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that’s the point, Slip. The invasion I’m thinking of doesn’t need any stardrive, and it works fine against any race at exactly our point of development. Right: most likely interstellar war is a fantastically expensive business, with decade lead times. What better policy for an imperialistic, highly technological race than to lie doggo listening for evidence of younger civilizations? When they detect such, they send only one ship. When it arrives in the victims’ solar system, the Computer Age is in full bloom there. We in the Coven know how fragile the present system is; it is only fear of exposure that prevents some warlocks from trying to take over. Just think how appealing our naivete must be to an older civilization that has thousands of years of experience at managing data systems. Their small crew of agents moves in as close as local military surveillance permits and gradually insinuates itself into the victims’ system. They eliminate what sharp individuals they detect in that system — people like us — and then they go after the bureaucracies and the military. In ten or twenty years, another fiefdom is ready for the arrival of the master race.”
    She lapsed into silence, and for a long moment they stared at each other. It did all hang together with a weird sort of logic. “What can we do, then?”
    “That’s the question.” She shook her head sadly, came across the room to sit beside him. Now that she had said her piece, the fire had gone out of her. For the first time since he had known her, Erythrina looked depressed. “We could just forsake this plane and stay in the real world. The Mailman might still be able to track us down, but we’d be of no more interest to him than anyone else. If we were lucky, we might have years before he takes over.” She straightened. “I’ll tell you this: if we want to live as warlocks, we have to stop him soon — within days at most. After he gets Wiley, he may drop the con tactics for something more direct.
    “If I’m right about the Mailman, then our best bet would be to discover his communication link. That would be his Achilles’ heel; there’s no way you can hide in the crowd when you’re beaming from that far away. We’ve got to take some real chances now, do things we’d never risk before. I figure that if we work together, maybe we can lessen the risk that either of us is identified.”
    He nodded. Ordinarily a prudent warlock used only limited bandwidth and so was confined to a kind of linear, personal perception. If they grabbed a few hundred megahertz of comm space, and a bigger share of rented processors, they could manipulate and search files in a way that would boggle Virginia the femcop. Of course, they would be much more easily identifiable. With two of them, though, they might be able to keep it up safely for a brief time, confusing the government and the Mailman with a multiplicity of clues. “Frankly, I don’t buy the alien part. But the rest of what you say makes sense, and that’s what counts. Like you say, we’re going to have to take some chances.”
    “Right!” She smiled and reached behind his neck to draw his face to hers. She was a very good kisser. (Not everyone was. It was one thing just to look gorgeous, and another to project and respond to the many sensory cues in something as interactive as kissing.) He was just warming to this exercise of their mutual abilities when she broke off. “And the best time to start is right now. The others think we’re sealed away down here. If strange things happen during the next few hours, it’s less likely the Mailman will suspect
us
.” She reached up to catch the light point in her hand. For an instant, blades of harsh white slipped out from between her fingers; then all was dark. He felt faint air motion as her hands moved through another spell. There were words, distorted and unidentifiable. Then the light was back, but as a torch again, and a door — a second door — had