consciousness.

It seemed fortunate that the sick bay cabin's emergency treatment
accessories, gentle as their action was, might have been designed for
the specific purpose of keeping the most violent of prisoners
immobilized--let alone one with a terrible knife wound in him. At the
angle along which the knife had driven in and up below the ribs, an
ordinary man would have been dead in seconds. But it was very evident
now that Maulbow was no ordinary man, and even after the eerie weapons
had been pitched out of the ship through the instrument room's disposal
tube, Gefty couldn't rid himself of an uncomfortable suspicion that he
wasn't done with Maulbow yet--wouldn't be done with him, in fact, until
one or the other of them was dead.

He said to Kerim, "I thought the machine Maulbow set up in the storage
vault would turn out to be some drive engine, but apparently it has an
entirely different function. He connected it with the instruments he had
made in the Hub, and together they form what he calls a control unit.
The emergency panel would show if the unit were drawing juice from the
ship. It isn't, and I don't know what powers it. But we do know now that
the control unit is holding us in the time current, and it will go on
holding us there as long as it's in operation.

"If we could shut it off, the _Queen_ would be 'rejected' by the
current, like Maulbow's sailer was. In other words, we'd get knocked
back into normspace--which is what we want. And we want it to happen as
soon as possible because, if Maulbow was telling the truth on that
point, every minute that passes here is taking us farther away from the
Hub, and farther from our own time towards his."

Kerim nodded, eyes intent on his face.

"Now I can't just go down there and start slapping switches around on
the thing," Gefty went on. "He said it wasn't working right, and even if
it were, I couldn't tell what would happen. But it doesn't seem to
connect up with any ship systems--it just seems to be holding us in a
field of its own. So I should be able to move the whole unit into the
cargo lock and eject it from there. If we shift the _Queen_ outside its
field, that should have the same effect as shutting the control unit
off. It should throw us back into normspace."

Kerim nodded again. "What about Mr. Maulbow's janandra animal?"

Gefty shrugged. "Depends on the mood I find it in. He said it wasn't
usually aggressive. Maybe it isn't. I'll get into a spaces