did not seem
to make sense.

Rynason looked more closely at the complex. It was definitely Outsiders
work, but what was it? Part of the Altar of Kor, obviously, but the
Outsiders telecommunicators had never used such extensive machinery. Yet
it did look familiar. He tried to remember the different types of
Outsiders machinery which had been found and partially reconstructed by
the advancing Earthmen in the centuries past. There weren't many....

Then, suddenly, he had it, and it was so simple that he was surprised he
hadn't thought of it before.

"This is Kor," he said. "It's not a communicator--it's a computer. An
Outsiders computer."

NINE

Mara's frown deepened; she looked around them in the dimness, her eyes
taking in the complexity and extent of the circuitry. It faded into the
darkness behind them; lines ran into the walls and floor.

"They built their computers in the grand manner, didn't they?" she said
softly.

"I've seen fragments of them before," Rynason said. "This is a big
one--no telling how much area the total complex takes up. One thing's
certain, though: it's no ordinary computer of theirs. Not for plain
math-work, nor even for specialized computations, like the one on Rigel
II--that was apparently used for astrogation, but it wasn't half the
size of this. And navigation between stars, even with the kind of drive
they must have had, is no simple problem."

"The Hirlaji think it's a god," she said.

"That raised another problem," Rynason mused. "The Outsiders built it,
and must have left it here when they pulled back to wherever they were
going ... if they ever left the planet. But the Hirlaji use it, and they
communicate with it verbally. The Hirlaji are apparently responsible for
keeping it protected since then. But why should the Hirlaji be able to
use it?"

"Unless they're the Outsiders after all?" said Mara.

Rynason frowned. "No, I'm still not convinced of that. The clue seems to
be that they communicate verbally with it--they must have been using it
since before