Between the Strokes of Night

CHAPTER ONE

The snow was drifting down in tiny flakes. Its fall, slow and steady, had added almost four inches of new crystals to the frozen surface. Two feet below, torso curled and nose tucked into thick fur, the great she-bear lay motionless. Walls of translucent ice caverned about the shaggy, light-brown pelt.

The voice came through to the cave as a disembodied thread of sound. “Sodium level still dropping. Looks really bad. Jesus Christ. Try one more cycle.” On the periphery of the cave a flicker of colored light began to blink on and off. The walls shone red, clear blue, then sparkled with dazzling green. A stippling of pure colors rippled a pattern to the beast’s closed eyelids. The bear slept on at the brink of death. Its body temperature held steady, ten degrees above freezing point. The massive heart pumped at a sluggish two beats per minute, the metabolic rate down by a factor of fifty. Breathing was steadily weakening, betrayed now only by the thin layer of ice crystals in the fringe of white beard and around the blunt muzzle.

“No good.” The voice held an added urgency. “Still dropping, and we’re losing the pulse trace. We have to risk it. Give her a bigger jolt.”

The light pattern altered. There was a stab of magenta, a rapid twinkle of sapphire and cyan, then a scattershot of moving saffron and ruby dots on the icy wall. As the rainbow modulated, the bear responded to the signal. Slate-gray eyes flickered in the long, smooth head. The massive chest shuddered. “That’s as far as I dare take it.” The second voice was deeper. “We’re beginning to get more heart fibrillation.”

“Hold the level there. And keep an eye on that rectal temperature. Why is it happening now, of all times?”

The voice echoed anguished through the thick-walled cavern. The chamber where the bear lay was fifteen meters across, and through the outer wall ran a spidery filament of fiber optics. It passed beneath the ice to a squat box next to the beast’s body. Faint electronic signals came from needles implanted deep in the tough skin, where sensors monitored the ebbing currents of life in the great body. Skin conductivity, heartbeat, blood pressure, saliva, temperature, chemical balances, ion concentrations, eye movements and brain waves were continuously monitored. Coded and amplified in the square box, the signals passed as pulses of light along the optic bundle to a panel of equipment set outside the chamber’s wall.

The woman who leaned over the panel outside the chamber was about thirty years old. Her dark hair was cropped short over a high, smooth forehead that now creased with frown lines as she studied the monitors. She was watching one digital readout as it flickered rapidly through a repeated sequence of values. She was in her stockinged feet, and her toes and feet wriggled nervously as the digital readout values moved faster.

“It’s no good. She’s still getting worse. Can we reverse it?”

The man next to her shook his head. “Not without killing her faster. Her temperature’s down too far already, and she’s below our control on brain activity. I’m afraid we’re going to lose her.” His voice was calm and slow under rigid control. He turned to look at the woman, waiting for an instruction. She took a long, shuddering breath.

“We must not lose her. There must be something else to do. Oh my God.” She stood up, revealing a supple, willowy build that emphasized the thinness of her stooped shoulders. “Jinx might be in the same condition. Did you check on his enclosure, see how he’s doing?”

Wolfgang Gibbs snorted. “Give me credit for something, Charlene. I checked him a few minutes ago. Everything is stable there. I held him four hours behind Dolly here, because I didn’t know if this move was a safe one.” He shrugged. “I guess we know now. Look at Dolly’s EEG. Better accept it, boss woman. We can’t do one thing for her.”

On the screen in front of them, the pattern of electrical signals from the bear’s brain was beginning to flatten. All evidence of spindles was gone, and the residual sinusoid was dropping in amplitude.

The woman shivered, then sighed. “Damn, damn, damn.” She ran her hand through her dark hair. “So what now? I can’t stay here much longer — JN’s meeting starts in less than half an hour. What the hell am I going to tell her? She had such hopes for this one.”

She straightened under the other’s direct gaze. There was a speculative element to his look that always made her uneasy.

He shrugged again and laughed harshly. “Tell her we never promised miracles.” His voice had a flat edge to the vowels that hinted at English as a late-learned second language. “Bears don’t hibernate in the same way as other animals do. Even JN will admit that. They sleep a lot, and the body temperature drops, but it’s a different metabolic process.” There was a beep from the monitor console. “Look out now — she’s going.”

On the screen in front of them the trace of brain activity was reduced to a single horizontal line. They watched in silence for a full minute, until there was a final, faint shiver from the heart monitor.

The man leaned forward and turned the gain as high as it would go. He grunted. “Nothing. She’s gone. Poor old Dolly.”

“And what do I tell JN?”

“The truth. She already knows most of it. We’ve gone farther with Jinx and Dolly than JN had any reason to hope we could. I told you we were into a risky area with the bears, but we kept pushing on.”

“I was hoping to keep Jinx under at least another four days. Now, we can’t risk it. I’ll have to tell JN we’re going to wake him up now.”

“It’s that, or kill him. You saw the monitors.” As he spoke, he had already switched to the injection control system for the second experimental chamber, and was carefully increasing the hormonal levels through Jinx’s half-ton body mass. “But you’re the boss. If you insist on it, I’ll hold him under a bit longer.”

“No.” She was chewing her lip, rocking backwards and forwards in front of the screen. “We can’t take the risk. Go ahead, Wolfgang, bring him up all the way. Full consciousness. How long had Dolly been under, total time?”

“One hundred and ninety one hours and fourteen minutes.”

She laughed nervously and wriggled her feet back into her shoes. “Well, it’s a record for the species. We have that much to comfort us. I have to go. Can you finish all right without me?”

“I’ll have to, won’t I? Don’t worry, this is my fourth hour of overtime already today.” He smiled sourly, but more to himself than to Charlene. “You know what I think? If JN ever does find a way for a human to stay awake and sane for twenty-four hours a day, first thing she’ll do is work people like us triple shifts.”

Charlene Bloom smiled at him and nodded, but her mind was already moving on to the dreaded meeting. Head down, she set off through the hangarlike building, her footsteps echoing to the high, corrugated-steel roof. Behind her, Wolfgang watched her departure. His look was a combination of rage and sorrow. “That’s right, Charlene,” he grunted under his breath. “You’re the boss, so you go off and take the heat. Fair enough. We both deserve it after what we did to poor old Dolly. But you ought to stop kissing JN’s ass and tell her she’s pushing us too fast. She’d probably put you in charge of paperclips, but serve you right — you should have put your foot down before we lost one.” A hundred yards away along the length of the open floor, Charlene Bloom abruptly turned to stare back at him. He looked startled, raised his hand, and gave an awkward half-wave.

“Reading my thoughts?” He sniffed and turned back to his control console. “Nah. She’s just chicken. She’d rather stay here than tell JN what’s happened in the last half-hour.”

He switched to Jinx’s displays. The big brown bear had to be eased back up to consciousness, a fraction of a degree at a time. They couldn’t afford to lose another one.

He rubbed at his unshaven chin, scratched absentmindedly at his crotch, and pored over the telemetry signals. What was the best way? Nobody had real experience at this, not even JN herself.

“Come on, Jinx. Let’s do this right. We don’t want you in pain when the circulation comes back. Blood sugar first, shall we, then serotonin and potassium balance? That sounds pretty good.”

Wolfgang Gibbs wasn’t really angry at Charlene — he liked her too well. It was worry about Dolly and Jinx that upset him. He had little patience or respect for many of his superiors; but for the Kodiak bears and the other animal charges, he had a good deal of affection and concern.

CHAPTER TWO

Charlene Bloom took almost a quarter of an hour to make her way along the length of the main hangar. More than reluctance to attend the impending meeting slowed her steps. Fifty experiments went on in the building, most of them under her administrative control.

In one dim-lit vault a score of domestic cats prowled, sleepless and deranged. A delicate operation had removed part of the reticular formation, the section of the hindbrain that controls sleep. She scanned the records. They had been continuously awake now for eleven hundred and eighty hours — a month and a half. The monitors were at last showing evidence of neurological malfunction. She could reasonably call it feline madness in her monthly report.

Most of the animals now showed no interest in food or sex. A handful had become feral, attacking anything that came near them. But they were all still alive. That was progress. Their last experiment had failed after less than half the time.

Each section of the building held temperature-controlled enclosures. In the next area she came to the rooms where the hibernating rodents and marsupials were housed. She walked slowly past each walled cage, her attention divided between the animals and thoughts of the coming meeting.

Marmots and ground squirrels here, next to the mutated jerboas. Who was running this one? Aston Naugle, if she had it right. Not as organized as Wolfgang Gibbs, and not as hardworking — but at least he didn’t make the shivers run up and down her spine. She was taller than Wolfgang. And his senior by three grades. But there was something about those tawny eyes… like one of the animals. He wasn’t afraid of the bears, or the big cats — or his superior. A sudden disquieting thought came to her. That look. He would ask her out one evening, she was sure of it. And then?

Suddenly conscious that time was passing, she began to hurry along the next corridor. Her shoes were crippling, but it wouldn’t do to be late. These damned shoes — why could she never get any that fitted right, the way other people did? Mustn’t be late. In the labs since JN had been made Director, unpunctuality was a cardinal sin (“When you delay the start of a meeting, you steal everyone’s time to pay for your own lack of efficiency.…”).

The corridor continued outside the main building, to become a long covered walkway. She took her first look at the mid-morning cloud pattern. It was still trying to rain. What was going on with this crazy weather? Since the climate cycle went haywire, not one of the forecasts was worth a thing. There was a low ground mist curling over the hills near Christchurch, and it was hotter than it was ever supposed to be. According to all the reports, the situation was as bad in the northern hemisphere as it was in New Zealand. And the Americans, Europeans, and Soviets were suffering much worse crop failures.

Her mind went back to the first lab. Everything had been designed for less moisture. No wonder the air coolers were snowing on Jinx, the humidity outside must be close to a hundred percent. Maybe they should add a dehumidifier to the system, what they had now was working like a damned snow machine. Should she request that equipment at today’s meeting?

The meeting.

Charlene jerked her attention away from the lab experiments. Time to worry about them later. She hurried on. Up a short flight of stairs, a left turn, and she was at C-53, the conference room where the weekly reviews were held. And, thank God, there before JN.

She slipped into her place at the long table, nodding at the others who were already seated: “Catkiller” Cannon from Physiology, de Vries from External Subjects, Beppo Cameron from Pharmacology (daffodil in his buttonhole — where did he get that in this wild weather?). The others ignored her and examined their open folders.

Five minutes to eleven. She had a few minutes to review her own statement and to stare for the hundredth time at the embroidery on the wall opposite. It had been there as long as she had, and she could close her eyes and recite it by heart.

“Do but consider what an excellent thing sleep is: it is so inestimable a jewel that, if a tyrant would give his crown for an hour’s slumber, it cannot be bought: of so beautiful a shape is it, that though a man lie with an Empress, his heart cannot be quiet till he leaves her embracements to be at rest with the other: yea, so greatly indebted are we to this kinsman of death that we owe the better tributary, half of our life to him: and there is good cause why we should do so: for sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together.” — Thomas Dekker.

And underneath the beautifully needle-worked quotation, in Judith Niles’ clear, bold cursive, was the recent addition:

Nuts. In this Institute, sleep is the enemy.

Charlene Bloom opened her own folder, leaned back, and eased off her black shoes, one foot tugging at the heel of the other. Eleven o’clock, and no Director. Something was wrong.

At four minutes past eleven, the other door of the conference room opened and Judith Niles entered followed by her secretary. Late — and she looked angry. Peering past her into the adjoining office, Charlene Bloom saw a tall man standing by the desk. He was curly haired and in his early thirties, pleasant-faced but frowning now at something over on one of the walls. A stranger. But those wide-set gray eyes seemed vaguely familiar; perhaps from an Institute Newsletter picture?

Judith Niles had remained standing for a moment instead of taking her usual place. Her glance went around the table, checking that all the department chiefs were already in position, then she nodded her greeting.

“Good morning. I’m sorry to keep you waiting.” Her lips pouted on the final word and held that expression. “We have an unexpected visitor, and I have to meet with him again as soon as this meeting is over.” She at last sat down. “Let’s begin. Dr. de Vries, would you start? I’m sure everyone is as interested as I am in hearing of the results of your trip. When did you get back?”

Jan de Vries, short and placid, shrugged his shoulders and smiled at the Director. Judith Niles and he saw the world from the same place, half a head lower than most of the staff. Perhaps that was what allowed him to relax with her, in a way that Charlene Bloom found totally impossible.

“Late last night.” His voice was soothing, slow and easy as warm syrup. “If you will permit me one moment of tangential comment, the treatment for jet lag that we pioneered here at the Institute is less than a total success.” Judith Niles never took notes. Her secretary would record every word, and she wanted all her own mind concentrated on the pulse of the meeting. She leaned forward and looked closely at de Vries’ face. “I assume you speak from experience?”

He nodded. “I used it on the trip to Pakistan. Today I feel lousy, and the blood tests confirm it. My circadian rhythms are still somewhere between here and Rawalpindi.”

The Director looked across at Beppo Cameron and raised her dark eyebrows. “We’d better take another look at the treatment, eh? But what about the main business, Jan? Ahmed Ameer — is he fact or fiction?”

“Regrettably, he is fiction.” De Vries opened his notebook. “According to the report we received, Ahmed Ameer never slept more than an hour a night. From the time he was sixteen years old — that’s nine years, he’s twenty-five now — he swore that he hadn’t closed his eyes.”

“And the truth?”

He grimaced and rubbed at his thin moustache. “I’ve got our complete notes here, and they’ll go in the file. But I can summarize in one word: exaggeration. In the six days and nights that we were with him, he went two nights with no sleep. One night he slept for four and a quarter hours. For the other three nights he averaged a little more than two and a half hours each.”

“Normal health?”

“Looks like it. He doesn’t sleep much, but we’ve had other subjects with less right here in the Institute.”

Judith Niles was watching him closely. “But you don’t look like a man who wasted a week on a wild-goose chase. What’s the rest of it?”

“My perceptive superior.” De Vries looked angelic. “You are quite right. On the way out I went through Ankara to check out a long shot — another one of the rumors from the Cairo labs, about a monk who keeps a vigil over the sacred relies of Saint Stephen. A vestment was stolen while he was on duty two years ago, and after that he supposedly swore he would never sleep again.”

“Well?” Judith Niles tensed as she waited for his answer.

“Not quite — but closer than we’ve ever come before.” De Vries was all sly satisfaction. “Would you believe an average total daily sleep of twenty-nine minutes? And he doesn’t sit in a chair and nod off for the odd few minutes when nobody’s looking. We had him hooked up to a telemetry unit for eleven days. We have the fullest biochemical tests that we could make. You’ll see my full report as soon as someone can transcribe it for you.”

“I want it today. Tell Joyce Savin that it’s top priority.” Judith Niles gave de Vries a little nod of approval. “Anything else?”

“Nothing good enough to tell. I’ll have my complete report for you tomorrow.” He winked across the table at Charlene. And she’ll never read it, said his expression. The Director depended on her staff to keep track of the details. No one ever knew how much time she would spend on any particular staff report. Sometimes the smallest element of data would engage her attention for days, at other times major projects would run unstudied for months.

Judith Niles took a quick look at her watch. “Dr. Bloom, you’re next. Keep it as short as possible — I’d like to squeeze our visitor in before lunch if we can.” But at my back I always hear, Time’s winged chariot hurrying near… Charlene gritted her teeth. JN was obsessed with sleep and time. And most of what Charlene could offer was bad news.

She bent her head over her notebook, reluctant to begin.

“We just lost one of the Kodiaks,” she said abruptly. There was a rustle of movement as everyone at the long table sat up straighter. Charlene kept her head bowed. “Gibbs took Dolly down to a few degrees above freezing and tried to maintain a positive level of brain activity.”

Now there was a charged silence in the room. Charlene swallowed, felt the lump in her throat, and hurried on. “The procedure is the same as I described in last week’s report for the Review Committee. But this time we couldn’t stabilize. The brain wave patterns were hunting, seeking new stable levels, and there were spurious alpha thresholds. When we started to bring the temperature back up all the body functions just went to hell. Oscillations everywhere. I brought the output listings with me, and if you want to see them I’ll pass them round.” “Later.” Judith Niles’ expression was a mixture of concentration and anger. Charlene knew the look. The Director expected everyone — everything — to share her drive toward Zero Sleep. Dolly had failed them. JN’s face had turned pale, but her voice was calm and factual.

“Gibbs, you said? Wolfgang Gibbs. He’s the heavy-set fellow with curly hair? Did he handle the descent and ascent operations himself?”

“Yes. But I have no reason to question his competence — “

“Nor do I, I’m not suggesting that. I’ve read his reports. He’s good.” Judith Niles made a gesture to the secretary at her side. “Were there any other anomalies that you consider significant?”

“There was one.” Charlene Bloom took a deep breath and turned to a new page of her notebook. “When we were about fifteen degrees above freezing, the brain wave patterns hit a very stable form. And Wolfgang Gibbs noticed one very odd thing about them. They seemed to be the same profile as the brain rhythms at normal temperature, just stretched out in time.”

She paused. At the end of the table, Judith Niles had suddenly jerked upright. “How similar?”

“We didn’t run it through the computer yet. To the eye they were identical — but fifty times as slow as usual.”

For a fraction of a second Charlene thought she saw a look flicker between Judith Niles and Jan de Vries, then the Director was staring at her with full intensity. “That’s something I want to see for myself. Later today, Dr. de Vries and I will come out to the hangar and take a look at this project. But let’s run over it in a little more detail now, when we’re all here. How long did you hold the stable phase, and what was the lowest body temperature? And what about tryptophan settings?”

Below table level, Charlene rubbed her hands along the side of her skirt. They were in for a digging session, she just knew it. Her hands were beginning to tremble, and she could feel new sweat on her palms. Was she well-prepared? She’d know in a few minutes. With the Director in the mood for detail, the visitor to the Institute might be in for a long wait.

CHAPTER THREE

For Hans Gibbs it was turning into a long and confusing day.

When first suggested, a Downside visit to the U.N. Institute for Neurology in Christchurch had sounded like the perfect break from routine. He would have a week in full earth gravity instead of the quarter-gee of PSS-One. He would gain a batch of exercise credits, and he needed all he could scrape together. He’d be able to pick up a few things Downside that were seldom shuttled up as cargo — how long since anyone on PSS-One had tasted an oyster? And even though Christchurch was down in New Zealand, away from the political action centers, he’d be able to form his own impressions on recent world tensions. There were lots of charges and counter-accusations flying about, but chances are it was more of the same old bluster that the Downsiders mislabelled as diplomacy.

Best of all, he could spend a couple of evenings with randy old Wolfgang. The last time they’d been out on the town together, his cousin had still been married. That had put a crimp on things (but less than it should have — one reason maybe why Wolfgang wasn’t married now?).

The trip down had been a disaster. Not the Shuttle flight, of course; that had been a couple of hours of relaxation, a smooth re-entry followed by activation of the turbofans and a long powered coast to Aussieport in northern New Guinea. The landing had been precisely on schedule. But that was the last thing that went according to plan.

The Australian spaceport, servicing Australia, New Zealand and Micronesia, normally prided itself on informality and excitement. According to legend, a visitor could find within a few kilometers of the port every one of the world’s conventional vices, plus a few of the unconventional ones (cannibalism had been part of native life in New Guinea long after it had disappeared elsewhere). Today all informality had disappeared. The port had been filled with grim-faced officials, intent on checking every item of his baggage, documents, travel plans, and reason for arrival. He had been subjected to four hours of questioning. Did he have relatives in Japan or the United States? Did he have sympathies with the Food Distribution Movement? What were his views on the Australian Isolationist Party? Tell us, in detail, of any new synthetic food manufacturing processes developed for the outbound arcologies.

Plenty was happening there, as he readily admitted, but he was saved by simple ignorance. Sure, there were new methods for synthetics, good ones, but he didn’t know anything about them — wouldn’t be permitted to know about them; they carried a high level of commercial secrecy.

His first gift for Wolfgang — a pure two-carat gemstone, manufactured in the orbiting autoclave on PSS-One — was retained for examination. It would, he was curtly informed, be sent along to his lodgings at the Institute if it passed inspection. His other gift was confiscated with no promise of return. Seeds developed in space might contaminate some element of Australasian flora. His patience had run out at that point. The seeds were sterile, he pointed out. He had brought them along only as a novelty, for their odd shapes and colors. “What the hell has happened to you guys?” he complained. “It’s not the first time I’ve been here. I’m a regular — just take a look at those visas. What do you think I’m going to do, break into Cornwall House and have a go at the First Lady?”

They looked back at him stonily, evaluating his remark, then went on with the questioning. He didn’t try any more backchat. Two years ago the frantic sex life of the Premier’s wife had been everybody’s favorite subject. Now it didn’t rate a blink. If much of Earth was like this, the climatic changes must be producing worse effects than anyone in the well-to-do nations was willing to admit. The less lucky ones spoke of it willingly enough, pleading for help at endless and unproductive sessions of the United Nations.

When he was finally allowed to close his luggage and go on his way, the fast transport to Christchurch had already left. He was stuck with a Mach-One pond-hopper, turning an hour’s flight into a six-hour marathon. At every stop the baggage and document inspection was repeated.

By the time they made the last landing he was angry, hungry, and tired out. The entry formalities at Christchurch seemed to go on forever, but he recognized that they were perfunctory compared with those at Aussieport — it seemed he had already been asked every question in the world, and his answers passed on to the centralized Australasian data banks.

When he finally reached the Institute and was shown to Judith Niles’ big office it was one o’clock in the morning according to his internal body clock, though local time was well before noon. He swallowed a stimulant — one originally developed right here in the Institute — and looked around him at the office fittings.

On one wall was a personal sleep chart, of exactly the same type that he used himself. She was averaging a little less than six hours a night, plus a brief lunchtime nap every other day. He moved to the bookcase. The predictable works were there: Dement and Oswald and Colquhoun, on sleep; the Fisher-Koral text on mammalian hibernation; Williams’ case histories of healthy insomniacs. The crash course he had received on PSS-One had skimmed through them all, though the library up there was not designed for storage of paper copies like these. The old monograph by Bremer was new to him. Unpublished work on the brain-stem experiments? That seemed unlikely — Moruzzi had picked the bones clean there, back in the 1940s. But what about that red file next to it, “Revised Analysis”? He reached out to take it from the case, then hesitated. It wouldn’t do to get off on the wrong foot with Judith Niles — this meeting was an important one. Better wait and ask her permission.

He rubbed at his eyes and turned from the bookcase to look at the pictures on the wall opposite the window. He had been well briefed, but the more he could learn by personal observation, the less impossible this job would be. Plenty of photographs there, taken with Presidents and Prime Ministers and businessmen. In pride of place was a picture of a gray-haired man with a big chin and rimless glasses. On its lower border, hand-written, were the words: Roger Morton Niles, 1941-2008. Judith’s father? Almost certainly, but there was something curiously impersonal about the addition of dates to a father’s picture. There was a definite family resemblance, mainly in the steady eyes and high cheekbones. He compared the picture of Roger Morton Niles with a nearby photograph of Judith Niles shaking hands with an aged Indian woman. Strange. The biographical written descriptions didn’t match at all with the person who had swept through the office on her way to her staff meeting and given him the briefest and most abstracted of greetings. Still less did it match the woman pictured here. Based on her position and accomplishments he had expected someone in her forties or fifties, a real Iron Maiden. But Judith Niles couldn’t be more than middle thirties. Nice looking, too. She was a fraction too thin in the face, with very serious eyes and forehead; but she made up for that with well-defined, curving cheek bones, a clear complexion, and a beautiful mouth. And there was something in her expression… or was it his imagination? Didn’t she have that look -

“Mr. Gibbs?” The voice from behind made him grunt and spin around. A secretary had appeared at the open doorway while he was daydreaming his way through the wall photographs.

Thank Heaven that minds were still unreadable. How ludicrous his current train of thought would seem to an observer — here he was, flown in for a confidential and highly crucial meeting with the Director of the Institute, and inside two minutes he was evaluating her as a sex object.

He turned around with a little smile on his face. The secretary was staring at him, her eyebrows raised. “Sorry if I startled you, Mr. Gibbs, but the staff meeting is over and the Director can see you now. She suggests that you might prefer to talk over lunch, rather than meeting here. That way you’ll have more time.”

He hesitated. “My business with the Director — “

“Is private? Yes, she says that she understands the need for privacy. There is a quiet room off the main dining room; it will be just you and the Director.” “Fine. Lead the way.” He began to rehearse his arguments as she preceded him along a dingy, off-white corridor.

The dining room was hardly private — he could see a hundred ways it could be bugged. But it did offer at least superficial isolation from other ears. He would have to take the risk. If anyone recorded them, it would almost certainly be for Judith Niles’ own benefit, and would go no farther. He blinked his eyes as he entered. The overhead light, like every light he had seen in the Institute, was overpoweringly bright. If darkness were the ally of sleep, Judith Niles apparently would not tolerate its presence.

She was waiting for him at the long table, quietly marking entries on an output listing. As he sat down she at once folded the sheet and spoke without any pause for conventional introduction.

“I took the liberty of ordering for both of us. There is a limited choice, and I thought we could use the time.” She leaned back and smiled. “I have my own agenda, but since you came to see us I think you are entitled to the first shot.”

“Shot?” He pulled his chair closer to the table. “You’re misreading our motives. But I’ll be pleased to talk first. And let me get something out of the way that may save us later embarrassment. My cousin, Wolfgang, works for you here at the Institute.”

“I wondered at the coincidence of name.”

And did you follow up with a check on us? Hans Gibbs nodded and went on. “Wolfgang is completely loyal to you, just as I work for and am loyal to Salter Wherry. I gather that you’ve never met him?”

Judith Niles looked up at him from under lowered brows. “I don’t know anyone who has — but everybody has heard of him, and of Salter Station.”

“Then you know he has substantial resources. Through them we can find out rather a lot about the Institute, and the work that goes on here. I want you to know that although Wolfgang and I have talked generalities from time to time about the work here, none of my specific information, or that of anyone else in our organization, came from him.”

She shrugged in a noncommittal way. “All right. But now you have me intrigued. What do you think you know about us that’s so surprising? We’re a publicly funded agency. Our records are open information.”

“True. But that means you are restricted in the budget available to you. Just today, for example, you have learned of additional budget cuts because of the crisis in U.N. finances.”

Her expression showed her astonishment. “How in the name of Morpheus can you possibly know that? I only found out a couple of hours ago, and I was told the decision had just been made.”

“Let me postpone answering that, if you don’t mind, until we’ve covered a couple of other things. I know you’ve had money problems. Worse still, there are restrictions — ones you find hard to accept — on the experiments that you are permitted to perform.”

The lower lip pushed forward a little, and her expression became guarded. “Now I don’t think I follow you. Care to be more specific?”

“With your permission I’ll defer discussing that, too, for the moment. I hope you’ll first permit me a few minutes on another subject. It may seem unrelated to budgets and experimental freedom, but I promise you it is relevant. Take a quick look at this, then I’ll explain exactly why I’m here.”

He passed a flat black cylinder across to her. “Look into the end of it. It’s a video recorder — don’t worry about focus, the hologram phases are adjusted for a perceived focal plane six feet from the eye. Just let your eyes relax.” She wrinkled her brow questioningly, put her unbroken bread roll back on her plate, and lifted the cylinder to her right eye. “How do I work it?” “Press the button on the left side. It takes a couple of seconds before the picture comes.”

He sat silent, waiting as a waitress in a green uniform placed bowls of murky brown soup in front of each of them.

“I don’t see anything at all,” Judith Niles said after a few seconds. “There’s nothing I can focus on — oh, wait a minute.…”

The jet-black curtain before her took on faint detail as her eyes adjusted to the low light level. There was a backdrop of stars, with a long, spindly structure in the foreground lit by reflected sunlight. At first she had no sense of scale, but as the field of view slowly shifted out along the spider-net of girders other scene elements began to provide clues. A space tug lay along one of the beams, its stubby body half hidden by the metal. Farther down, she could see a life-capsule, clamped like a tiny mushroom button in the corner of a massive cross-tie. The construction was big, stretching hundreds of kilometers away to a distant end-boom.

The camera swung on down, until the limb of the sunlit Earth appeared in the field of view.

“You’re seeing the view from one of the standard monitors,” said Hans Gibbs. “There are twenty of them on the Station. They operate twenty-four hours a day, with routine surveys of everything that goes on. That camera concentrates mostly on the new construction on the lower boom. You know that we’re making a seven-hundred-kilometer experimental cantilever on PSS-One? Salter Station, most people down here apparently call it, though Salter Wherry likes to point out that it was the first of many, so PSS-One is a better name. Anyway, we don’t need that extension cantilever for the present arcologies, but we’re sure we’ll use it someday soon.”

“Uh-uh.” Judith did not move her eyes from the viewing socket. The camera was zooming in, closing steadily on an area at the very end of the boom where two small dots had become visible. She realized that she was seeing a high-magnification close-up from a small part of the camera field. As the dots grew in size, the image had begun to develop a slight graininess as the limit of useful resolution was reached. She could make out the limbs on each of the space suits, and the lines that secured the suits to the thin girders.

“Installing one of the experimental antennas,” Hans Gibbs said. He obviously knew exactly what point the display in front of her had reached. “Those two are a long way from the center of mass of the Station — four hundred kilometers below it. Salter Station is in six hour orbit, ten thousand kilometers up. Orbital velocity at that altitude is forty-eight-eighty meters a second, but the end of the boom is travelling at only forty-seven-sixty meters a second. See the slight tension in those lines? Those two aren’t quite in freefall. They feel about a hundredth of a gee. Not much, but enough to make a difference.”

Judith Niles drew in a deep breath but did not speak.

“Watch the one on the left,” said Hans Gibbs quietly.

There was enough detail in the image to see exactly what was happening. The lines that secured one of the two suited figures had been released, so that a new position on the girder could be achieved. A thin aerial had opened up, stretching far out past the end of the boom. The left-most figure began to drift slowly along the length of the aerial, a securing bracket held in its right glove. It was obvious that there would be another tether point within reach along the girder, where the securing line could be attached. The suit moved very slowly, rotating a little as it went. The second figure was crouched over another part of the metal network, attaching a second brace for the aerial. “In thirty seconds, you drift away by nearly fifty meters,” said Hans Gibbs quietly. His companion sat as still as a statue.

The realization grew by tiny fractions, so that there was never one moment where the senses could suddenly say, “Trouble.” The figure was within reach of the tether point. It was still moving, inching along, certainly close enough for an outstretched arm to make the connection. Five seconds more, and that contact had been missed. Now it would be necessary to use the suit controls, to apply the small thrust needed to move back to contact range. Judith Niles suddenly found herself willing the suit thrusters to come on, willing the second figure to look up, to see what she was seeing. The gap grew. A few feet, thirty meters, the length of the thin aerial. The suit had begun to turn around more rapidly on its axis. It was passing the last point of contact with the structure. “Oh, no.” The words were a murmur of complaint. Judith Niles was breathing heavily. After a few more seconds of silence she gave another little murmur and jerked her body rigidly upright. “Oh, no. Why doesn’t he do something? Why doesn’t he grab the aerial?”

Hans Gibbs reached forward and gently took the cylinder away from her eye. “I think you’ve seen enough. You saw the beginning of the fall?”

“Yes. Was it a simulation?”

“I’m afraid not. It was real. What do you think that you saw?”

“Construction for the boom on Salter Station — on PSS-One. And they were two of the workers, rigging an antenna section.”

“Right. What else?”

“The one farther out on the boom just let go his hold, without waiting to see that he had a line secured. He didn’t even look. He drifted away. By the time the other one saw, he was too far away to reach.”

“Too far away for anything to reach. Do you realize what would happen next?” Neither of them took any interest in the food before them. Judith Niles nodded slowly. “Re-entry? If you couldn’t reach him he’d start re-entry?” Hans Gibbs looked at her in surprise, then laughed. “Well, that might happen — if we waited for a few million years. But Salter Station is in a pretty high orbit, re-entry’s not what we worry about. Those suits have only enough air for six hours. If we have no ship ready, anybody who loses contact with the station and can’t get back with the limited reaction mass in the suit thrusters dies — asphyxiates. It was a woman in that suit, by the way, not a man. She was lucky. The camera was on her, so we could compute an exact trajectory and pick her up with an hour to spare. But she’ll probably never be psychologically ready to work outside again. And others haven’t been so lucky. We’ve lost thirty people in three months.”

“But why? Why did she let go? Why didn’t the other worker warn her?” “He tried — we all tried.” Hans Gibbs tucked the little recorder back into its plastic case. “She didn’t hear us for the same reason that she released her hold. It’s a reason that should really interest you, and the reason why I’m here at your Institute. In one word: narcolepsy. She fell asleep. She didn’t wake up until after we caught her, fifty kilometers away from the boom. The other worker saw what had happened long before that, but he didn’t have the reaction mass to go out and back. All he could do was watch and yell at her through the suit radio. He couldn’t wake her.”

Hans Gibbs pushed his half-full plate away from him.

“I know there’s a desperate food shortage around most of the world, and it’s a sin not to clear your dish. But neither one of us seems to be eating much. Can we continue this conversation back in your office?”

CHAPTER FOUR

It was early evening before Judith Niles picked up the phone and asked Jan de Vries to join her in her office. While she waited for him she stood by the window, staring out across the garden that flanked the south side of the Institute. The lawns were increasingly unkempt, with the flower beds near the old brick wall showing patches of weeds.

“Midnight oil again? Where’s your dinner date, Judith?” said a voice behind her. She started. De Vries had entered the open office door without knocking, quiet as a cat.

She turned. “Close the door, Jan. You won’t believe this, but I did have an offer of dinner. A wild offer, with all the old-fashioned trimmings — he suggested oysters Rockefeller, veal cordon bleu, wine, and the moonlit Avon River. Oysters and wine! My God, you can tell that he’s from way out in space. He honestly believed we’d be able to buy that sort of food, without a contract or a special dispensation. He doesn’t know much about the real situation. One of the scary things about all the government propaganda is that it works so well. He had no idea how bad things are, even here in New Zealand — and we’re the lucky ones. Oysters! Damn it, I’d give my virginity for a dozen oysters. Might as well hope to be served roast beef.”

Her voice was longing, and it carried no trace of the usual authority. She sat down at her desk, eased off her shoes, and lolled back in her chair, lifting her bare feet to rest them on an open desk drawer.

“Far too late for any of that, my dear,” said Jan de Vries. “Roast beef, good wine, oysters — or virginity, for that matter. For most of us they’ve fled with the snows of yesteryear. But I’m just as impressed by the other implications of his offer. Only somebody out of touch with the climate changes and literally out of this world would want to look at that ghastly river — not when it’s eighty-seven degrees and ninety percent humidity.”

He sat down gracefully, reclining on a big armchair. “But you turned down the invitation? Judith, you disappoint me. It sounds like an offer you couldn’t refuse — just to see his expression when he could compare reality with his illusions.”

“I might have taken it if Hans Gibbs hadn’t made me the other offer.” “Indeed?” Jan de Vries touched his lips with a carefully manicured forefinger. “Judith, from one of your strongly heterosexual tastes, those words ring false. I thought you longed for offers like that, attractive beyond all other lures — “ “Stow it, Jan. I’ve no time for games just now. I want the benefit of your brain. You’ve met Salter Wherry, right? How much do you know about him?” “Well, as it happens I know a fair amount. I almost went to work on Salter Station. If you hadn’t lured me here, I’d probably be there now. There’s a certain je ne sais quoi to the notion of working for a aged multibillionaire, especially one whose romantic tastes before he went into seclusion were said to coincide with mine.”

“Does he really own Salter Station? Completely?”

“So it is rumored, my dear. That, and half of everything else you care to mention. I could never discover any evidence to the contrary. Since the charming Mr. Gibbs works for Wherry, and you met with him for many hours this afternoon — don’t think your long cloistering passed unnoticed, Judith — I wonder why you ask me these things. Why didn’t you ask Hans Gibbs your questions about Salter Wherry directly?”

Judith Niles padded back to the window and stared moodily out at the twilight. “I need to do an independent check. It’s important, Jan. I need to know how rich Salter Wherry really is. Is he rich enough to let us do what we need to do?” “According to my own investigations and impressions, he is so rich that the word lacks real meaning. Our budget for next year is a little over eight million, correct? I will check the latest data on him, but even if Salter Wherry is no richer now than he was twenty years ago, this whole institute could be comfortably supported on the interest on Wherry’s petty cash account.” “Maybe that’s his plan.” Judith swung back to face into the room. “Damn it, he certainly timed it well.”

“Money troubles again? Remember, I’ve been away.”

“Bad ones. I’ve had it with our brainless Budget Committee. They want to squeeze us another five percent, and already the place is falling apart around our ears. And we can’t keep some of our experiments and results secret indefinitely, much as I’d like to. Charlene Bloom and Wolfgang Gibbs are stumbling over the same lead that we found. Wherry couldn’t be approaching us at a better time. It could work out perfectly.”

“As I have told you many times, Judith, you are a genius. You can maneuver simple innocents like me around like puppets. But you are not — yet — a manipulator to match Salter Wherry. He is the best in the System, and he can call on seventy years of experience. When you think of your own objectives, and your hidden agenda — which I do not even pretend to be privy to — remember that he undoubtedly has a hidden agenda also, with quite different goals. And if you are a genius, he is an undoubted genius also in finance and organization. And he has a reputation of getting his way.”

De Vries crossed his legs carefully and adjusted the sharp crease on his trousers. “But from the look on your face I suspect I’m digressing. What’s this great offer you want to discuss? Why aren’t you off by the great gray-green greasy Avon River, dining on strawberries and cream to the sound of trumpets — or whatever other delights of dalliance the sadly out-of-touch Mr. Gibbs had in mind?”

Judith Niles rubbed delicately at her left eye, as though it was troubling her. “Hans Gibbs brought me an offer. They’re having problems on Salter Station. Did you know that?”

“I have heard rumors. The insurance rates for Station personnel have been raised an order of magnitude above those for conventional space operations. But I fail to see any connection with the Institute.”

“That’s because you don’t know what the problems are. Jan, the offer I had today was a simple one. Hans Gibbs came here with authority from Salter Wherry. The budget of the Institute will be quadrupled, with guaranteed funding levels for eight years. In addition, the schedule of experiments that we conduct here will be free from all outside control or interference. So will our hardware and software procurement.”

“It sounds like paradise.” De Vries stood up and went to stand next to Judith. “Where’s the worm in the apple? There must be one.”

She smiled at him, and patted his shoulder. “Jan, how did I get along before you joined the Institute? Here’s your worm: to get all the good things that Salter Wherry promises, we must satisfy one condition. The key staff of the Institute must relocate — to Salter Station. And we must do our best to crack a problem that has been ruining the arcology construction projects there.”

“What! Up into orbit. I hope you didn’t agree to it.”

“No, not yet. But I might. I have to go up there and see for myself — Hans Gibbs will make the arrangements this weekend.” As Jan de Vries became more and more doubtful, Judith looked more relaxed.

“And since I’ll be gone, Jan,” she went on, “somebody else has to look at the initial list of key staff members, just in case we decide to do it. I know my own choices for the top people, but I’m not close enough to all the support staff — and we’d need some of them, too. Who are the best ones, and who is willing to go to Salter Station?”

“You sound as though you have made up your mind already.”

“No. I just want to think ahead in case it does happen.” She went across to her desk and picked up a handwritten page. “Here’s my first selection. Sit down again, and we’ll go over it together.”

“But — “

“Get Charlene to help you on this while I’m away.”

“Charlene? Look, I know she’s good, but can she be objective? She’s a mass of insecurity.”

“I know. She’s too modest. That’s why I want her to know she was on my preferred list from the start. While you’re at it, take a look at this.” She handed him a couple of pages of printout. “I just ran it out of the historical data banks. It’s the statement that Salter Wherry made to the United Nations when he started his industrial space activity, thirty years ago. We need to understand the psychological make-up of the man, and this is a good clue to it.” “Judith, slow down. You’re pushing me. I’m not at all sure that I want to — “ “Nor am I. Jan, we may be forced to do this, even if some of us don’t like the decision. Things have been absolutely falling apart around here in the past few months, bit by bit.”

“I know times are hard — “

“They’ll get worse. The way the Institute is getting screwed around, we can’t afford to do nothing. If we’re being raped we have to fight any way we can; even if it means risking Salter Wherry trying to screw us too.”

He took the sheets from her hand, sighing. “All right, all right. If you insist, I’ll blunder ahead. Let’s all become experts on Salter Wherry and his enterprises. But Judith, must you be so crude? I prefer to avoid these unpleasant suggestions of rape. Why can’t we regard this overture as the first touch of Salter Wherry’s perfumed hand in our genteel seduction?” He smirked happily. “That makes it all positively appealing; in seduction, my dear, there’s so much more scope for negotiation.”

From the invited address of Salter Wherry to the United Nations General Assembly, following establishment of Salter Station in a stable six-hour orbit around the Earth, and shortly before Wherry withdrew from contact with the general public:

Nature abhors a vacuum. If there is an open ecological niche, some organism will move to fill it. That’s what evolution is all about. Twenty years ago there was a clear emerging crisis in mineral resource supply. Everybody knew that we were heading for shortages of at least twelve key metals. And almost everybody knew that we wouldn’t find them in any easily accessible place on Earth. We would be mining fifteen miles down, or at the ocean bottom. I decided it was more logical to mine five thousand miles up. Some of the asteroids are ninety percent metals; what we needed to do was bring them into Earth orbit.

I approached the U.S. Government first with my proposal for asteroid capture and mining. I had full estimates of costs and probable return on investment, and I would have settled for a five percent contract fee.

I was told that it was too controversial, that I would run into questions of international ownership of mineral rights. Other countries would want to be included in the project.

Very well. I came here to the United Nations, and made full disclosure of all my ideas to this group. But after four years of constant debate, and many thousands of hours of my time preparing and presenting additional data, not one line of useful response had been drafted to my proposal. You formed study committees, and committees to study those committees, and that was all you did. You talked.

Life is short. I happened to have one advantage denied to most people. From the 1950s through the 1990s, my father invested his money in computer stocks. I was already very wealthy, and I was frustrated enough to risk it all. You are beginning to see some of the results, in the shape of PSS-One — what the Press seems to prefer to call Salter Station. It will serve as the home for two hundred people, with ease.

But this is no more than a beginning. Although Nature may abhor a vacuum, modern technology loves one; that, and the microgravity environment. I intend to use them to the full. I will construct a succession of large, permanently occupied space stations using asteroidal materials. If any nation here today desires to rent space or facilities from me, or buy my products manufactured in space, I will be happy to consider this — at commercial rates. I also invite people from all nations on Earth to join me in those facilities. We are ready to take all the steps necessary for the human race to begin its exploration of our Universe.

It was past midnight by the time that Jan de Vries had read the full statement twice, then skipped again to the comment with which Salter Wherry had concluded his address. They were words that had become permanently linked to his name, and they had earned him the impotent enmity of every nation on earth: “The conquest of space is too important an enterprise to be entrusted to governments.” De Vries shook his head. Salter Wherry was a formidable man, ready to take on world governments — and win. Did Judith have the equipment to play in Wherry’s league?

He closed the folder, his chubby face completely serious. A move to Salter Station. It would be fascinating. But the government outrage and hypocrisy over Wherry’s actions still continued, undiminished (perhaps increased) by success. The popularity of the arcologies, and the flood of applicants to embark on them, only added fuel to the official anger. If the Institute moved, everyone there would have to understand that the decision to join the Wherry empire would add to the outcry. They would all be branded as “traitors” by the U.N. official press.

And once they went out, what then? For many of them there would never be a return home. Earth would be lost to them forever.

The building hummed quietly with the subdued murmur of a thousand experiments, going on through the night. Jan de Vries sat in his easy chair for a long time, musing, peering out of the window into the humid night but seeing only the cloudy vision of his own future. Where was it likely to lead? Would he be in space himself, ten years from now? What would it be like out there? The ideas were difficult to grasp, drifting away from the periphery of his tired brain. He yawned, and rose slowly to his feet. Ten years — it was too far to see. Better think of near-term things: Judith Niles’ list, the budget, the still-unfinished trip report. Ten years was infinity, something beyond his span. Jan de Vries could not possibly have known it, but he had his crystal ball wrongly focused. He should have been looking much farther ahead.

CHAPTER FIVE

“Either I meet with him personally, or there will be no agreement. It’s as simple as that, Hans.”

“I’m telling you, that’s not possible. He doesn’t hold face-to-face conferences any more; not here, or down on Earth.”

“You see him often enough.”

“Well, damn it, Judith, I am his assistant. Even he has to see a few people. But I have full legal authority to sign for him, if that’s a worry. Check with Zurich for any questions on financing. And if you want to look at anything else on the Station, tell me and I’ll arrange it.”

Hans Gibbs sounded almost pleading. They were sitting in an eighth-gee chamber halfway out from the hub of Salter Station, watching the mining operations on Elmo, a hundred kilometers above them. Electric arcs sparkled and sputtered in random sequence on the surface of the Earth-orbiting asteroid, and loaded cargo buckets were drifting lazily down along the umbilical. From this distance it was a glittering filament of silver, coiling its length down to the station refining center.

Judith Niles pulled her gaze back from the hypnotic sight of the endless bucket chain. She shook her head, and smiled at the man seated across from her. “Hans, this isn’t just me being awkward. And I’m sure that you and I could conclude the deal. It’s not something I want for myself, it’s for my team down at the Institute. I’m asking them to give up the security of government jobs and take a flier to a private industry group in an orbital facility.” “Security?” Hans Gibbs glared at her. “Judith, that’s pure crap. You know it’s crap. A job with Salter Wherry is safer than any government position. Your whole group could be wiped out tomorrow if some jackass in the U.N. decided to throw his weight around. And they have plenty of jackasses. And don’t give me any nonsense about your budget — Salter Wherry has better and earlier information about that than you do.”

“I believe it.” She sighed. “I told you, you don’t have to convince me. You’re preaching to the choir. I’ve seen our programs twisted and cut and maimed, year after year. But I need to bring twenty key scientists up here with me and I’m telling you how some of them feel. I go back to the Institute and they say to me, ‘Did Salter Wherry agree to this?’ And I say, ‘Well, no. I signed a long-term contract — but I didn’t actually see him.’ Know what they’ll say? They’ll say that this project is pretty low on Salter Wherry’s list of priorities, and maybe we should think again.”

“It’s top priority. Even down on Earth, most people know that he doesn’t hold face-to-face meetings.”

“I know.” She smiled sweetly. “That’s why it will be so impressive to my staff when they hear that I did meet with him. Think about it for a minute.” Judith Niles leaned back and recalled the last conversation with Jan de Vries and Charlene Bloom before she left. Negotiate hard. It had been the point they all agreed on. And if it didn’t work out? Well, they would live through it. The Institute would continue somehow, even with government cuts in funding. Across from her, Hans Gibbs groaned and eased to his feet. In the two days that they had spent together he had been forming his own impressions of the Institute director, adding to the odd perspective that had come from his cousin at the Institute.

“She’s weird, I mean, like she’s not shaped yet,” Wolfgang had said. “She’s pretty old, right?”

Hans glared at him. “Watch it, sonny. She’s thirty-seven. Guess that’s old if you’re still wet behind the ears.”

“Right. So she’s thirty-seven, and she has a world-wide reputation. But she’s like a little kid in some ways.” Wolfgang waved his beer glass in a circle in the air. “I mean, you tell me I act like a retard, but she’s the one you should talk to. I can’t figure her at all. I think maybe when she was younger all her energy went into science and sex. She’s just getting around to learning the rest of the world.”

“Sex?” Hans raised his eyebrows. “I was right, then. Wolf, if you say she’s sex-mad, she must be something. Been trying to sleep your way to the top, eh? And I thought she was all fixed up with that little man I met yesterday.” “You mean Jan de Vries?” Wolfgang spluttered his laughter through a mouthful of beer. “Cousin boy, you are all screwed up on that one. No chance of an affair between him and JN, not if you locked ‘em up together and fed ‘em Spanish Fly for a year. I like Jan, he’s a great guy, but he’s got his own ideas on sex. He makes friends easily with women, but for his love life he only looks at men.” “But you’re sure about her?”

“I’m sure. Not from personal experience, though. She’s not like me. JN’s discreet, she never plays bedroom games around the Institute. But she disappears for nights and weekends.”

“She could be working.”

“Bullshit. It takes one to know one. She’s horny as I am.”

Hans shrugged. His own impressions had been formed back when he first saw her photograph. “All right, so she’s horny as you are. God help her. But if she’s not shaped and still changing, what will she be like when she is shaped?” Wolfgang Gibbs’ face took on a different expression. He was silent for a moment. “She could be anything,” he said at last. “Absolutely anything. Even the cocky ones at the Institute admit it, she’s way above them on technical matters.” “Even you, cousin? Since when? I thought the mirror on the wall said you were smartest of them all.”

Wolfgang placed his beer glass down on the window sill. He looked very serious. “Even me, cousin. Remember what one of France’s old generals said when he came out of his first meeting with Napoleon? ‘I knew at once that I had met my master.’ That’s how I felt after my first one-on-one with JN. She’s a powerhouse. And when she wants something, she’s hard to stop.”

“I’ve met more than one like that. But where does she get her kicks? If we’re going to have a deal, I need to understand her motives.”

But at that point Wolfgang Gibbs had only shaken his head and picked up his beer again. And now, thought Hans, looking at Judith’s unreadable face, we’re one-on-one and I’m experiencing the push for myself. An audience with Salter, she says, or no deal. He began to move slowly toward the exit.

“Okay, Judith. I’ll try. Salter Wherry is here on the Station, and I have to see him anyway about some other stuff. Give me half an hour — if I can’t do anything in that time, I can’t do it at all. Wait here, and dial Central Services if you need anything while I’m gone. But don’t get your hopes up. The only thing I can tell you is that he wants the Institute up here so bad he can taste it — he says the narcolepsy problem is top priority. Maybe it will make him break his own rule.”

Judith Niles was left with her own thoughts. The words of Jan de Vries kept drifting back to her. “Salter Wherry is a manipulator, the best in the System.” And now she was hoping to manipulate the system he had created. Wherry didn’t know it, but she had little choice. She had her own urgencies. The experiments she wanted to do couldn’t be conducted down on Earth. If he were to suspect that…

She looked again out of the concave viewing port. Salter Station was powerful evidence of the effectiveness of that manipulative power. From where she was sitting, Elmo was continuously visible. It was the first of the

Earth-orbit-crossing asteroids to be steered into stable six-hour orbit around the Earth: but as Salter Wherry had promised the United Nations, the story had not ended there.

Looking at the panorama of development above her, Judith Niles was forced to marvel. Wherry’s asteroid mining operations had provided the base metals to create and then expand Salter Station. But at the same time, as no more than a by-product, they also extracted enough platinum, gold, iridium, chromium, and nickel to make up almost half of the world’s supply. Bans against import of products from Salter Station into most countries had been totally useless. The shipments of metal were “laundered” through neutral spaceports in the Free Trade Zones, and at last arrived where they were needed — fifty percent more expensive than they would have been on direct purchase.

Wherry’s operations were strong enough to withstand a challenge from any government, his defense systems rumored to be capable of meeting a combined Earth attack. The Institute could be moved here, safe from withering cuts and changes of direction. But would it be worth it? Only if she and the rest of the staff had real freedom to pursue their work. That was the promise that she must extract from Salter Wherry. And an ironbound legal contract had to go with it. When you dealt with a master manipulator, you couldn’t afford to leave loopholes.

She lay back in her seat, staring upward. A faint glimmer of light caught her eye, drifting past her field of view. She realized that she was witnessing one of the infrequent transits of Eleanora, the sixth and most ambitious of the giant arcologies. It was in an orbit nearly a thousand kilometers higher, and it passed the station only once every three days. Initially dubbed as “Salter’s Folly” by the skeptical media, the first arcology had been started fourteen years ago and had grown steadily. Until the great space station was completed, Salter Wherry seemed content to let the original jeering name serve as the official one. Then he had finally renamed it Amanda, assisted its population of four thousand to establish themselves there, and apparently lost all interest. His mind was focused on construction of the second arcology, then the third…

Curious, Judith dialled into the Station’s central computer and requested a high-resolution image of Eleanora. The half-built arcology blinked into full-color display on the screen. The skeleton was finished now, a seven-hundred-meter spherical framework of metal girders. Wall panels were going in over half the structure, so that she could estimate the size of the rooms and the internal corridors that would exist in the final ship. Allowing for power, food, maintenance and recreational areas, the final Ark would comfortably house twelve thousand people — the biggest one yet. And it had more facilities and living-space per person than the average family enjoyed on Earth. Two more arcologies were starting construction in higher orbits, each supposedly even bigger than this one.

Judith stared out of the port, seeing again her own office back at the Institute. The group’s move up here (if it happened; Hans Gibbs had been gone a long time) had seemed such a big thing when it was first proposed. Compared with what Salter Wherry was planning for the arcologies, it was nothing. They were designed to be self-sustaining over a period of centuries and more, free-ranging through the Solar System and beyond if they chose, independent even of sunlight. From a kilo or two of water, self-contained fusion plants would provide enough power for years. As a backup to the recycling systems, each arcology would tow along an asteroid several hundred meters across, to be mined as needed. Judith shook her head thoughtfully. She swung her chair to look out of the Earthside ports. It was daylight below, and she could see the great smudge that shrouded most of central Africa. Parts of the desiccated equatorial rain forest were still ablaze, casting a dark shadow across a third of the continent. The drought-ridden area stretched from the Mediterranean past the Equator, and no one could predict when it would end. It was hard to imagine what life must be like down there, as the climate changes made the old African life styles impossible. And across the Atlantic, the vast Amazon basin was steadily drying, too, becoming the tinder that would flame in just a few more months unless weather patterns changed.

A turn of the head brought Eleanora back into view, far above. Down on Earth the arcologies seemed remote, the daydream of one man. But once you were up here, watching the ferry ships swarming between the Station and the distant, twinkling sphere of Eleanora…

“Interested in taking that trip?” said Hans Gibbs’ voice from behind her. “There’s plenty of space available for qualified people, and you’d be a prime candidate for a colonist.”

The spell was broken. Judith realized that she had been staring out mindlessly, more fascinated than she had ever expected. She looked around at him questioningly.

“It’s yes,” he said at once. He shook his head in a puzzled way. “I’d have bet my liver that he wouldn’t even consider seeing you — I told you, Salter Wherry never meets with anybody except a few aides these days. So what does he do? He agrees to see you.”

“Thank you.”

Hans Gibbs laughed. “For Christ’s sake, don’t thank me. All I did was ask — and I didn’t expect anything except a quick refusal. He agreed so quickly, I wasn’t ready for it. I started to give him arguments why he should make an exception in this case, then my brain caught up with my mouth. I suppose that proves how little I know him, even after all these years. If you’re ready we can go over right now. His suite is on the other side of Spindletop, directly across from here. Come on, before he changes his mind.”

CHAPTER SIX

Salter Station was built on the general double-wheel plan defined thirty years earlier for a permanent space station.

The upper wheel, Spindletop, was reserved for communications, living, and recreational quarters. It rotated about the fixed spindle that jutted up to it from the lower wheel. With a diameter of four hundred meters, Spindletop had an effective gravity that ran from near-zero at the hub to almost a quarter-gee at the outer circumference. The thicker under-section turned much more slowly, needing close to two hours for a full revolution compared with Spindletop’s one-minute rotation period. All the maintenance, construction, power, and agriculture systems resided on the lower wheel.

“And some of the people, too,” said Hans Gibbs as they rode the moving cable in toward the hub of Spindletop. “Once they become used to zero gee, it’s a devil of a job to get them up here again. There’s a compulsory exercise program, but you wouldn’t believe the ways they find to get around it. We have engineers here who couldn’t go back down to Earth without a year’s conditioning — they spend all their time loafing around Workwheel. They even take their meals down there.” He pointed along a metal corridor, twenty meters across, that went away at right angles from their inward passage. “That’s the main route between Workwheel and Spindletop. See, we’re at the hub now. If we wanted to we could just hang here and drift.”

They paused for a few seconds so that Judith could take a good look around her. The central section was a labyrinth of cables, passages, and airlocks. “It’s all pressurized,” he said in answer to her question about the need for interior airlocks. “But different sections have different pressure levels. And of course the locks are there for safety, too. We’ve never had a blow-out or a bad air loss but it could happen anytime — we can’t track all the meteors.” He took her arm as they caught the cable out along another radial passageway of Spindletop. Her muscles tensed slightly beneath his fingers, but she made no comment.

“Have you spent much time in freefall?” he said after a few moments. He turned so that they were facing each other, dropping outward steadily down the spiralling circular tunnel that led to the edge of Spindletop.

She shook her head. “Enough so that it doesn’t trouble me in the stomach any more, but that’s about all. I’ve sometimes thought it might be nice to take a vacation up on Waterway and see how freefall swimming is done; but I’m told it’s expensive and I’ve always been too busy.”

“If you come up here to work, you can do it free. The big fish tanks down on Workwheel are open to swimmers all the time.”

He turned his face so that he was no longer looking directly at her before he spoke again. His voice was completely neutral. “There are some other experiences in freefall that you ought to try — really interesting ones. Maybe you can sample them before you go back down to the Institute and tell the others what it’s like here.”

He felt her arm muscles tighten again in his grasp. “Let’s see what happens first with Salter Wherry, shall we?” she said. Her voice was noncommittal, but she sounded slightly amused. “Maybe I’ll have to tell them it didn’t work out. Or maybe we’ll have something to celebrate.”

The area they were entering looked substantially different from the parts of Salter Station that Judith had already seen. Instead of metal walls and bulkheads they now passed over soft carpeted floors flanked by elaborate murals. At the door of an antechamber they were met by a young man dressed in a skintight electric-blue uniform. To Judith he looked like a pretty child, no more than thirteen years old. His complexion was soft, without a sign of facial hair.

“He has decided that he will see her alone,” he said, in a voice that was not yet fully broken.

Hans Gibbs shrugged, looked at the youth, then at Judith. “I’ll wait for you right here. Good luck — and remember, you’re holding a card that he wants very badly.”

Judith managed a wry smile. “And what he wants, he gets, right? Thanks anyway, and I’ll see you later.”

She followed the young boy in through the curtained entrance. In the reduced gravity his walk lent an elegant, undulating sway to his hips.

Was he accentuating it intentionally? Jan de Vries was probably right about Salter Wherry’s personal tastes — it was the sort of detail that he would know. Judith tried to make her own movements as economical and functional as possible as she followed her guide around the curved floor of the chamber and on to another large room, this one with no viewports. The boy in front of her halted. Apparently they had arrived. Judith looked around her in surprise. Opulence would have been understandable. These were the private living quarters of a man whose fortune exceeded that of most Earth nations — perhaps all. But this?

The room they had entered was bare and ugly. Instead of the drapes and murals of the outer chamber, she was looking at dark walls and simple, plastic-coated floor and ceiling. The furniture was hard upright chairs, a single narrow couch, and an old wooden desk. And there was something else, stranger yet… Judith had to think for a few seconds before she could pin it down. Something was missing. The room lacked any signs of data terminals or display screens; she could not even see a telephone or television outlet.

But Salter Wherry had System-wide influence and interests. One word from him could bankrupt whole States. He must find the most modern and elaborate communications equipment absolutely essential.…

Judith walked over to the desk, ignoring the youth who had brought her in. There was nothing. No terminal, no data links, no modems; not even data cube holders. She was looking at a flat desk top with two buff file folders upon it, and a black book set neatly between them. A Bible.

“Where does he keep all — “ she began.

“Videos? Books? Electronic equipment?” It was a different voice behind her. “I have everything that I find necessary.”

Salter Wherry had quietly entered through a sliding door to her left. The pictures that she had seen of him showed a man in vigorous middle age, substantial and strongly built, with a sensuous, fleshy face and prominent nose. But they had been taken thirty years ago, before Salter Wherry became reclusive. Now the man standing in front of Judith Niles was frighteningly frail, with a thin, lined face. Judith looked at him closely as he held out his hands to take both of hers. The aquiline nose was all that had survived of the younger Salter Wherry. Judith found the new version much more impressive. All the softness had been burned away from the man standing in front of her, and what remained had been tempered in the same inner furnace. The eyes dominated the countenance, glowing bright-blue in deep sockets.

“All right, Edouard. You will leave us now,” said Wherry after a few moments. His voice was gruff and surprisingly deep, not at all an old man’s thin tones. The boy nodded deferentially, but as he turned to leave there was a pout, a condescending look at Judith, and an arrogant sway of his shoulders. Salter Wherry gestured to the narrow couch.

“If it will not make you uncomfortable, I will stand. Long ago I learned that I think better this way.”

Judith felt her stomach muscles tighten involuntarily as she sat on the couch. Wherry’s intuitive perception of motives was legendary. It might be hard to hide any secret from the probing intellect behind those steady eyes. She cleared her throat. “I appreciate your willingness to see me.”

Salter Wherry nodded slowly. “I assume that your desire was not merely social. And I want you to be assured that the problem your Institute will be addressing is of prime importance to me. We have been obliged to introduce so many new precautions in space construction work that our rate of progress on the new arcologies has become pathetic.”

He stood motionless in front of her, quietly waiting.

“It’s certainly not social.” Judith cleared her throat again. “My staff are asking certain questions. I want to know the answers as much as they do. For example, you have a problem with narcolepsy. We are well qualified to tackle it.”

And if I’m right, I may have already solved it. Go carefully now, that’s not the main point at issue.

“But why not employ us simply as your consultants?” she went on. “Why go to the trouble and expense of hiring an entire Institute, at great cost — “ “At negligible cost, compared with a hundred other enterprises I have up here. You will find me generous with money and other resources. ‘Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn.’ “

“All right, even without considering the cost. Why create an Institute, when you want to solve a single problem?”

He was gently nodding. “Dr. Niles, you are logical. But permit me to suggest that you see this with the wrong perspective. The problem is too important to me to use you as consultants. I need a dedicated attention. If you were to remain on Earth, with your present responsibilities to the United Nations, how much of your time would be devoted to my problem? How much of Dr. Bloom’s time, or Dr. Cameron’s time, or Dr. de Vries’ time? Ten percent? Or twenty percent? — but not one hundred and twenty.”

“So why not hire a team for the specific problem? The salaries that you offer would attract many of my staff.”

“And you yourself?” He gave a curious little smile as she looked pensive. “I thought not. Yet I am told that if anyone will solve it, it will be Judith Niles.”

Judith felt the hair on her arms and shoulders tingle into goosebumps. Salter Wherry was willing to move a multimillion dollar operation into space and make a long-term commitment, merely to ensure her own availability. Careful, said the inner voice. Remember, flattery is a tool that never fails.

Did he suspect that she would be obliged to move some of the experiments into space, if her ideas on the processes of consciousness were correct? And if she knew already what was causing the narcolepsy problem in Salter Wherry’s space construction crews, then from his point of view the move of the Institute would be unnecessary. She would be manipulating the master manipulator. “You appear doubtful,” he went on. “Let me offer an additional argument. I know already of your personal indifference to money, and I will not offer it. But what about freedom to experiment?”

He moved over to the desk and picked up one of the two buff folders. His hand was thin, with long, bony fingers. Judith watched warily as he flipped open the folder and held it out toward her.

“In the past year, there have been seven requests to the U.N. from Dr. Judith Niles to conduct experiments on sleep research, using twelve new drugs that affect metabolic rate. The experiments would be done using human subjects — “ “ — all volunteers, as the applications made clear.”

“I know. But all rejected. Perhaps because three years ago, you led an experiment that ended disastrously. The recorded statements are quite clear. Using a combination of Tryptophil and a technique of EEG reinforcement and feedback, you succeeded in keeping three volunteers awake, alert, and apparently healthy for more than thirty days. But then there were complications. First there was atrophy of emotional responses, then atrophy of intellect. To quote one critical review of the study, ‘Dr. Niles has succeeded not in abolishing the need for sleep, but only in inducing Alzheimer’s disease. We do not need more senile dementia.’ “

“Damn it, if you know that much, you probably know who wrote that review. It was Dickson, whose application for identical research — under worse control conditions — was turned down in favor of mine.”

“Indeed I know it.” Salter Wherry smiled again. “My point is not to goad you. It is to ask you how long it will be, for whatever reason, before you are allowed to resume experiments with human subjects — even, as you say, with eager volunteers.”

Judith clenched her hands together hard. Her face was impassive. Just how much did he know? He was at the very brink of the new research.

“It could be years before such experiments are permitted,” she said at last. “Or it could be forever. Recall that delay is the deadliest form of denial.” He was pressing hard, dominating the meeting, and they both knew it. “And recall Ecclesiastes, that to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under Heaven. Your time is now, your purpose here on this station. You should seize the opportunity. On PSS-One you will not be bound by the rules that crippled your institute on Earth. Here, you will create the rules.” Judith looked up at him. She had regained her self-control.

“You make all the rules here.”

Salter Wherry smiled, and for a second the sensuous mouth of the younger man reappeared. “You are misinformed. Let us admit there are certain rules that I insist on. All the rest are negotiable. Tell me what experiments you wish to conduct. I will be amazed if I do not agree to all of them. In writing. If this is the case, will you come here?”

He finally came to sit in a chair opposite.

“Perhaps,” she said. “Your offer is more than generous.”

“And if we are realistic, we will agree that things are not going well down on Earth? Very well. I will not press you. But I have one more question. You told Hans Gibbs that this meeting was an absolute essential: if there were no face-to-face encounter, there would be no agreement. Most unusual. He told me your reason, that your own credibility with the people who work for you would be diminished if you did not see me. But you and I know that is nonsensical. Your prestige and reputation carry enough weight with your staff to make a meeting with me neither necessary nor relevant. So. Why did you want to meet me?” Judith paused for a long time before she replied. Her next remark might anger Salter Wherry to the point where all his interest in relocating the Institute might vanish. But she needed to gain some psychological advantage. “I was told that you have certain personal tastes and preferences. That you would never, under any circumstances, deal directly with a woman. And that you had also become hopelessly reclusive. Your sexual habits are not my business, but I could not work for anyone with whom personal contact was denied. I could work with you only if we can meet to discuss problems.”

“Because you need my inputs?” he said at last. “Let us be realistic. In your work, my contribution would be no more than noise and distraction.” “That is not the point. My relationships demand a certain logic, independent of gender and personality. Otherwise they become unworkable.”

He was smiling again. “And you pretend there is logic in your present dealings with the impenetrable U.N. bureaucracy? It is better for your case if I do not pursue that.”

He stood up. “You have my word. If you come here, you will have access to me. But as you grow older you will learn that logic is a luxury we must sometimes forego. Most of the human race struggles along without it. You are undeniably a woman — let me destroy another rumor by saying that I find you to be an attractive woman. I am certainly meeting with you, face to face. So much for idle speculation. When you return to Earth, perhaps you will spread the word that many of the ‘known facts’ about me are simple invention. Though I know it will make no difference to the public’s perceptions.”

He had paused in front of her, his manner clearly indicating that the meeting was over. Judith remained seated.

“You asked me one last question,” she said. “Why did I insist on this meeting? I have given you an answer. Now I think I have the right to one more question, too.”

He nodded. “That is fair.”

“Why did you agree to see me? According to Hans Gibbs, you would certainly refuse. I believe that the narcolepsy problem is important to you — but is it that important? I think not.”

Salter Wherry stooped a little, so that the lined face was directly in front of Judith’s. He looked very old, and very tired. She could sense the sadness in his eyes, far down beneath the fire and iron. When he at last smiled, those eyes looked dreamy.

“You are an extraordinary person. Few people see a second level of purpose, except for themselves and their own objectives. I refuse to lie to you, and I feel sure that your own motives sit deeper than we have reached in this meeting. So you should believe me when I say this: Today, you and your staff would find my other motives difficult to accept. Therefore, I will not offer them. But someday you will know my reasons.”

He paused for a long moment, then added softly: “And now that I have met you, I think that you will approve of them.”

He turned and was heading for the doorway before Judith could frame a reply. The interview with Salter Wherry was over.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Earth has been regarded for centuries as a giant self-regulating machine, absorbing all changes, great and small, and diluting their effects until they become invisible on a global scale. Mankind has taken that stability for granted. Careless of consequences, we have watched as forests were cleared, lakes poisoned, rivers damned and diverted, mountains leveled, whole plains dug out for their mineral and fuel content. And nothing disastrous happened. Earth tolerated the insults, and always she restored the status quo.

Always — until now. Until finally some hidden critical point has been passed. The move away from a steady state is signalled in many ways: by increasing ocean temperatures, by drought and flood, by widespread loss of topsoil, by massive crop failure, and by the collapse of worldwide fishing industries. Many solutions have been proposed. But none of them can even be attempted now. All of them call for some practice of conservation, for the reversing of certain changes. That is impossible. With a world population approaching eight billion, all margin for experiment has long disappeared. As resources grow scarcer, pressure to produce grows and grows. The richest nations practice an increased level of isolationism and caution, the poor ones are at the point of absolute desperation. The materials produced in space are no more than a trickle, where a flood is called for.

I offer naught for your comfort. The world is ready to explode, and I see no way to avoid that explosion. What I offer you is only a chance for some of your children…

“Still at it?” said Jan de Vries. He had activated the videophone connection between the offices. At the sound of his voice Judith Niles put down the slim transcript.

“I’m ready to quit. I don’t think I want to read any more. Did you take a look at this?”

De Vries nodded. “It is not difficult to see why Salter Wherry lacks popularity in the esteemed halls of the United Nations. His recruiting campaign for the space colonies is certainly effective, but he doesn’t paint an encouraging picture of the world’s future. Let us hope that he is wrong.” He moved his index finger along the line of his neat moustache. “The suit is all set. They are ready when you are.”

“Who’ll do it? I left the final screening with Charlene.”

“Wolfgang Gibbs. He’s young, and he’s fit, and we’re agreed that it is not dangerous.”

Judith Niles looked thoughtful. “I’m not so sure of that. Vacuum is vacuum — you don’t play games with it. Tell them to prep him. I’m on my way over.” When she arrived the final lab preparation was complete. Emergency resuscitation equipment stood in banks along the walls. In the middle, seated on a long table in a sealed chamber, Wolfgang Gibbs was adjusting the gloves of the space suit. Charlene Bloom was by his side, obsessively checking the helmet. She straightened up as Judith Niles entered the room.

“Are you sure this is the same design as they’re using now on Salter Station?” she said. “I think I see small differences in the seals.”

Niles nodded. “The schematics we had were not quite right. We checked. According to Hans Gibbs this is the one in use now. All hooked up?”

Wolfgang turned and stared at her. His face was pale through the faceplate. “Ready when you are,” he said over the suit radio.

Charlene placed her head close to the helmet. “Scared?” she said, in a low voice.

“Give you one guess.” He smiled at her through the narrow faceplate. “Jelly in my guts. Now I know what the test animals must feel like. Let’s get on with it. You get out of here and let’s take the pressure down.”

As he spoke the overhead lights flickered, faded, then slowly came back up to full power.

“Jesus!” said Charlene. “That’s three brownouts in two hours.” She looked at the other woman. “Should we go ahead, JN? It looks as though there’s something horribly wrong with the grid.”

“Blow-outs in the China link,” said Judith Niles. “Cameron checked this afternoon, and he says it will get worse. They expect China may drop out completely in a week or so — they’re above capacity, and their equipment is old. So there’s no point in delaying. We have our own standby system, and that’s in good shape.”

“So let’s get on with it,” said Gibbs. To Charlene Bloom’s horror he reached and gave a sly rub along her thigh with one gloved hand, on the side hidden from Judith Niles.

She jerked away from him and shook her head fiercely. She had told Wolfgang over and over — private life must never get tangled up with their work.

“So you’re telling me you want to stop?” he had said.

She had paused, turning her head to look at his bare, tanned shoulder. “You know I don’t. But don’t you be horrible, either. I know you have a reputation at the Institute, and I’m not asking about that. But remember this is the first time for me for… well, for anything like this.”

He had turned to look down at her face, with an expression in his eyes that made her shiver all over. “For me, too.”

Liar, she had been about to say. Then she looked at him again. He appeared completely serious. She had very much wanted to believe him — still wanted to believe him; but not now, for Heaven’s sake, not when JN was watching, even if he was staring at her so intently through the suit’s faceplate.… Charlene turned away briskly and stepped out of the chamber. “Sealed, and reducing,” she said. She tried to keep her eyes on the gauges and away from Wolfgang.

The pressure was calibrated in kilos per square centimeter, and also as barometric altitude. The two women watched in silence as the green readouts flickered down through their first reduction.

“Three kilometers equivalent height,” said Charlene. “Are you feeling all right, Wolfgang?”

He grunted. “No problem.” His voice sounded much more relaxed than she felt. “According to my readings we have a balance of internal and external pressure. Correct?”

“Right. You’re on pure oxygen now. Any tightness at the suit’s joints, or any dizziness? Move your arms, legs, and neck, and see how it feels.” He lifted his left arm and waggled the fingers in the suit. “Morituri te salutamus. I’m feeling fine.”

“Very good. Who’s been teaching you Latin?” As soon as she said it, Charlene felt a blush starting to rise from the back of her neck. What would JN think? — Charlene was the only one at the Institute who liked to spice up her reports with Latin tags. “Five kilometers,” she said hurriedly. “We’re getting a change of scale.”

The readouts automatically adjusted to a finer gradation, moving from kilograms to grams per square centimeter. The pressure was reducing very slowly now, at a rate controlled by Charlene. It was another twenty minutes before the chamber value was quivering down at zero. The barometric altitude, after rising steadily to a hundred kilometers, now refused to go any higher.

“Anything new?” Judith Niles had moved to stand with her face close to the chamber window.

“Nothing bad.” Gibbs moved his head slowly from side to side. “You were right about the neck seals — I can feel a bit of pressure now, as though the suit bulges in a little bit there.”

“That’s the new design, they introduced it about a year ago. It’s a better seal, but not so comfortable. The bulge is caused by the outside pressure drop, making an inward wrinkle in the seal. You’ll get used to it. Any feelings of drowsiness?”

“Not a bit.”

“Right. Start moving the blocks, and talk while you do it. Set your own pace.” Wolfgang, clumsy because of the unfamiliar gloves, began to move a heap of colored plastic blocks from one chest-high stand to another. “Haven’t done anything like this since I was eighteen months old. Used to seem harder then. Get them all moved correctly, and I get a handful of raisins, right?” Neither woman spoke as he carefully moved blocks. He was finished in less than a minute.

“Still feeling all right?” said Judith Niles when the task was done. “Perfectly fine. No aches and pains, no sleepiness. Still have that bit of pressure in my neck, but all the other joints are very comfortable. Shall I switch to the cameras?”

“Whenever you’re ready.”

Gibbs nodded. The faceplate of the suit slowly darkened. His face became a dark gray and slowly faded from view as the plate achieved total opacity. The watchers heard a grumble through the suit radio. “Lousy color in here. If my TV didn’t perform better than this I’d turn it in for service.”

The suited figure turned slowly to point its forward viewing camera to look through the chamber window. “Charlene, you’ve turned green.”

“I feel it. We’ll worry about camera color balance later. Can you move the blocks again? And keep talking as you do it, just the way you did last time.” “Piece of cake.” The bulky figure began to move the blocks slowly back to their original stand. “Reminds me of the work that they used to give you in the army when you were doing basic training. Supposed to tire us out and keep us out of trouble. First you move the pile of dirt over here, then when you were finished somebody else would move it back. Then you would move — “

It happened with startling suddenness. There was no drowsy trailing-off of speech. At one moment the suited figure was working efficiently, his matter-of-fact tones clear over the suit radio. Then they were looking in at a silent, motionless statue, frozen with a red block stretched out in one gloved hand.

Charlene Bloom gave a cry of alarm, while Judith Niles took a long, shivering breath. “That’s it. No cause for panic, Charlene, it’s what we were expecting. Start bringing the pressure up — slowly. We don’t want a problem there. I’ll make sure the bed is ready. My guess is that he’ll be out for at least half an hour.” She moved over to the phone. Behind her, Charlene stared wide-eyed at Wolfgang Gibbs’ unconscious figure. She had to fight the temptation to bring the pressure instantly to sea level, and rush into the chamber herself.

Jan de Vries was waiting in her office, calmly reading a file marked Confidential — Director Only. He looked up as she came in.

“How is he?”

“Recovered. He was out several minutes, and he remembers nothing of the whole episode. So far as Wolfgang is concerned, he didn’t even begin the tests with the suit on video.” Judith Niles did not sit down, but instead paced back and forth in front of the chair where Jan de Vries was sitting. “No aftereffects now, and full alertness.”

“So your hypothesis is correct. You predicted what would happen, and the subject performed exactly as required.” De Vries slapped the file closed. “Everything can now proceed precisely as you planned. We will move the Institute to orbit, spend a month or two in supposed problem analysis, and then hand Salter Wherry the solution to his major problem; after which we will be in a position to pursue our own researches, as the Institute’s new contract explicitly permits. Wonderful. The manipulation is complete, exactly as designed.” His mouth twisted in a grimace. “So, my dear, where is the jubilation? You do not have the air of one whose plans approach fruition.”

“I’m not satisfied — not at all.” Judith Niles paused, looking quizzically down at the diminutive figure of de Vries in the depths of the big armchair. “Listen to this sequence, then tell me what you think. Item one: a year ago there was a slight change in the type of space suit worn in Salter Station for outside construction work. The new one uses a slightly different set of rings and seals in the neck portion.

“Item two.” She checked off on the fingers of her right hand. “For some positions of the head, the new suit causes increased pressure on the wearer’s carotid arteries.”

“Slight pressure?”

“Not that slight — big enough for the wearer to notice. Item three: increased pressure within the carotid arteries can cause momentary blackouts. “Item four: when a suit is on normal visual operation, the blackout is momentary, too brief to be noticed. But when the suit is on remote and using TV cameras instead of faceplate viewing, the scanning rates on the TV give a feedback to the brain that reinforces the blackout. Result: narcolepsy. The wearer will not break out of the cycle unless there is some external interruption. How does that sound to you?”

De Vries sat silent for a few moments, then nodded. “Plausible — more than plausible, almost certainly correct.”

“All right. I agree. So here’s item five.” She closed her fist. “All of this has been known for forty years. The increased pressure in the carotids is a classical cause of narcolepsy. The brain wave reinforcement is a standard positive feedback mechanism. What does all that say to you?”

De Vries leaned far back, gazing up at the ceiling. He shook his head. “Judith, put in those terms I see where you are heading — but I must admit that it would not have occurred to me if you had not waved it in front of my nose.” Judith Niles regarded him grimly. “Be specific, Jan. What’s wrong with it?” “It’s too simple. When you set the explanation out on a plate, as you just did, it’s clear that we should not be needed to solve the problem. Remember, you told me you thought you knew the answer when you first looked at the suits and the case histories. All the medics on Salter Station had to do was a minimal amount of background reading, and a few well-designed experiments. At the very least they would have noticed the correlation between the new suits and the onset of the problem.”

“Exactly. So why didn’t they?” Judith Niles stopped her pacing and stood in front of de Vries. “Even if they didn’t catch on as fast as we would here at the Institute, they should have deduced it after a while. Jan, I’m very worried. We have to go up to Salter Station. Our own experiments require it, and anyway I’ve burned too many bridges here in the past few days to stop now. But I feel that things are out of control.”

She suddenly lifted her left hand and began to rub gently at her eye, her forehead wrinkled.

Jan de Vries looked concerned. “What’s wrong, Judith? Headache?”

She shook her head. “Not any sort I’ve ever had before. But I’m getting blurring from this eye — very off-putting. Not quite seeing double, but not far from that. Odd feeling.”

De Vries frowned. “Don’t take chances. Even if it is no more than the strain of too much work, let a specialist take a look at it.” De Vries did not say it, but he was astonished. Never since he had known her had Judith Niles shown any sign of strain and fatigue, no matter what pressures she had worked under, no matter how she forced herself along.

“I’ll be all right,” she said. “Sorry, Jan, what were you saying?” “I agree with you that things may be out of control.” The little man wriggled forward in the armchair so that he could stand up. “And let me give you, as Salter Wherry quoted in his speech on the space colonies, ‘naught for your comfort.’ I’ve been doing the follow-up work you asked for on Salter Wherry. Did you know that most of his expenditures are not on development of the arcologies at all? They go into two other areas: efficient, spaceborne fusion drives, and robots. He is rumored to be many years ahead of anyone else in those areas. I believe it. But what do our projects have to do with either of those research endeavors? If you can see the connection, I beg enlightenment. And then there is the question of the breadth of Wherry’s influence, and his sources of wealth. Do you remember my telling you that insurance rates for Station personnel have gone up greatly in the past year?”

“Yes. Because of the increased accident rate.”

“So we had assumed. But this afternoon I obtained and examined the financial statements of Global Insurance — the organization which issues the policies for Salter Station personnel. It turns out that a single individual owns more than eighty percent of the stock of Global, and exercises complete control over corporate actions.” De Vries smiled grimly. “You are permitted one guess as to the identity of that individual. Then, my dear Judith, we should perhaps discuss who is manipulating whom.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

The fish were nervous. Moving in regular array, they darted to and fro through the fronds of weed that curled across Workwheel’s great tanks. As the schools of fish turned in the cloudy water their silvery scales caught the green-tinged sunlight, filling the interior with flashes of brilliance.

The two human figures, naked except for light breathing masks, swam slowly around the perimeter of the tank, driving the fish along before them. The outer edge of the wheel was a filled lattice of transparent plastic, admitting perpetual day to the four hundred meter cylinder. Far above, near the hollow central axle, oxygenation pumps sent a faint thrumming through the sluggishly moving liquid.

The female figure swooped without warning down to the clear honeycombed plastic of the outer wall, kicked off hard from it, and surged upward toward Workwheel center. The other, taken by surprise, followed her a second later. He overtook her halfway to the axle and reached out to grasp her calf, but she wriggled away and headed off in a new direction, still slanting toward the surface. Again he pursued, and this time as he neared her he reached out to grasp both her ankles. His fingers closed, and at that instant the tableau suddenly froze. Two nude sculptures, their muscles tensed, hung in the water among the motionless fishes. Salter Wherry looked closely at the video display for a few seconds, then carefully moved it along several frames. It was difficult to see the expressions clearly in the recording, and he zoomed in on Judith Niles’ face for a high-mag close-up. Even with the mask on, her face contrasted with her taut muscles. She looked totally relaxed, though Hans Gibbs was gripping her firmly around the ankles. After a few moments of study Wherry skipped forward, a few frames at a time, watching the changing expressions as the nude bodies moved together, embraced, then slowly rose. Entwined, they moved to meet the broad concave meniscus of the water surface near the axle of the wheel.

Salter Wherry watched their actions calmly in the darkness of the control room. Always, regardless of the couple’s embraces, his attention rested on Judith Niles’ face. At last he leaned forward and pressed another key on the console in front of him. The scene changed to a brilliantly lit interior. Now it was Judith Niles standing alone in Wherry’s office on Spindletop, just next door from the hidden studio, waiting for her first meeting with him. Again his attention was on her face. One minute more, another press of a key, and Wherry was seeing her as she stood after their first meeting. He grunted in dissatisfaction. The hidden cameras were carefully placed, but they could not offer views from all angles, and this time a full-face view was denied him.

He moved on. The next shots had come from the inside of the Institute itself, down on earth. Preparations were under way for the move to Salter Station. The cameras showed experimental animals being carefully housed in well-ventilated crates for upward shipment. This time Salter Wherry seemed pleased. There was a hint of satisfaction in the blue eyes as he cut to the receiving network for his daily global status report.

Salter Station’s observing network tapped all open news channels around the globe, plus a number of sources that national governments would have been shocked to see so routinely cracked. Ground reports were supplemented and confirmed by the station’s spy satellite network, the hundred polar-orbiting spacecraft that permitted a constant detailed look at events anywhere on the globe.

Salter Wherry now began his daily routine, switching with long practice between different data sources. As the mood struck him, he cut back to earlier events of the past year, then moved forward again to the present. Patiently, he tacked his way to and fro across the face of the globe, sometimes a thousand miles above the surface, sometimes through a hand-held camera on an open street, occasionally with video taken inside government buildings or within private homes. The images flooded in.

. . . East Africa. The four-thousand-mile flow of the Nile northward to the Mediterranean showed a river shrunk and diminished by unremitting drought. The Sudan was parched desert, the great agricultural systems along the river all vanished. Khartoum, at the confluence of the Blue Nile and the White Nile, was no more than cindered buildings. The cameras swept north, high above the muddy river. Close to the Mediterranean, Cairo was a ghost town where packs of hungry dogs patrolled the dusty streets. The nilometer on Roda island stood far out above the river’s trickling flow. Water supply and sewage systems had failed long since. Now, only the flies were energetic in the monstrous noon heat.… Alaska. The long southern coastline was shrouded in perpetual fogs, marking the meeting of warm and cold currents. Inland, the warming peninsula was suddenly bursting with new life. The permafrost had melted. Rampant vegetation was rising to clog the muskeg swamps, and clouds of mosquito and black fly buzzed and swirled above the soft surface. The population, at first delighted by the warming trend, was now struggling to hold its own against the rising tide of plant and animal life. All day long, aircraft loaded with pesticides sprayed tens of thousands of square kilometers. They enjoyed little success… London. The steadily melting icecaps had been raising the sea level, slowly, inexorably, a few inches a year. The tides were lapping now at the top of the seawalls, pressing inward all the way from Gravesend to Waterloo Bridge. Cameras in the streets caught lines of volunteer workers continuing their long toil with sandbags and concrete buttresses. Wading through ankle-deep water, they fought the daily battle with high tide. The work went on quietly, even cheerfully. Morale was good.

. . . Java. The chain of volcanoes along the island, as though in sympathy with the globe’s extreme weather, had woken a week earlier to malignant life. Many of the hundred million people packed onto the island had sought flight, north across the shallow waters of the Java Sea. The spaceborne cameras picked out every detail of the frail boats, heavily overloaded, as they headed for Borneo and Sumatra.

But not only the land was seismically active. When the tsunami struck not a boat remained afloat. The sixty-foot tidal wave that hit Jakarta and the whole northern shore of Java ensured that those who had remained on land fared little better than their seagoing relatives. Today the cameras picked up isolated clusters of survivors as they were gathered by rescue teams and shipped to mountain camps in the central highlands.

. . . Moscow. Reports from the main agricultural oblasts were coming in to Central Records. A stone-faced calm was being maintained there, as word arrived of wheat and barley crops withered and brown, of rice and rye failure, and of steadily rising winds that ripped away dry topsoil and carried it pulverized high into the atmosphere.

Salter Wherry crouched motionless over his console, steadily absorbing new information, collating it with old. Only his mouth and eyes seemed alive. After the scenes from Moscow, he finally switched to the interior of the United Nations building. The formal ritual in the crowded chamber could not hide the undercurrents of anger and tension washing in from the stressed world outside. The Chinese ambassador, face stern and intense, was concluding his prepared speech.

“What we are seeing in the world today is not an accident of nature, not the vicissitudes of planetary weather at work. We are seeing deliberate modification of climate, changes directed against China and our friends by other nations. The time for reticence in naming these nations is past. My country is the victim of economic warfare. We cannot permit — “

Wherry jabbed impatiently at the keyboard. He was frowning, bright eyes shadowed by heavy eyebrows. After a few seconds Eleanora appeared on the screen in front of him, a silver ovoid against the backdrop of stars and a sunlit earth. He held it there while he called out printed schedules and status reports for construction. The curving lines of geodesic support girders on the outer hull had disappeared, covered by bright exterior panels. Final electrical systems were being installed, together with the power sources and the hydroponic tanks; the vast water cylinder was already full.

Wherry skipped to views of the other arcologies. The most distant, Amanda, blinked in as a grainy and indistinct image. It was now almost three million miles away from Earth, spiralling slowly outward in the plane of the ecliptic. In eight years, unless some new trajectory were adopted, the colony ship would have wound its way out to the orbit of Mars. Already the scientists on board were talking about the possibility of a small manned station on Phobos, and consulting with Salter Station on the available resources for the project. Salter Wherry flicked off the viewing screen and sat motionless for many minutes. At last he keyed in another sequence. The face of Hans Gibbs, hair tousled, appeared.

“Hans, do you have the schedule for shipping the Neurological Institute staff there with you?”

“Not in front of me. Hold on a minute and I’ll get it.”

“No need for that. I’ll tell you what I want you to do. The schedule calls for everything to be up here seventy-seven days from now.”

“Right. Judith Niles grumbled at that, but we’re on time so far.” “Hans, it won’t do. I don’t think we have that long. It’s going to hell, and it’s skidding fast. I understand international politics pretty well, but today I couldn’t even guess which country will go crazy first. They’re all candidates. I want you to work up a revised schedule that will have everything from the Institute — people, animals, and equipment — here inside thirty days. Tell Muncie I want him to do the same thing for anything we need to finish Eleanora, in the same timetable.”

Hans Gibbs suddenly looked much more awake. “Thirty days! No way, the permits alone will take us that long.”

“Don’t worry about permits. Let me take care of those. You start working the shipping arrangements. Fast. Cost is irrelevant. You hear me?” Salter Wherry smiled. “Irrelevant. Now, Hans, when have you ever heard me say that about the cost of anything? Thirty days. You have thirty days.”

Hans Gibbs shrugged. “I’ll try. But apart from permits, we have to worry about launch availability. If that goes sour — “

He paused, and swore. The connection was gone. Hans was talking to a blank screen.

CHAPTER NINE

Wolfgang Gibbs closed his eyes and leaned his head forward to touch the cool metal of the console. His face was white, and shone with sweat. After a few seconds he swallowed hard, sat upright, took a deep breath, and made another try. He hit the key sequence for a coded message, waiting until the unit in front of him signalled acceptance.

“Well, Charlene” — he had to clear his throat again — “I promised you a report as soon as I could get round to it. I’ve just screwed up the transmission sequence three times in a row, so if this one doesn’t work I’ll call it a day. I originally thought I’d be sending to you right after I got here — shows what an optimist I am! Still, here we go, one more time. If you hear puking noises in the middle of the recording, don’t worry. That’s just me, losing my liver and lungs again.”

He coughed harshly. “Hans says that only one person in fifty has as bad a reaction to freefall as I do, so with luck you’ll be all right. And they say even I should feel better in a couple more days. I can’t wait. Anyway, that’s enough moaning, let me get to work.

“Most of the trip up was a breeze. We had everything tied down tight, so nothing could shake loose, and Cameron had all the animals souped up to their eyebrows with sedatives. Pity he couldn’t do the same for me. When we hit freefall everything was all right at first, though my stomach felt as if it had moved about a foot upward. But I was coping with it, not too bad. Then we began moving the animals into their permanent quarters here. They didn’t like it, and they showed their annoyance the only way they could. I’m telling you, we’d better not move again in a hurry. They don’t pay enough for me to wallow along through a cloud of free-floating animal puke and animal crap every day of the week. Wall-to-wall yucky. It was about then that I started to feel I was going to lose my breakfast. And then I did lose it — then the previous day’s lunch and dinner, and I still feel as though I’ll never eat again.

“Okay. I guess that’s not what you want to hear. Let me get back to the real stuff. I’ll dress it up properly for the lab reports, but here’s where we stand.”

Wolfgang paused for a moment as another wave of nausea swept over him. He had made his way to the outermost corridor of Spindletop, where the effective gravity was highest, and a quarter gee was almost enough to bring his stomach in line; but if he allowed himself to look down, he was gazing out at infinity, standing on a rotating sea of stars that swirled beneath his feet. And that was enough to start him off again.

He looked straight ahead, steadfastly refusing to allow his glance to stray toward any of the ports. The turning knot in his stomach slowly loosened. “I guess the cats came through in worst shape,” he said at last. “They’re all alive, but we’ll have a hell of a time sorting out how much of their troubles are caused by the trip up here, and how much is progressive deterioration in their experimental condition. We lost a couple of sloths — don’t know why yet, but looks like it may be a drug-induced cardiac arrest. Cannon warned about that before we started, but nobody had any bright ideas how to prevent it. The other small mammals all seem in pretty good shape, and we had no real trouble moving them to their quarters. That wasn’t true with the Kodiaks, though.” He managed to smile into the camera. “They’re big mothers. Thank God we don’t have any experiments going on with elephants. You had to be here to see what a job we had with old Jinx. Great fat monster. We’d tug and heave on him for a while, and feel he wasn’t moving, then after we finally got him drifting in the right direction we’d find we couldn’t stop him. I was nearly flattened against one of the walls. It’s a good thing the people on the station are used to handling big masses in space, or I never would have made it.

“I’ll cut out the tales of woe. We finally got him in place, ’nuff said, up near the hub of Workwheel. It’s a horrible place — no gravity to speak of. I don’t know how low, but less than a hundredth of a gee for sure. Hans says that in a month or two I’ll enjoy it there, but now just thinking about it makes me sick. I’ll say one thing for the crews here, they know how to build. All the tanks and the supporting equipment we asked for were ready and in place — and it all worked. A couple of hours ago I gave Jinx the treatment, and I have him stabilized now in Mode Two hibernation pattern. You’ll get the detailed logs with the official transmission, and all the video, too. But I thought you’d like to see something at once, so I’m going to run a clip for you right in with this. Here, see what you think of Jinx.”

Wolfgang took a long, deep breath and pressed the calling sequence. He did it slowly and painfully, with the fragile and exaggerated care of an old, old man. His fingers stumbled several times, but at last he had a correct pattern entered. He leaned back and massaged his midriff as a copy of the recorded video was displayed before him and simultaneously sent down as a signal to Earth. Jinx was shown at center screen. The bear was sitting upright on a bed of soft shavings, sniffing curiously at a massive chunk of fish protein held in his front paws. His long black tongue came out and licked tentatively at the flaky surface. The bear’s movements were a little jerky, but well-controlled and accurate. Wolfgang watched with approval as Jinx took a neat bite, chewed thoughtfully, then placed the rest of the protein block down on the shavings. When the mouthful was swallowed Jinx yawned and scratched peacefully at a fur-free patch on his left side. The implanted sensors there lay close to the surface of the skin, and it was still a little sensitive. After a few seconds more he picked up the fishy slab and the monstrous jaws began to nibble around it contentedly.

“Looks good, eh?” said Wolfgang. “You’ll see more when you get the full coverage later, but let me give you the bottom line now. We saw the first signs of this in those last experiments in Christchurch, and what JN had been predicting all along seems to hold up exactly. We hit the correct drug protocols right away this time. Jinx’s body temperature was seven degrees above freezing in that segment of video. His heart rate was one beat per minute — and still is. I estimate that his metabolic rate is down by a factor of about eighty. He’s slow, but he’s sure as hell not hibernating — look at him chew on that slab. What you’re seeing is speeded up, by a factor of sixty-eight over real time. The trickiest piece so far was finding something that Jinx is willing to eat. You know how picky he is. Seems like things feel different to him now, and he doesn’t like it. We got the consistency right after about twenty tries, and he seems to be feeding normally.”

Wolfgang rubbed ruefully at his midsection. “Lucky old Jinx. That’s more than I can say for myself. Best of all, his condition seems to be completely stable. I checked all the indicators a few minutes ago. I think we could hold him there for a month if we had to, maybe more.”

He cut back from the picture of the bear to real-time transmission. “That’s the report from this end, Charlene. Now I can relax. But I can’t wait for you and the others to get up here. I don’t know how biased the news coverage is that comes here to Salter Station, but we hear of trouble everywhere back on Earth. Cold wars, hot wars, and mouthing off in all directions. Did you know it hit sixty-two Celsius yesterday in Baluchistan — that’s nearly a hundred and forty-four Fahrenheit. They must be dying in droves. And did you get the reports from the U.N. Security Council? There’s talk of closing all national air space, and Hans is having real problems scheduling flights up — not just the usual red tape, either. He’s meeting blank walls. He’s been told there will be an indefinite suspension of all flights, from all spaceports, until the Earth situation normalizes again. And who knows when that will be? Wherry’s experts say the changes are here to stay — we’ve caused them ourselves with the fossil fuel programs.”

His hand moved toward the key that would end transmission, then paused. He looked uncertainly at the screen. “Hey, Hans told me one other thing I really didn’t want to hear. Dammit, I wish I knew just how secure this line is, but I’ll say it anyway. If it’s not common knowledge down at the Institute, Charlene, please keep it to yourself. It’s about JN. Did you know that she’s been taking a whole battery of neurological tests over at Christchurch Central? CAT scans, radioisotope tracers, air bubble tracers, the works. They’ve been probing her brain sixteen different ways. I hope she didn’t do something crazy back there, like using herself as a test subject for Institute experiments. Maybe you can check it out? I’d like to be sure she’s all right. Don’t ask me how Hans knew all this — the information they have up here about Earthside doings amazes me. I guess that’s all for now.”

Wolfgang pressed the key carefully and leaned back. Transmission terminated, and the circuit was broken.

He closed his eyes. That hadn’t been as bad as he expected. It definitely helped to have something good to concentrate on, to take your thoughts away from feeling nauseated. Think of something good. A sudden and startling memory of Charlene came to his mind, her long limbs and willowy body bending above him, and her dark hair falling loosely about her forehead. He grunted. Christ! If he could have thoughts like that, he must definitely be on the mend. Next thing you know he’d be able to face food again.

Maybe it was time for another test.

Wolfgang slowly steeled himself, then turned his head and looked out of the port. Now Spindletop was pointing down toward Earth, and he was facing an endless drop to the sunlit hemisphere beneath. Salter Station was flying over the brown wedge of the Indian subcontinent, with the greener oval of Sri Lanka just visible at its foot.

He gasped. As he watched the scene seemed to spin and warp beneath him, twisting through a strange and surrealistic mapping. He gritted his teeth and held on tight to the console edge. After thirty unpleasant seconds he could force himself to a different perspective. It was earth’s blue-and-white surface, mottled with brown-green markings, that was airy and insubstantial; Salter Station was real, tangible, solid. That was it. Cling to that thought. He was slowly able to relax his grip on the table in front of him.

It would be all right. Everything was relative. If Jinx could adapt to his new life, comfortable with a body temperature down near freezing, surely Wolfgang could become at ease with the much smaller changes produced by the move to Salter Station. Better forget self-pity, and get back to work.

Ignoring the twinges from his long-suffering stomach, Wolfgang forced himself to look out again as the station swept toward the Atlantic and the majestic curve of the day-night terminator.

Three more days, then the Institute staff would be on their way here. And if the news reports were correct, it would be just in time. In their fury and endless feuding, the governments of earth seemed all set to block the road to space itself.

CHAPTER TEN

Hans Gibbs had sent his cousin the briefest, uninformative message from the main control room. “Get your ass over here. On the double, or you’ll miss something you’ll never see again.”

Wolfgang and Charlene were in the middle of first inventory when that message came over the intercom. He looked at her and signed off the terminal at once. “Come on.”

“What, right now?” Charlene shook her head protestingly. “We’re just getting started. I promised Cameron we’d have this place organized and ready to go to work when they got here. We only have a few more hours.”

“I know. But I know Hans, too. He always understates. It must be something special. Let’s go, we’ll finish this later.”

He took her hand and began to pull her along, showing off his hard-won experience with low gee. Charlene had been on Salter Station less than twenty-four hours, the second person to make full transfer from the Institute. It seemed grossly unfair to Wolfgang that she hadn’t suffered even one moment of freefall sickness. But at least she didn’t have his facility yet for easy movement. He tugged her and spun her, adjusting linear and angular momentum. After a few moments Charlene realized that she should move as little as possible, and let him drag her along as a fixed-geometry dead weight. They glided rapidly along the helical corridor that led to the central control area. Hans was waiting for them when they arrived, his attention on a display screen showing Earth at screen center. The image was being provided from a geostationary observing satellite, 22,000 miles up, so the whole globe showed as a ball that filled most of the screen.

“You won’t see anything ship-sized from this distance,” Hans said. “So we have to fake it. If we want to see spacecraft, the computer generates the graphics for them and merges it all into the display. Watch, now. I’m taking us into that mode. The action will start in a couple of minutes.”

Charlene and Wolfgang stood behind him as Hans casually keyed in a short command sequence, then leaned back in his chair. The display screen remained quiet, showing Europe, Asia and Africa as a half-lit disk under medium cloud cover. The seconds stretched on, for what seemed like forever.

“Well?” said Wolfgang at last. “We’re here. Where’s the action?”

He leaned forward. As he did so, the display changed. Suddenly, from different points on the hemisphere, tiny sparks of red light appeared. First it was half a dozen of them, easy to track. But within a few minutes there were more, rising like fireflies out of the hazy globe beneath. Each one began the slow tilt to the east that showed they were heading for orbit. Soon they were almost too numerous to count.

“See the one on the left?” said Hans. “That’s from Aussieport. Most of your staff will be on that; Judith, and de Vries, and Cannon. They’ll be here in an hour and a half.”

“Holy hell.” Charlene was frowning, shaking her head. “Those can’t be ships. There aren’t that many in the whole world.”

She was too absorbed by the scene in front of her to catch Hans Gibbs’ familiar reference to the Institute director, but Wolfgang had given his cousin a quick and knowing look.

“Charlene’s right,” Hans said. He looked satisfied at her startled reaction. “If you only consider the Shuttles and other reuseables, there aren’t that many ships. But I ran out of time. Salter Wherry told me to get everything up here, people and supplies, and to hell with the cost. He’s the boss, and it was his money. The way things have been going, if I’d waited any longer we’d never have been allowed to bring up what we need. What you’re seeing now is the biggest outflow of people and equipment you’ll ever see. I took launch options on every expendable launch vehicle I could find, anywhere in the world. Watch now. There’s more to come.”

A second wave had begun, this time showing as fiery orange. At the same time, other flashing red points were creeping round the Earth’s dark rim. Launches made from the invisible hemisphere were coming into view.

Hans touched another key, and a set of flashing green points appeared on the display, these in higher orbit.

“Those are our stations, everything in the Wherry Empire except the arcologies — they’re too far out to show at this scale. In another half-hour you’ll see how most of the launches begin to converge on the stations. We’ll be faced with multiple rendezvous and docking up here, continuously for the next thirty-six hours.”

“But how do you know where the ships are?” Charlene was wide-eyed, hypnotized by the swirl of bright sparks. “Is it all calculated from lift-off data?” “Better than that.” Hans jerked a thumb at another of the screens, off to the side. “Our reconnaissance satellites track everything that’s launched, all the time. Thermal infrared signals for the launch phase, synthetic aperture radar after that. Software converts range and range-rate data to position, and plots it on the display. Wherry put the observation and tracking system in a few years ago, when he was afraid some madman down on earth might try a sneak attack on one of his stations. But it’s ideal for this use.”

A third wave was beginning. All around the equator, a new necklace of dazzling blue specks was expanding away from the Earth’s surface. The planet was girdled by a multicolored confusion of spiralling points of light.

“For God’s sake.” Wolfgang dropped any pretence of nonchalance. “Just how many of these are there? I’ve counted over forty, and I’ve not even been trying to track the ones launched in the American hemisphere.”

“Two hundred and six spacecraft, all shapes and sizes, and most of them not designed for the sort of docking ports we have available here. The count for launches shows on that readout over there.” Hans waved a hand at a display, but his attention was all on the screen.

“It’s going to be a nightmare,” he said cheerfully. “We have to match them all up when they get here. Matter of fact, we won’t even try to bring all of them all the way. Lots of ‘em will stay in low orbit, and we’ll send the tugs down to transfer cargo. I didn’t have time to worry about extra thrust to bring them up here. We had enough trouble getting some of that junk into orbit at all.” A fourth wave had begun. But now the screen was too confusing to follow. The points of light were converging, and the limited resolution of the display screen made many appear close to collision, even though miles of space separated them. The two men seemed hypnotized, staring at the bright carousel of orbiting ships. Charlene went to the viewport and looked directly down toward Earth. There was nothing to be seen. The ships were far too small to show against the giant crescent of the planet. She shook her head, and turned to face the launch count readout. The total was ticking higher, skipping ahead in little bursts as orbital velocity was confirmed for the ships in a new group.

Hans had moved back from the control console, and the three stood side by side, motionless. The room remained totally silent for several minutes except for the soft beep of the counters.

“Nearly there,” said Charlene at last. She was still watching the ship count. “Two hundred and three. Four. Five. One more to go. There. Two hundred and six. Should we be applauding?”

She smiled at Wolfgang, who absentmindedly squeezed her hand. Then she turned back to the counter. She stared at it for a few seconds, not sure what she was seeing.

“Hey! Hans, I thought you said the total was two hundred and six? The readout shows two hundred and fourteen and it’s still going.”

“What!” Hans swivelled his head to look, the rest of his body turning the other way to give low-gee compensation for the movement. “It can’t be. I scrounged every ship that would fly. There’s no way…”

His voice faded. On the screen, a fountain of bright points of light was spouting upward. It centered on an area of southeast Asia. As they watched, a speaker by the console stuttered and burst to life.

“Hans! Full alert.” The voice was harsh and strained, but Wolfgang recognized the note of authority. It was Salter Wherry. “Bring up our defense systems. Monitors show launch of missiles from west China. No trajectory information yet. Could be headed for America or western Russia or South America, some could be coming our way. Too soon to tell. I’ve thrown the switch here. You confirm action stations. I’ll be in central control in one minute.”

In spite of its tone of agonized strain, the voice had made its staccato statements so fast that the sentences ran into one stream of orders. Hans Gibbs did not even attempt a reply. He was off his seat and over to another console instantly. A plastic seal was removed and the lever behind it pulled out before Wolfgang or Charlene could move.

“What’s happening?” cried Charlene.

“Don’t know.” Hans sounded as though he were choking. “But look at the screen — and the count. Those have to be missile launches. We can’t afford to take a chance on where they’re heading.”

The readout was going insane, digits flickering too fast to read. The launch count was up over four hundred. As it escalated higher, Salter Wherry came stumbling into the control room.

It was his arrival, in person, that made Charlene aware of the real seriousness of the situation. Here was a man who rarely met with anyone, who prized his privacy above any wealth, who hated exposure to strangers. And he was there in the control room, oblivious to the presence of Charlene and Wolfgang. She stared at him curiously. Was this the living legend, the master architect of Solar System development? She knew he was very old. But he looked more than old. His face was white and haggard, like a stretched-out death mask, and his thin hands were trembling.

“The fools,” he said softly. His voice was a croaking whisper. “Oh, the fools, the damned, damned, damned fools. I’ve been afraid of this, but I didn’t really believe it would ever happen in my lifetime. Do you have our defenses up?” “In position,” said Hans harshly. “We’re protected. But what about the ships that are on their way here? They’ll be blown apart if they’re on a rendezvous trajectory with us.”

Charlene stared at him mindlessly for a second. Then she understood. “The ships! My God, the whole Institute staff is on its way up here. You can’t use your missile defense on them — you can’t do it!”

Wherry glared at her, seeming to notice the strangers in the control room for the first time. “Even the fastest of our ships won’t be here for an hour,” he said.

He sank to a chair, his breath wheezing in his throat. He coughed and leaned back. His skin looked dry and white, like crumbling dough. “By then it will all be over, one way or another. The attack missiles have high accelerations. If they’re aimed at us, they’ll be here in twenty minutes. If they’re not, it will be over anyway. Hans, flag our position on the display.”

Under Hans Gibbs’ keyboard control, the position of Salter Station appeared on the screen as a glowing white circle. Hans studied the whole display for a few moments, head cocked to one side. “I don’t think they’re coming this way. For a guess, they’re heading for western Russia and the United States. What’s happening?”

Wherry was sitting, head down. “Don’t know. See what you can catch on radio communications.” He cleared his throat, the breath wheezing in his larynx. “We’ve always been worried that somebody would try a sneak first strike, wipe out the others’ retaliatory power. That’s what we’re seeing. Some madman took advantage of the high level of our launch activity — so much going on, it would take anyone a while to realize an attack was being made.” Hans had cut in a radio frequency scan. “Radio silence from China. Look at the screen. Those will be United States’ missiles. The counterattack. We knew a preemptive first strike wouldn’t work. It didn’t.”

A dense cluster of points of fire was sweeping up over the north pole. At the same time, a new starburst was rising from eastern Siberia. The launch readout had gone insane, emitting a series of high-pitched squeaks as individual launches became too frequent to be marked by a separate beep from the counter. Over two thousand missile launches had been recorded in less than three minutes. “Couldn’t work. Couldn’t ever work,” said Salter Wherry softly. “First strike never would — always leaves something to hit back.”

His head slumped down. For the first time, Charlene had the thought that she might be seeing something more than old age and worry. “Wolfgang! Give me some help here.”

She moved to Wherry’s side and placed her hand under his chin, lifting his head. His eyes were bleary, as though some translucent film covered them. At her touch he feebly raised his right hand to grip hers. It was icy cold, and his other hand clutched at his chest.

“Couldn’t work. Couldn’t.” The voice was a rough whisper. “It’s the end. End of the world, end of everything.”

“He’s having a heart attack.” Charlene leaned over to lift him, but Wolfgang was there before her.

“Hans. You could do this better than we can, but you’d better stay here — we have to know what’s going on. Alert the medical facility, tell them we think it’s a heart attack. Ask them if we should move him, or if they want to treat him here — and if they want him at the facility, tell me how to get him there.” Charlene helped to lift Wherry from the seat. She did it as gently as she could, while some part of her brain stood back astonished and watched Wolfgang and Hans. There had been a strange and sudden change in their relationship in the past few minutes. Hans was still older, more senior, and more experienced. But as events became more confused and depressing, he seemed to dwindle, while Wolfgang just became more forceful and determined. At the moment there was no question as to who was in control. Hans was following Wolfgang’s orders without hesitation. He was at the console, ear mike on, and his fingers were flying across the array of keys.

“Leave Wherry here,” he said after a few seconds. “Med Center says Olivia Ferranti will be right over. Make sure he can’t fall over, then don’t move him. Don’t try any treatment unless he stops breathing. They’ll bring portable resuscitation equipment with them.”

“Right.” Wolfgang gestured to Charlene, and between them they carefully lowered Salter Wherry to the floor, supporting his head on Wolfgang’s jacket. He lay quiet for a moment, then made an effort to lift himself.

“Don’t move,” said Charlene.

There was a tiny sideways movement of his head. “Displays.” Wherry’s voice was a rustling whisper. “Have to see the displays. Reconnaissance. Cities.” Hans had turned to watch them. He nodded. “I’ve already asked for that. Major cities. What else?”

“Can you reach the ship with the Institute senior staff on board?” asked Wolfgang. “We have to talk to JN. They’re well clear of the atmosphere, but I don’t know if they’re line-of-sight from here.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Hans turned back to the console. “We can go through relays. I’ll try to reach them. We’ll have to use another channel for that. I’ll feed them in to the screen behind you.”

He set to work at the keyboard. He was the only one with enough to occupy him completely. Charlene and Wolfgang stood by feeling helpless. Salter Wherry, after his effort to raise his head, lay motionless. He looked drained of all blood, with livid face and hands bent into withered claws. His breath gargled deep in his throat, the only sound that broke the urgent beep of new launches. The sparks were no longer concentrated in a band around the Earth’s equator. Now they covered the globe like a bright net, drawn tighter in the northern hemisphere and over the pole.

Olivia Ferranti arrived just as the reconnaissance satellite images appeared on the screen. The doctor took one startled look at the blue-white blossoming explosion that had been Moscow, then ignored it and knelt beside her patient. Her assistant rapidly connected electrodes from the portable unit to Salter Wherry’s bared chest, and took an ominous-looking saw and scalpel from a sterilized carrying case.

“Transmissions from the ship coming in,” said Hans. “Who do you want?” “JN,” said Wolfgang. “Charlene, you’d better talk to her. Tell them not to move away from a rendezvous trajectory until our missile defense goes off here. They’ll be safe anywhere — “

His words were lost in a huge burst of noise from the communications unit. “Damnation.” Hans Gibbs rapidly reduced the volume to a tolerable level. “I was afraid of that. Some of the thermonuclear explosions are at the edge of the atmosphere. We’re getting electromagnetic pulse effects, and that’s wiping out the signals. We’re safe enough, all the Wherry systems were hardened long ago. I’m not sure about that ship. I’m going to try a laser channel, hope they’re hardened against EMP, and hope we’re line-of-sight at the moment.” The reconnaissance screens told a chilling story. Every few seconds the detailed display shifted to show a new explosion. There was no time to identify each city before it vanished forever in the glow of hydrogen fusion. Only the day or night conditions of the image told the watchers in which hemisphere the missiles were arriving. It was impossible to estimate the damage or the loss of life before a new scene was crowding onto the screens. Salter Wherry was right, the hope of a preemptive first strike had proved an empty one.

Wolfgang and Charlene stood together in front of the biggest screen. It still showed the view from geostationary orbit. Again the display was sparking with bright flickers of light, but this time they were not the result of computer simulation. They were explosions, multiple warhead, multimegaton. The whole hemisphere was riddled with dark pocks of cloud, as buildings, bridges, roads, houses, plants, animals, and human beings were vaporized and carried high into the stratosphere.

“Hamburg.” Wolfgang whispered the word, almost to himself. “See, that was Hamburg. My sister was there. Husband and kids, too.”

Charlene did not speak. She squeezed his hand, much harder than she realized. The explosions went on and on, in a ghastly silence of display that almost seemed worse than any noise. Did she wish the screen showed an image of North America? Or would she rather not know what had happened there? With all her relatives in Chicago and Washington, there seemed no hope for any of them. She turned around. On the floor, a mask had been placed over the lower part of Salter Wherry’s face. Ferranti had opened Wherry’s dark shirt, and was doing something that Charlene preferred not to look at too closely to his chest. The assistant was preparing a light-wheeled gurney.

Dead, or alive? Charlene was shocked to see that Wherry was fully conscious, and that his eyes were swivelling to follow each of the displays. There was an intensity to his expression that could have been heart stimulants, but at least that dreadful glazed and filmy look was gone.

Charlene followed Wherry’s look to the screen at the back of the room. A fuzzy image was building there, with a distorting pattern of green herringbone noise overlaid upon it. As the picture steadied and cleared, she realized that she was looking at Jan de Vries. He was sitting in a Shuttle seat, a pile of papers on his lap. He looked thoroughly nauseated. And he was crying.

“Dr. de Vries — Jan.” Charlene didn’t know if he could hear her or see her, but she had to cry out to him. “Don’t try to rendezvous. We’re operating a missile defense system here.”

He jerked upright at her voice. “Charlene? I can hear you, but our vision system’s not working. Can you see me?”

“Yes.” As soon as she said the word, Charlene regretted it. Jan de Vries was dishevelled, there was a smear of vomit along his coat, and his eyes were red with weeping. For a man who was so careful to be well-groomed always, his present condition must be humiliating. “Jan, did you hear what I said?” she hurried on. “Don’t let them try to rendezvous.”

“We know.” De Vries rubbed at his eyes with his fingers. “That message came in before anything else. We’re in a holding orbit until we’re sure it’s safe to approach Salter Station.”

“Jan, did you see any of it? It’s terrible, the world is exploding.” “I know.” De Vries spoke clearly, almost absently. Somehow Charlene had the impression that his mind was elsewhere.

“I have to talk to a doctor on Salter Station,” he went on. “I would have done it before launch, but there was just too much confusion. Can you find me one?” “There’s one here — Salter Wherry had a heart attack, and she’s looking after him.”

“Well, will you bring the doctor to the communicator? It is imperative that I talk with her about the medical facilities on Salter Station. There is an urgent need for certain drugs and surgical equipment — “ Jan de Vries suddenly paused, looked perplexed, and shook his head. “I’m sorry, Charlene. I hear you, but I am having difficulty in concentrating on more than one thing just now. You said that Wherry had a heart attack. When?”

“When the war started.”

“A bad attack?”

“I think so. I don’t know.” Charlene couldn’t answer that question, not with Salter Wherry gazing mutely at her. “Dr. Ferranti, do you have time to talk for a few moments with Dr. de Vries?”

The other woman looked up from her position by Wherry. “No. I’ve got my hands more than full here. But tell me the question, and I’ll see if I can give you a quick answer.”

“Thank you,” said de Vries humbly. “I’ll be brief. Back on Earth there are — or were — four hospitals equipped to perform complete parietal resection, with partial removal and internal stitching of the anterior commissure. It needs special tools and a complicated pre- and post-operative drug protocol. I would like to know if such an operation could be performed with the medical facilities available at Salter Station’s Med Center.”

“What the hell is he going on about?” asked Hans in a gruff whisper over his shoulder to Wolfgang. “The world’s going up in flames, and he’s playing shop talk about hospitals.”

Wolfgang gestured to Hans to keep quiet. Jan de Vries had stated many times that he was unencumbered in the world, an orphan with no living relatives, and no close friends. His griefs should not be for lost family or loved ones. But Wolfgang could see the look on de Vries’ face, and something there spoke of personal tragedy more than general Armageddon. A strange suspicion whispered into Wolfgang’s mind.

Dr. Ferranti finally turned her head to stare at de Vries’ image. “We don’t have the equipment. And seeing that” — she jerked her head at the main display unit — “I guess we’ll never have it.”

Salter Station’s orbit had steadily taken it farther west, to the sunlit side of Earth. Now they looked directly down on the Atlantic Ocean. The tiny dark ulcers on the Earth’s face had spread and merged. Most of Europe was totally obscured by a smoky pall, lit from within by lightning flashes and surface fire-storms. The east coast of the United States should have been coming into view, but it was hidden by a continuous roiling mass of dust and cloud.

And the seeker missiles were still being launched. As enemy targets were hit and vanished from the displays, new bright specks rose like the Phoenix from the seething turmoil that had been the United States, setting their paths over the pole toward Asia. The guiding hands that controlled them might be dead, but their instructions had long since been established in the control computers. If no one lived to stop it, the nuclear rain would fall until all arsenals were empty.

“Can you put together a facility for the operation?” asked de Vries at last. Unable to see the displays himself, he did not realize that everyone in the central control room was paralyzed by the scene of a dying Earth. His question was an urgent one, but no one would reply. Since the beginning of the day everything had taken place in a slow dream, as though the world around de Vries was already running down toward its final end.

“Can you build one?” he repeated.

Ferranti shivered, and finally replied. “If we wanted to we might be able to build a makeshift system to do the job — but it would take us at least five years. We’d be bootstrapping all the way, making equipment to make equipment.” She looked down again at Salter Wherry, and at once lost interest in talking further to de Vries. Wherry’s breathing was shallower, and he was trembling. He appeared to be unconscious.

“Come on,” she said to her assistant. “I didn’t want to move him yet, but we have no choice. We have to take him back to the center. At once, or he’ll be gone.”

With Wolfgang’s help, Wherry was carefully lifted on to the lightweight carrier. He still wore the breathing mask over his lower face. As he was lowered into position, his eyes opened. The pupils were dilated, the irises rimmed with yellowish-white. The eyeballs were sunk back and dark-rimmed. Wolfgang looked down into them and saw death there.

He begin to straighten up, but somehow the frail hand found the strength to grip his sleeve.

“You are with the Institute?” The words were faint and muffled.

“Yes.” It was a surprise to find that Wherry was still able to speak. “Come with me.” The weak voice could still command. Wolfgang nodded, then hesitated as Olivia Ferranti prepared to wheel Wherry slowly away. Charlene was speaking to de Vries again, asking the question that Wolfgang himself had wanted to ask.

“Jan,” she was saying. “We’ve tried to reach Niles. Where is she?” “She is here. On this ship.” De Vries put his hands to his eyes. “She’s unconscious. I didn’t want her to come. I wanted her to wait, build up her strength, have the operation, then follow us. She insisted on coming. And she was right. But back on Earth, she could have been helped. “Now…” Wolfgang struggled to make sense of de Vries’ words. But the frail hand was again on Wolfgang’s arm, and the thread of voice was speaking again. “Come. Now. Must talk now.”

Wolfgang hesitated for a second, then reluctantly followed the stretcher out of the control room.

Salter Wherry turned his head toward Wolfgang, and a dry tongue moved over the pale lips. “Stand close.”

“Don’t try to talk,” said Ferranti.

Wherry ignored her. “Must give message. Must tell Niles what is to be done. You listening?”

“I’m listening.” Wolfgang nodded. “Go ahead, I’ll make sure that she gets the message.”

“Tell her I know she saw through narcolepsy. Thought she might — too simple for her. Want her to know reason — real reason — why had to have her here.” There was a long pause. Wherry’s eyes closed. Wolfgang thought that he had lapsed into unconsciousness, but when the old voice spoke again it sounded stronger and more coherent.

“I had my own reasons for needing her — and she had hers for coming. I don’t know what they were; I want her to know mine. And I want her to carry plan out here. I hoped we wouldn’t blow ourselves up down there, but I had to prepare for worst. Just in time, eh?” There was a wheezing groan, that Wolfgang realized was a laugh. “Story of my life. Just in time. ‘Nother day, we’d have been too late.” He moved his arm feebly as Ferranti took it to make an injection. “No sedatives. Hurts — in my chest — but I can stand that. You, boy.” The eyes burned into Wolfgang. “Lean close. Can’t talk much more. Tell you my dream, want you to tell Niles to make it hers.”

Wolfgang stooped over the frail body. There was a long pause.

“Genesis. You remember Genesis?” Wherry’s voice was fading, indistinct. “Have to do what Genesis says. ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’ Fruitful, and multiply.” Wolfgang looked quickly at Ferranti. “He’s rambling.”

“Not rambling.” There was a faint edge of irritability still in the weak voice. “Listen. Made arcologies to go long way — seed universe. Be fruitful, and multiply. See? Self-sustaining, run thousand years — ten thousand. But can’t do it. We’re weak link. Fight, change minds, change societies, kill leaders, breakdown systems. Damned fools. Never last thousand years, not even hundred.” They had reached the Med Center, and Wherry was being lifted onto a table all prepared for emergency operations. A needle was sliding into his left arm, while a battery of bright lights went on all around them.

Wherry rolled his head with a last effort to face Wolfgang. “Tell Niles. Want her to develop suspended animation. That’s why need Institute on station.” The breathing mask had been removed, and there was a travesty of a smile on the tortured face. “Thought once I might be first experiment. See stars for myself. Sorry won’t be that way. But tell her. Tell her. Cold sleep… end of everything… sleep…”

Olivia Ferranti was at Wolfgang’s side. “He’s under,” she said. “We want you out of here — we’re going to operate now.”

“Can you save him?”

“I don’t think so. This is the third attack.” She bit her lip. For the first time, Wolfgang noticed her large, luminous eyes and sad mouth. “Last time it was a patch-up job, but we hoped it would last longer than this. One chance in ten, no more. Less unless we start at once.”

Wolfgang nodded. “Good luck.”

He made his way slowly back along the corridors. They were deserted; everyone on the station had retreated with their thoughts. Wolfgang, usually impervious to fatigue, felt drained and beaten. The explosions on Earth rose unbidden in his mind, a collage of destruction with Jan de Vries’ sad face overlaid on it. The morning optimism and the joking inventory of supplies with Charlene felt weeks away.

He finally came to the control room. Hans was alone there, watching the displays. He seemed in a shocked trance, but he roused himself at Wolfgang’s voice.

“The missile defense system has been turned off. They were too busy with themselves — down there — to waste their time on us. Your ships will start docking any time now.”

“What’s the situation?” Wolfgang nodded his head at the screen, where the big display showed the smudged and raddled face of Earth.

“Awful. No radio or television signals are coming out — or if they’re trying, they’re lost in the static. We tried for an estimate of released energy, just a few minutes ago. Thirty-five thousand megatons.” Hans sighed. “Five tons of TNT for every person on the planet. There’s night now, all over Earth — sunlight can’t penetrate the dust clouds.”

“How many casualties?”

“Two billion, three billion?” Hans shook his head. “It’s not over yet. Disease and climate changes will get the rest.”

“Everyone? Everyone on Earth?”

Hans did not reply. He sat hunched at the console, staring at the screen. The whole face of the planet was one dark smear. After a few seconds Wolfgang continued back to his own quarters. Hans and the others were right. Soon the ships would be docking, but before that there was the need for solitude and silent grief.

Charlene was waiting for him in a darkened room. He went and took her in his arms. For several minutes they sat in silence, holding each other close. The pace of events had been so fast for many hours that they had been numbed, and only now did their awful significance begin to sink home. For Charlene in particular, less than twenty-four hours away from Earth and the Neurological Institute, everything had a feeling of unreality. Soon, she felt, the spell would break and she would return to the familiar and comfortable world of experiments, progress reports, and weekly staff meetings.

Wolfgang stirred in her arms. She lifted his hand and rubbed it along her cheek. “What’s the news on JN?” he said at last. “I didn’t like the look of de Vries.” Charlene shivered in the darkness. “Bad as it could be. Jan met with her this morning, when she had the final lab test results. She has a rapidly growing and malignant brain tumor — even worse than we’d feared.”

“Inoperable?”

“Not completely — that’s what Jan de Vries was asking about. There is an operation and associated chemotherapy program, one that’s been successful one time out of five. But only a handful of places and people could perform it. There’s no way to do it on Salter Station — you heard Ferranti, it would take five years of development.”

“How long does she have?”

“Two or three months, no more.” Charlene had held back her feelings through the day, but now she was quietly weeping. “Maybe less — the acceleration at launch knocked her unconscious, and that’s a bad sign. It was only three gee. And every facility that could have done the operation, back on Earth, is dust. Wolfgang, she’s doomed. We can’t operate here, and she can’t go back there.” He was again silent for a while, rocking Charlene back and forward gently in his arms. “This morning we seemed at the beginning of everything,” he said. “Twelve hours later, and now it’s the end. Wherry said it: the end of everything. I didn’t tell you this, but he’s dying, too. I feel sure of it. He gave me a message for JN, to work on cold sleep for the arcologies. I promised to deliver it to her, and I will. But now it doesn’t matter.”

“They’re all gone,” said Charlene softly. “Earth, Judith Niles, Salter Wherry. What’s left?”

Wolfgang was silent for a long time. In the darkness, feeling his body warm against her, Charlene wondered if he had really heard her. They were both beginning to drowse off, as nervous exhaustion drained away all energy. She felt too weak to move.

Finally Wolfgang grunted and stirred. He took a long, steadying breath. “We’re left. We’re still here. And the animals, they’re here too. Somebody has to look after them. They can’t be left to starve.”

He pulled her head to lean against his shoulder. “Let’s stay here, try to rest a little. Then we can go and feed old Jinx. Some things have to get done — even after the end of the world.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

For almost four hours there had been no conversation. The three white-garbed figures were absorbed with their particular duties, and the gauze masks imposed an added isolation and anonymity. The air in the chamber was freezingly cold. The workers rubbed at their chilled hands, but they were reluctant to wear thermal gloves and risk decreased dexterity.

The woman on the table had been unconscious throughout. Her breathing was so shallow that the monitors’ reassurance was necessary to tell of her survival and stable condition. Electrodes and catheters ran into her abdomen, chest cavity, nose, eyes, spinal column, and skull. A thick tube had been connected to a major artery in the groin, ready to pump blood to the chemical exchange device that stood by the table.

All was ready. But now there was hesitation. The three checked the vital signs one more time, then by unspoken agreement went outside the chamber and removed their masks. For a few seconds they looked at each other in silence. “Should we really go through with it?” Charlene said abruptly. “I mean, with the uncertainties and the risks — we have no experience with a human. Zero. And I’m not sure how any of the drug amounts should be adjusted for different body mass and body chemistry.…”

“What action would you suggest, my dear?” Jan de Vries had been the one who opposed the idea most vehemently when it was first proposed, but now he seemed quite calm and resigned. “Bring her body temperature back to normal? Try to wake her? If that is your suggestion, propose it to us. But you must be the one, not I, to face her and explain why we did not accede to her explicit wishes.” “But what if it doesn’t work?” Charlene’s voice was shaking. “Look at our record. It’s so risky. We’ve had Jinx in that mode for only three weeks.” “And you argue that your experience with the bear is not applicable?” “Who knows? There could be a hundred significant differences — body mass, preexisting antigens, drug reactions. And some a lot more improbable than that. For all we know, it works for Jinx because of some previous drug used in our experiments with him. Remember, when we did the same sort of protocol with Dolly, it killed her. We need to try other tests, other animals — we need more time.”

“We all know that.” Wolfgang Gibbs didn’t share de Vries’ fatalist calm, or Charlene’s nervous vacillation. He seemed to have an objective interest in the new experiment. “Look at it this way, Charlene. If we can move JN into Mode Two in the next few hours, one of two things will happen. If she stays stable and regains consciousness, that’s fine. We’ll try to communicate with her and find out how she feels. If we get her into Mode Two and she’s not stable, we can try to bring her back to normal. If we succeed we’ll have the chance to try again. If we fail, she’ll die. That’s what you’re worried about. But if we don’t try to stabilize her in Mode Two, she’s dead anyway — remember the diagnosis? She’ll be gone in less than three months, and we can’t change that. Ask it this way: if it were you on that table, what would you want us to do?”

Charlene bit her lip. There was a dreadful temptation to do nothing, to leave JN with her body temperature down close to freezing while they deliberated. But the temperature in the chamber was still dropping. Within the next half hour they had to bring Judith Niles back up to consciousness, or try for Mode Two. “What’s the latest report on Jinx?” Charlene said abruptly.

“He’s fine.”

“Right. Then I say, let’s go ahead. Waiting won’t help anything.” If the other two were startled at the sudden change of attitude, neither mentioned it. They adjusted their masks and went back at once into the chamber. Already the temperature inside had dropped another degree. The monitors recorded a pulse rate for Judith Niles of four beats a minute, and the chilled blood was driven sluggishly through narrowed veins.

The final stage began. It would be carried out under computer control, with the humans merely there to provide an override if things went wrong. Jan de Vries initiated the control sequence. Then he went across to the still figure on the table and gently placed the palm of his hand on her cold forehead. “Good luck, Judith. We’ll do our best. And we’ll be communicating with you — God willing — when you get there.”

He stood looking at her face for a long time. The carefully measured drug injections and massive transfusion of chemically changed blood had already begun. Now the monitors showed strange patterns, steady periods alternating with abrupt changes in pulse rate, skin conductivity, ion balances, and nervous system activity. Oscilloscope displays showed unpredictable peaks and valleys of brain rhythms, as cycles of waves rose, fell, and merged.

Even to the experienced eyes of the watchers, everything on the monitors looked odd and unfamiliar. And yet that was no surprise. As she had requested, Judith Niles was embarked on a strange journey. She would be exploring a region where blood was close to freezing, where the body’s chemical reactions proceeded at a fraction of their usual rates, where only a few hibernating animals and no human had ever ventured and returned to life.

The frozen heart slowed further, and the blood drifted lazy along cold arteries and veins. The body on the table suddenly shuddered and twitched, then was quiet again. The monitors fluttered a warning.

But there would be no going back. The search was on. In the next few hours, Judith Niles would be engaged in a desperate quest. She had to find a new plateau of physiological stability, down where no human had ever gone before; and her only guide was the uncertain trail left by one Kodiak bear.