Deepsix

I

November 2223

The impending collision out there somewhere in the great dark between a gas giant and a world very much like our own has some parallels to the eternal collision between religion and common sense. One is bloated and full of gas, and the other is measurable and solid. One engulfs everything around it, and the other simply provides a place to stand. One is a rogue destroyer that has come in out of the night, and the other is a warm well-lighted place vulnerable to the sainted mobs. -Gregory MacAllister, Have Your Money Ready

They came back to Maleiva HI to watch the end of the world.

Researchers had been looking forward to it since its imminence was proclaimed almost twenty years earlier by Jeremy Benchwater Morgan, an ill-tempered combustible astrophysicist who, according to colleagues, had been born old. Even today Morgan is the subject of all kinds of dark rumors, that he had driven one child to tranks and another to suicide, that he'd forced his first wife into an early grave, that he'd relentlessly destroyed careers of persons less talented than he even though he gained nothing by doing so, that he'd consistently taken credit for the work of others. How much of this is true, no one really knows. What is on the record, however, is that Morgan had been both hated and feared by his colleagues and apparently by a deranged brother-in-law who made at least two attempts to kill him. When he'd died, finally, of heart failure, his onetime friend and longtime antagonist Gunther Beekman, commented privately that he had beaten his second wife to the punch. In accordance with his instructions, no memorial was conducted. It was, some said, his last act of vindictiveness, denying his family and associates the satisfaction of staying home.

Because he had done the orbital work and predicted the coming collision, the Academy had given his name to the rogue world that had invaded the Maleiva system. Although that was a gesture required by tradition in any case, many felt that the Academy directors had taken grim pleasure in their action.

Morgan's World approached Jovian dimensions. Its mass was 296 times that of Earth. Diameter at the equator was 131,600 kilometers, at the poles about five percent less. This oblateness resulted from a rotational period of just over nine hours. It had a rocky core a dozen times as massive as the Earth. It was otherwise composed primarily of hydrogen and helium.

It was tilted almost ninety degrees to its own plane of movement, and half as much to the system plane. It was a gray-blue world, its atmosphere apparently placid and untroubled, with neither rings nor satellites.

"Do we know where it came from?" Marcel asked.

Gunther Beekman, small, bearded, overweight, was seated beside him on the bridge. He nodded and brought up a fuzzy patch on the auxiliary display, closed in on it, and enhanced. "Here's the suspect," he said. "It's a section of the Chippewa Cloud, and if we're right, Morgan's been traveling half a billion years."

In approximately three weeks, on Saturday, December 9, at 1756 hours GMT, the intruder would collide head-on with Maleiva III.

Maleiva was the infant daughter of the senator who'd chaired the science funding committee when the initial survey was done, two decades earlier. There were eleven planets in the system, but only the doomed third world had received a name to go with its Roman numeral: From the beginning they called it Deepsix. In the often malicious nature of things, it was also one of the very few worlds known to harbor life. Even though locked in a three-thousand-year-old ice age, it would have made, in time, an exquisite new outpost for the human race.

"The collision here is only the beginning of the process," Beekman said. "We can't predict precisely what's going to happen afterward, but within a few thousand years Morgan will have made a complete shambles of this system." He leaned back, folded his hands behind his head, and adopted an expression of complacency. "It's going to be an interesting show to watch."

Beekman was the head of the Morgan Project, a planetologist who had twice won the Nobel, a lifelong bachelor, and a onetime New York State chess champion. He routinely referred to the coming Event as "the collision," but Marcel was struck by the relative sizes of the two worlds. It would most certainly not be a collision. Deepsix would fall into Morgan's clouds, like a coin casually dropped into a pool.

"Why doesn't it have any moons?" he asked Beekman.

Beekman considered the question. "Probably all part of the same catastrophe. Whatever ejected it from its home system would have taken off all the enhancements. We may see something like that here in a few centuries."

"In what way?"

"Morgan's going to stay in the neighborhood. At least for a while. It's going into a highly unstable orbit." He brought up a graphic of Maleiva and its planetary system. One gas giant was so close to the sun that it was actually skimming through the corona. The rest of the system resembled Earth's own, terrestrial worlds in close, gas giants farther out. There was even an asteroid belt, where a world had failed to form because of the nearby presence of a jov-ian. "It'll eventually mangle everything," he said, sounding almost wistful. "Some of these worlds will get dragged out of their orbits into new ones, which will be irregular and probably unstable. One or two may spiral into the sun. Others will get ejected from the system altogether."

"Not a place," said Marcel, "where you'd want to invest in real estate."

"I wouldn't think," agreed Beekman.

Marcel Clairveau was captain of the Wendy Jay, which was carrying the Morgan research team that would observe the collision, record its effects, and return to write papers on energy expansion, gravity waves, and God knew what else. There were forty-five of them, physicists, cosmologists, planetologists, climatologists, and a dozen other kinds of specialists. They were a picked group, the leading people in their respective fields.

"How long's it going to take? Before things settle down again?"

"Oh, hell. I don't know, Marcel. There are too many variables. It may never really stabilize. In the sense you're thinking."

A river of stars crossed the sky, expanding into the North American Nebula. Vast dust clouds were illuminated by far-off Deneb, a white supergiant sixty thousand times as luminous as Sol. More stars were forming in the dust clouds, but they would not ignite for another million years or so.

Marcel looked down on Deepsix.

It could have been an Earth.

They were on the daylight side, over the southern hemisphere. Snowfields covered the continents from the poles to within two or three hundred kilometers of the equator. The oceans were full of drifting ice.

Frigid conditions had prevailed for three thousand years, since Maleiva and its family of planets plowed into the Quiveras, one of the local dust clouds. They had not yet come out the other side, wouldn't for another eight centuries. The dust filtered the sunlight, and the worlds had cooled. Had there been a civilization on Deepsix, it would not have lived.

The climatologists believed that below fifteen degrees south latitude, and above fifteen degrees north, the snow never melted. Had not melted in these thirty centuries. That wasn't necessarily a long time, as such things went. Earth itself had gone through ice ages of similar duration.

Large land animals had survived. They sighted herds moving through the plains and forests of the equatorial area, which at present formed a green strip across two of the continents. There was also occasional movement out on the glaciers. But along the equatorial strip, a multitude of creatures had hung on.

Beekman got up, took a deep breath, rinsed his coffee cup, clapped Marcel on the shoulder, and beamed. "Have to get ready," he said, starting for the door. "I believe the witching hour has arrived."

When he was gone, Marcel allowed himself a long smile. The host of scientific leaders riding on Wendy had given way to unalloyed enthusiasm. On the way out they'd run and rerun simulations of the Event, discussed its potential for establishing this or that view of energy exchange or chronal consequences or gravity wave punctuation. They argued over what they might finally learn about the structure and composition of gas giants, and about the nature of collisions. They expected to get a better handle on long-standing puzzles, like the tilt of Uranus or the unexplained large iron content of worlds like Erasmus in the Vega system and Mercury at home. And the most important implication: It would be their only opportunity to see directly inside a terrestrial planet. They had special sensors for that, because the eruption of energy, during the final spasm, would be blinding.

"It's going to begin to break up here," they'd said, one or another, over and over, pointing at the time line, "and the core will be exposed here. My God, can you imagine what that'll look like?"

The common wisdom was that one could not be a good researcher if one had completely outgrown childhood. If that was so, Marcel knew he had good people along. They were kids who'd come to watch a show. And however they tried to disguise the reality of that, pretending that this was first and foremost a fact-gathering mission, nobody was fooling anybody. They were off on a lark, cashing in the real reward that came from lives of accomplishment. They'd broken into the structure of space, mapped the outer limits of the universe, solved most of the enigmas associated with time, and now they were going to sit back and enjoy the biggest wreck of which anyone had ever heard.

And Marcel was pleased to be along. It was the assignment of a lifetime.

NCA Wendy Jay was the oldest operating vessel in the Academy fleet. Its keel had been laid almost a half century before, and its interior decor consequently possessed a quaintness that gave one a sense of stepping into another age.

Its passengers were watching Morgan through a battery of telescopes and sensors, some mounted on the ship's hull, others on satellite. In every available space throughout the vessel, researchers were peering down into misty blue-gray depths that fell away forever. Gigantic lightning bolts flickered across the face of the world. Occasional meteors raced down the sky, trailing light, vanishing into the clouds.

They gauged its magnetic field, which was two-thirds as strong as Jupiter's, and they recorded the squeals and shrieks of its radio output.

The mood remained festive, and the physicists and planetolo-gists wandered the passageways, visiting one another's quarters, hanging out in the operations center, visiting the bridge, pouring drinks in the workout room. When Marcel strolled down to Wendy's project control, he encountered half a dozen of them gathered around a screen, and when they saw him they raised their glasses to him.

It was a pleasant feeling, to be toasted by the creme de la creme. Not bad for a kid who'd resisted schools and books for years. One teacher had taken him aside when he was fourteen and suggested he might as well apply for the dole then. Get in line early, she'd advised.

When they'd finished the Morgan observations, they moved over to Maleiva III and began the process of inserting probes and positioning satellites. The intention, as Chiang Harmon explained it, was to "take the temperature of the victim, and to listen to its heartbeat, throughout its final days." The team wanted to get every possible physical detail on file. They would establish Maleiva Hi's density and record the fluctuations of its albedo. They would watch the shifting tides. They would examine the depth and composition of its core, analyze the atmospheric mix, and record the air pressure. They would chart its hurricanes and its tornadoes, and they would measure the increasing intensity of the quakes that would eventually shatter the planet.

At breakfast during their first full day in orbit around Deepsix, Beekman announced to everyone in the dining room, and by the PA to the rest, that the correlation of hydrogen to helium, 80.6 to 14.1, matched perfectly with that of Morgan's suspected home star. So now they knew with near certainty where it had been born.

Everyone applauded, and somebody suggested in a deliberately slurred voice that the occasion called for another toast. The noise turned to laughter and Beekman passed around the apple juice. They were in fact a sober lot.

Marcel Clairveau wanted to get a job in management but expected to spend the rest of his life piloting superluminals for the Academy. Prior to that, he'd worked for Kosmik, Inc., shuttling personnel and supplies out to Quraqua, which Kosmik was terraforming. But he hadn't liked the people running the organization, who were both autocratic and incompetent. When it reached a point at which he was embarrassed to reveal for whom he worked, he'd resigned, done a brief stint as an instructor at Overflight, had seen an opportunity with the Academy, and had taken it.

Marcel was a Parisian, although he'd begun life on Pinnacle. He had been the second child born on an extrasolar planet. The first, a girl, also born on Pinnacle, had received all kinds of gifts, up to and including a free education.

"Let it be a lesson," his father had been fond of telling him. "Nobody remembers who Columbus's first mate was. Always go for the top job."

It had been a running joke between them, but Marcel had seen the wisdom in the remark, and now a variation of it hung over the desk in his quarters. Jump in or sit down. Not very poetic, but it reminded him to leave nothing to chance.

His father had been disappointed with the aimlessness of his adolescent years, and he'd died while Marcel was still adrift, undoubtedly convinced his wayward offspring would do nothing substantial with his life. He'd put Marcel into a small college at Lyon, where they specialized in recalcitrant students. And they'd introduced him to Voltaire.

It might have been his father's unexpected death, or Voltaire, or a math instructor in his sophomore year who unfailingly believed in him (for reasons Marcel never understood), or Valeric Guischard, who had told him point-blank she would not allow herself to become involved with a man with no future. Whatever had caused it, Marcel had decided to conquer the world.

He hadn't quite achieved that, but he was captain of a superlu-minal. He'd been too late to capture Valeric, but he knew no woman would ever again walk away from him because he had nothing to offer.

Starships, however, had turned out to be less romantic than he'd expected. His life, even with the Academy, had devolved into hauling passengers and freight from world to world with monotonous regularity. He'd hoped to pilot the survey ships that went out beyond the bubble, that went to places no one had ever seen before, like the Taliaferro, which had come out twenty-one years ago and found Morgan. That was the kind of life he wanted. But those were compact ships, and the pilots also tended to be part of the working crew. They were astrophysicists, exobiologists, climatologists, people who could carry their weight during a mission., Marcel could run the ship and in a pinch repair the coffeemaker. He was a skilled technician, one of the few pilots who could do major repairs under way. That skill counted for a great deal, but it was one more reason why the Academy liked him on flights that carried large numbers of passengers.

Marcel had found himself living a curiously uneventful life.

Until- Morgan.

Because the collision would be a head-on, a kind of cosmic train wreck, Maleiva 111 was not yet feeling the gravitational effects of the approaching giant. Nor was it yet more than a bright star in her skies. "Nothing much will change down there," Beekman predicted, "until the last forty hours or so. Then"-he rubbed his hands with anticipation-"Katie bar the door."

They were over the night side. Filmy clouds floated below them, limned by starlight. Here and there they could see oceans or snow-covered landmasses.

The Wendy jay was moving east in low orbit. It was early morning again aboard ship, but a substantial number of the researchers were up, crowded around the screens. They ate snacks and drank an endless supply of coffee in front of the displays, watching the sky brighten as the ship approached the terminator.

Marcel's crew consisted of two people. Mira Amelia was his technical specialist, and Kellie Collier was copilot. Kellie had taken the bridge when he went to bed. But sleeping had been difficult. There was too much excitement on the ship, and he hadn't dozed off until almost one. He woke again several hours later, tossed and turned for a while, gave it up, and decided to shower and dress. He'd developed a kind of morbid interest in the approaching fireworks. The realization irritated him because he'd always thought of himself as superior to those who gape at accidents.

He'd tried to convince himself that he was simply showing a scientific interest. But there was more to it than that. There was something that ran deep into the bone with the knowledge that an entire planetload of living things was going about their normal routines while disaster approached.

He turned on his monitor and picked up one of the feeds from project control. The screen filled with the endless arc of the ocean. A snow squall floated uncertainly off one edge of the cloud cover.

They were over snowcapped mountains, which in the distance subsided into an endless white plain.

It wasn't possible to see the Quiveras dust cloud. Even on the superluminal, they needed detectors to tell them it was there. Yet its effect had been profound. Take it away, and Maleiva III would have been a tropical world.

They were passing over a triangle-shaped continent, the largest on the planet. Vast mountain ranges dominated the northern and western coasts, and several chains of peaks formed an irregular central spine. The landmass stretched from about ten degrees north latitude almost to the south pole. Its southern limits were of course not visible to the naked eye because it simply connected with the mass of antarctic ice. Abel Kinder, one of the climatologists on board, had told him that even in normal times there was probably an ice bridge to the cap.

He found Beekman sitting in his accustomed chair on the bridge, charting with Kellie and drinking coffee. They were looking down as the last of the mountains passed out of the picture. A herd of animals moved deliberately across the plain.

"What are they?" Marcel asked.

Beekman shrugged. "Fur-bearing something-or-others," he said. "The local equivalent of reindeer. Except with white fur. Did you want me to bring up the archives?"

It wasn't necessary. Marcel had just been making conversation. He knew that the animals on Deepsix were by and large variations on well-established forms. They had all the usual organs, brains, circulatory systems, a tendency toward symmetry. A lot of exoskeletons here. Heavy bone on both sides of the wrapper. Most plants used chlorophyll.

Insects on Deepsix ranged all the way up to beasts the size of a German shepherd.

Detail was lacking because, as the whole world knew, the Nightingale expedition nineteen years ago had been attacked by local wildlife on its first day. No one had been on the ground since. Research had been limited to satellite observations.

"It's a pleasant enough world," said Beekman. "It would have made a good prospect for your old bosses."

He meant Kosmik, Inc., whose Planetary Construction Division selected and terraformed worlds for use as human outposts. "Too cold," said Marcel. "The place is a refrigerator."

"Actually it's not bad near the equator. And in any case it's only temporary. Another few centuries and it would have been away from the dust and everything would have gone back to normal."

"I don't think my old bosses were much at taking the long view."

Beekman shrugged. "There aren't that many suitable worlds available, Marcel. Actually, I think Deepsix would have been rather a nice place to take over."

The plains turned to forest and then to more peaks. Then they were out over the sea again.

Chiang Harmon called from project control to announce that the last of the general-purpose probes had been launched. In the background. Marcel heard laughter. And someone said, "Gloria-mundi."

"What's going on?" asked Beekman.

"They're naming the continents," said Chiang.

Marcel was puzzled. "Why bother? It isn't going to be here that long."

"Maybe that's why," said Kellie. Kellie was dark-skinned, attractive, something of a scholar. She was the only person Marcel knew who actually read poetry for entertainment. "You'll have a map when it's over. Seems as^if we ought to have some names to put on it."

Marcel and Beekman strolled over to project control to watch. Half the staff was there, shouting suggestions and arguing. One by one, Chiang was putting locations on-screen, not only continents but oceans and inland seas, mountain ranges and rivers, islands and capes.

The triangular continent over which they'd just passed became Transitoria. The others had already been named. They were Endtime, Gloriamundi, and Northern and Southern Tempus.

The great northern ocean they called the Coraggio. The others became the Nirvana, the Majestic, and the Arcane. The body-of water that separated Transitoria from the two Tempi (which were connected by a narrow neck of land) became the Misty Sea.

They continued with Cape Farewell and Bad News Bay, which pushed far down into northwestern Transitoria; and with Lookout Rock and the Black Coast and the Mournful Mountains.

In time they filled the map, lost interest, and drifted away. But not before Marcel had noticed a change in mood. It was difficult to single out precisely what had happened, even to be certain it wasn't his imagination. But the researchers had grown more somber, the laughter more restrained, and they seemed more inclined to stay together.

Marcel usually wasn't all that comfortable with Academy researchers. They tended to be caught up in their specialties, and they sometimes behaved as if anyone not interested in, say, the rate at which time runs in an intense gravity field is just not someone worth knowing. It wasn't deliberate, and by and large they tried to be sociable. But few of them were capable of hiding their feelings. Even the women seemed generally parochial.

Consequently, most evenings he retired early to his quarters and wandered through the ship's library. But this had been a riveting day, the first full day on station. The researchers were celebrating, and he did not want to miss any of it. Consequently he stayed until the last of them had put their dishes and glasses in the collector and gone, and then he sat studying Chiang's map.

It was not difficult to imagine Maleiva III as a human world. Port Umbrage established at the tip of Gloriamundi. The Irresolute Canal piercing the Tempi.

Even then he was not sleepy. After a while he went back to the bridge. The ship's AI was running things, and he got bored looking at the endless glaciers and oceans below, so he brought up a political thriller that he'd started the previous evening. He heard people moving about in the passageways. That was unusual, considering the hour, but he assigned it to the general electricity of the day.

He was a half hour into the book when his link chimed. "Marcel?" Beekman's voice.

"Yes, Gunther?"

"I'm back in project control. If you've a moment, we have something on-screen you might want to see."

There were about a dozen people gathered in front of several monitors. The same picture was on all of them: a forest with deep snow and something among the trees that looked like walls. It was hard to make out.

"We're at full mag," said Beekman.

Marcel made a face at the screen, as though it would clarify the image. "What is it?" he asked.

"We're not sure. But it looks like-"

"— A building." Mira Amelia moved in close. "Somebody's down there."

"It might just be filtered sunlight. An illusion."

They all stared at the monitor.

"I think it's artificial," said Beekman.

II

Extraterrestrial archeology sounds glamorous because its perpetrators dig up transistor radios used by creatures who've been gone a quarter million years. Therefore, it carries an aura of mystery and romance. But if we ever succeed in outrunning the radio waves, so we can mine their broadcasts, we'll undoubtedly discover that they, like ourselves, were a population of dunces. That melancholy probability tends to undercut the glamour. -Gregory MacAllister, Reflections of a Barefoot journalist

Inside the e-suit, Priscilla Hutchins caught her breath as she gazed around the interior of the reconstructed temple. Late-afternoon sunlight slanted through stained windows in the transepts, along the upper galleries, and in the central tower. A stone dais occupied the place where one might usually look for an altar.

Eight massive columns supported the stone roof. Benches far too high for Hutch to use comfortably were placed strategically throughout the nave for the benefit of worshipers. They were wooden and had no backs. The design was for creatures which lacked posteriors, in the human sense. The faithful would have used the benches by balancing their thoraxes on them, and gripping them with modified mandibles.

Hutch studied the image above the altar. It had six appendages and vaguely insectile features. But the eyes very much resembled those of a squid. Stone rays, representing beams of light radiated from its upper limbs.

This, the experts believed, was intended to be a depiction of the Almighty, the creator of the world. The Goddess.

The figure was female, although how the team had reached that conclusion escaped Hutch. It had a snout and fangs and antennas whose precise function still eluded the researchers. Each of its four upper limbs had six curved digits. The lower pair had evolved into feet, of a sort, and were enclosed in sandals.

The skull was bare save for a cap that covered the scalp and angled down over a pair of earholes. It wore a jacket secured with a sash, and trousers that looked like jodhpurs. The midlimbs were shrunken.

"Vestigial?" asked Hutch.

"Probably." Mark Chernowski was sipping a cold beer. He took a long moment to taste it, then tapped an index finger against his lips. "Had evolution continued, they'd no doubt have lost them."

Despite the odd features and the curious anatomy, the Almighty retained the customary splendor one always found in the inhabitants of the heavens. Each of the four intelligent species they'd encountered, as well as their own, had depicted its assorted deities in its own image, as well as in a few others. On Pinnacle, where for a long time the physical appearance of the inhabitants had not been known, it had been difficult to sort out which representation was also that of the dominant species. But inevitably everyone succeeded in capturing the dignity of divine power.

Hutch could not help noting that the more somber qualities and moods were somehow translatable in stone from one culture to another. Even when the representations were utterly alien.

They moved closer to the altar. There were several other carved figures, some of which were animals. Hutch could see, however, that the creatures were mythical, that they could never have developed on a terrestrial world. Some had wings inadequate to lifting the owner. Others had heads that did not match the trunks. But all were rendered in a manner that suggested religious significance. One bore a vague resemblance to a tortoise, and Chernowski explained that it symbolized sacred wisdom. A serpentine figure was believed to represent the divine presence throughout the world.

"How do we know these things?" she asked. "Plainfield told me that we still can't read any of the script."

Chernowski refilled his mug, glanced at her to see whether she'd changed her mind and would share some of the brew, and smiled politely when she declined. "We can deduce quite a lot from the context in which the images are traditionally placed. Although questions and doubts certainly remain. Does the turtle represent the god of wisdom? Or is it just a symbol of the divine attribute? Or, for that matter, is it just a piece of art from a previous era that no one took seriously in any other sense?"

"You mean this place might have been just an art museum?"

Chernowski laughed. "Possibly," he said.

The reconstruction had been raised a few kilometers away from the site of the original structure, in order to preserve the ruins.

Some pieces were quite striking. Especially, she thought, the winged beings. "Yes." He followed her gaze. "Flight capability does add a certain panache, does it not?" He looked up at a creature that bore a close resemblance to an eagle. It was carved of black stone. Its wings were spread and its talons extended. "This one is curious," he said. "As far as we can determine, this world never had eagles. Or anything remotely like an eagle."

She studied it for a long minute.

"It often appears on the shoulder of the Almighty," he continued, "and is closely associated with her. Much as the dove is with the Christian deity."

It was getting late, and they retreated to the rear of the nave. Hutch took a last look. It was the first time she'd seen the temple since its completion. "Magnificent," she said.

The rover was waiting outside. She looked at it, looked up at the temple, compelling in its austerity and simplicity. "It's several hundred thousand years ago, Mark," she said. "A few things might have changed since then. Maybe they had eagles in the old days. How would you know?"

They climbed in and started back toward the hopelessly mundane mission headquarters, little more than a collection of beige panels just west of the original ruins.

"It's possible," he admitted. "Although we've got a pretty good fossil record. But it's of no consequence. Better to agree with Plato that there are certain forms that nature prefers, even though we may not see them in the flesh." He got up and stretched.

"What do you think happened to the natives?" she asked. "Why'd they die off?" Pinnacle's dominant race was long gone. Almost three-quarters of a million years gone.

Chernowski shook his head. He was tall and angular, with white hair and dark eyes. He'd spent half his life on this world and had made arrangements to be buried here when the time came. If he was fortunate, he was fond of telling visitors, he'd be the first. "Who knows?" he said. "They got old, probably. Species get old, just like individuals. We know their population was failing drastically toward the end."

"How do you know that?"

"We can date the cities. There were fewer of them during the later years."

"I'm impressed," she said.

Chernowski smiled and accepted the compliment as his due.

Hutch looked out the window at the handful of collapsed stones that comprised all that remained of the original temple. "How much of it was extrapolation?" she asked. "Of what we just saw?"

The vehicle settled to the ground and they climbed out. "We know pretty much what the temple looked like. We're not exactly sure about all the details, but it's close. As to the statuary, we've recovered enough bits and pieces here and elsewhere to make informed guesses. I suspect if the natives could return, they'd feel quite at home in our model."

The archeological effort on Pinnacle was almost thirty years old. There were currently more than two thousand research and support personnel scattered across several dozen sites.

Pinnacle was still a living world, of course, but it was of minimal interest to exobiologists. Its various creatures had been cataloged, its pure electrical life-forms had been analyzed, and the only work that remained now was data collection. There would be no more surprises, and no more breakthroughs.

But there was still a great deal of fascination with the prime species. The temple-builders had spread to all five continents; the ruins of their cities had been found everywhere except in the extremes at the ice caps. But they were gone to oblivion. They were by far the earliest civilization known by humans. And despite Chernowski's boasts, not one member of their species was known by name. Not even, she thought, the name of their prime deity.

Hutch thanked him for the tour and returned to the rover. She stood a few moments, half in and half out of the vehicle, gazing at the circle of antique stones, wondering how much of the temple she'd seen had come out of the imaginations of Chernowski's designers.

The e-suit fitted itself to her like a garment, save at the face, where it formed a hard oval shell, allowing her to speak and breathe comfortably. It afforded protection against extremes of temperature and radiation, and also countered air pressure within the body so that she could function in a vacuum. It felt rather like wearing a bodysuit of loose-fitting soft cloth. Power was derived from weak-force particles, and consequently the suit could maintain itself indefinitely.

When the temple had stood on this spot, the climate had been far more hospitable, and the surrounding lands had supported a thriving agricultural society. Later, the town and the temple had been sacked and burned, but the place had risen again, had risen several times from assaults, and eventually became, according to the experts, a seat of empire.

And then it had gone down permanently into the dust.

Her commlink vibrated. "Hutch? We're ready to go." That was Toni Hamner, one of her passengers. At the moment Toni was directing the loading crew.

A couple of Chernowski's peopk were lifting an engraved stone out of a pit. "On my way," she said.

She set down minutes later beside the lander. Another rover was on the ground, from which packing cases were being loaded. The cases contained artifacts, almost exclusively pieces of the temple, protected by foam. "We've got some ceramics to take back," said Toni. "Including a statue."

"A statue? Of whom?"

She laughed. "No one has any idea. But it's in good condition."

There were two loaders. One was looking at the shipping labels. "Cups," he said. "You believe that? After all this time?"

"John's new," said Toni. "It's fired clay," she told him. "Do it right, and it'll last forever." She was lithe, olive-skinned, happy-go-lucky. Hutch had brought her out from Sol four years before, with her husband. Rumor had it that she'd been maybe a bit too happy-go-lucky. He gave it up and wanted to go home, while Toni made it clear she intended to stay indefinitely. She was a power-flow expert, with an opportunity to show what she could do. Her time at Pinnacle, where she had an opportunity to design and implement her own systems without undue supervision, was priceless.

Apparently Toni had considered the husband expendable.

The cases were heavy, and it was essential to balance the load.

Hutch showed them where she wanted everything, and then climbed into the cabin. Her other three passengers were already seated.

One of them was Tom Scolari, an ADP specialist whom she'd known for years. Scolari introduced her to Embry Desjardain, a physician ending her tour, and Randy Nightingale, with whom she had a passing acquaintance. Nightingale had been a surprise, a late addition to her manifest. The flight home, she explained, would last thirty-one days. Not that they didn't already know.

She sat down, pressed the commlink, and informed the transport officer that she was ready to go.

His voice crackled over the circuit. "You're clear," he said. "It was nice having you here, Hutch. Will you be coming back this way soon?"

"Next two trips are to Nok." Nok was the only world they'd found with a functioning civilization. Its inhabitants had just begun to put electricity to work. But they were constantly waging major wars. They were a quarrelsome lot, given to repression, intolerant of original ideas. They believed they were alone in the universe (when they thought about it at all), and even their scientific community refused to credit the possibility that other worlds might be inhabited. It was a curious business, because humans walked among them, clothed in lightbenders, which rendered them invisible.

Hutch wondered why the civilization on Pinnacle, dead these hundreds of thousands of years, should be so much more interesting than the Noks.

Toni took a last look at the artifacts to be sure they were secured. Then she said good-bye to the two loaders and took her seat.

Hutch started the spike, and while the system built energy she recited the safety procedures for them. Spike technology allowed her to manipulate the weight of the lander in a relatively light (i.e., planetary) gravity field from its actual value down to about two percent. She instructed her passengers to remain in their seats until advised otherwise, make no effort to release the harness until the harness itself disengaged, attempt no sudden movements once the red light went on, and so forth.

"All right," she said. "Here we go."

The harnesses settled around their shoulders and locked them in. She rotated the thrusters to a down angle and fired them. The vehicle began to rise. She eased back on the yoke, and the lander lifted gently into the air.

She turned it over to the AI, informed her passengers they could switch off their e-suits if they desired, and shut her own down.

The excavation site had already become indistinguishable from the brown sands surrounding it.

The Harold Wildside had exquisite accommodations. Hutch had seen several major changes during the twenty-odd years she'd been piloting the Academy's superluminals, the most significant of which had been the development of artificial gravity. Bttt it was also true that Academy people now traveled well. Not in luxury, perhaps, but current accommodations had come a long way since the early days, when everything had been bargain-basement.

The extra infusion of money into the space sciences had largely resulted from the discovery of the Omega clouds, those curious and lethal objects that drifted out of galactic center in eight-thousand-year cycles and which seemed programmed to assault technological civilizations. What they really assaulted, of course, was straight lines and right angles on structures large enough to draw their attention. Which was to say, shapes that did not appear in nature. Since their discovery two decades before, architectural styles had changed dramatically. The curve was now a basic feature everywhere. Bridges, buildings, spaceports, whatever an architect put his hand to, were designed with sweep and arc. When the Omega clouds arrived in the vicinity of Earth-they were expected in about a thousand years-they would find little to trigger them.

The entities had ignited a long debate: Were they natural objects, an evolutionary form perhaps that the galaxy used to protect itself against sentient life? Or were they the product of a diabolical intelligence of incredible engineering capability? No one knew, but the notion that the universe might be out to get the human race had caused some rethinking among the various major religions.

The temple in the desert had been rounded, without any architectural right angles. Hutch wondered whether it signified that the problem was ancient.

The lander settled into its bay on board Wildside. Hutch waited for her panel to turn green. When it did, she opened the airlock. "Nice to have you folks along," she said. "Quarters are on the top deck. Look for your name. Kitchen's at the rear. If you want to change, shower, whatever, before we leave, you have time. We won't be getting under way for another hour."

Embry Desjardain had long dark hair and chiseled cheekbones. There was something in her eyes that made it easy to believe she was a surgeon. She'd done three years at Pinnacle, which was one more than a standard tour for medical personnel. "I enjoyed myself," she explained to Hutch. "No hypochondriacs out here."

Tom Scolari was medium height, redheaded, laughed a lot, and told Hutch he was going home because his father had become ill, his mother was already disabled, and they just needed somebody around the'house. "Just as well," he continued with a straight face, "there's a shortage of women on Pinnacle."

He made it a point to shake Nightingale's hand. "Aren't you," he said, "the same Nightingale who was out to Deepsix a few years ago?"

Nightingale confessed that he was, commented that it would be good to get home, and opened a book.

While waiting for Wildside's orbit to bring it into alignment with her departure vector, Hutch ran her preflight check, talked to an old friend on Skyhawk, Pinnacle's space station, and read through the incoming traffic.

There were some interesting items: the TransGalactic cruise ship Evening Star was on its way to Maleiva with fifteen hundred tourists to watch the big collision. The Event would also be broadcast live by Universal News Network, although the transmission would be a few days late arriving on Earth. Separatists in Wyoming had gone on another shooting spree, and another round of violence had broken out in Jerusalem.

The Star was the biggest in a proposed series of cruise vessels. A couple of years ago a smaller ship had taken passengers out to the black hole at Golem Point. They'd not expected much interest. As the joke went, there's not much to see at a black hole. But subscriptions had overwhelmed the ticket office, and suddenly deep-space marvels had become big business and a new industry was born.

The Maleiva story reminded her of Randy Nightingale's connection with that system. He'd lost his future and his reputation during the ill-fated mission nineteen years ago. Now the place was in the news again, and he wondered whether that had anything to do with his sudden decision to go home.

Bill asked permission to fire up the engines. "It's time,"he added. The onboard AI for all Academy superluminals was named for William R. Dolbry, who was not the designer, but the first captain to be brought home by the onboard system. Dolbry had suffered a cardiac arrest while ferrying an executive yacht and four frightened passengers on a self-reliance voyage eighty light-years out.

Bill's image (which was not Dolbry's) revealed a man who would have been right out of central casting for a president or chairman. His face was rounded, his eyes quite serious, and he wore a well-manicured gray beard. His designers had been careful not to allow him to establish too great a degree of presence, because they didn't want captains automatically resigning their judgment to him. Illusions could be overwhelming, and AIs still lacked the human capacity to make decisions in real-world situations.

"Go ahead, Bill," she said.

Wildside was carrying a substantial cargo of ceramics and clay tablets. Altogether, they'd brought up eleven loads, and if the ship was a trifle light on passengers, the cargo more than compensated.

Replicas of the cups and bowls, she knew, would turn up later in the Academy gift shop. She would have liked very much to have an original. But the stuff was worth its mass in titanium. And then some.

Pity.

"Okay, folks," she told the PA, "we're going to start accelerating in three minutes. Please be sure you're locked down somewhere. And check in when it's done."

It would be a long haul back to Earth, but Hutch was used to it. She'd discovered that most of her passengers inevitably found they shared a community of interests. There was an endless supply of entertainment available, and the voyages invariably became vacations. She knew of cases in which people who had made this kind of flight together were still holding annual reunions years later. She recalled instances in which passengers had fallen in love, marriages had disintegrated, a scientific breakthrough had been made, and a nearly nonstop orgy had been conducted.

Marcel was amused. "I understood there was nothing intelligent down there. Didn't they specify that on the profile?"

They were back in project control, surrounded by Beekman's technicians and analysts. Beekman himself heaved a long sigh. "You know how surveys are," he said. "And keep in mind that this survey team got run off pretty quick."

"Okay." Marcel grinned. He'd have enjoyed being there to watch the reaction of top management when this news came in. I say, we seem to have had a bit of an oversight on Deepsix. "When you're ready to transmit your report, Gunny, let me know."

Beekman went below and, within twenty minutes, was on the circuit. "We went back over the recordings, Marcel," he said. "Take a look at this"

A snowfield clicked onto his display. Taken by the satellites, it seemed ordinary enough, a landscape of rolling hills and occasional patches of forest. On the desolate side, but the whole world was desolate. "What am I looking for?"

"There," said one of the researchers, a blond young man whose name was Arvin, or Ervin, or something like that.

A shadow.

A building. No doubt this time.

"Where is this?" he asked.

"Northern Transitoria. A few hundred kilometers south of the coast."

It was a spire. A tower.

They magnified it for him. It appeared to be made from stone blocks. He saw a scattering of windows. "How high is it?"

"About three stories. Probably another three below the snow line."

He stared at it. The tower and the snow. It looked like a cold, solitary, forbidding place.

"It doesn't look lived in," said Arvin.

Marcel agreed with the assessment. It looked old, and the surrounding snow was undisturbed.

"I don't think there's any glass in the windows," said someone else.

A map appeared with the location marked. It was south of the ocean they'd called Coraggio. Not far from Bad News Bay.

Well named, he thought. "What's under the snow?"

Beekman nodded to someone off-screen. A network of lines appeared. Houses. Streets. Central parks, maybe. An avenue or possibly a onetime watercourse curving through the middle of the pattern. Watercourse probably, because it was possible to make out a couple of straight lines that looked like bridges. "It's big," he said.

Beekman nodded. "It would have supported a population of probably twenty thousand. But it's small in the sense that the roads and buildings are scaled down. We figure the streets are only a couple of meters wide. That's narrow by anybody's standards. And here's something else." He used a marker to indicate a thick line that seemed to circle the network. "This looks like a wall."

"Fortifications," said Marcel.

"I'd think so. And that kind of fortification means pretechnologi-cal." He looked uncomfortable. "I wish we had an expert here."

The tower appeared to be connected to the wall. "Nothing else visible above the snow?"

"No. Everything else is buried."

He'd suspected the wall they'd found yesterday to be a freak of nature, an illusion perhaps. But this- "It makes five of us now," said Marcel. Five places where sentience had appeared. "Any structures anywhere else on the planet, Gunther?"

"Nothing other than the wall, so far. We've started looking. I'm sure there will be." He tugged distractedly at his beard. "Marcel, we'll have to send a team down. Find out who they are. Or were."

"Can't," said Marcel.

The project director met his eyes. Beekman lowered his voice so that there would not appear to be a disagreement. "This is a special circumstance. I'll sign a release from any instructions or policies that preclude you from acting. But we have to go down and take a closer look."

"I'd love to help, Gunny," said Marcel, "but I meant can't. We don't have a lander."

Beekman's jaw literally dropped. "That can't be right," he said. "You have three of them down in the shuttle bay."

"Those are shuttles. Ship to ship. But they can't operate in an atmosphere."

"You're sure?" He was visibly dismayed. "We've got to be able to do something."

"I don't know what," said Marcel. "Report it. Let Gomez worry about it."

"How could we not have a lander?"

"We don't carry dead mass. Landers are heavy. This operation, we weren't supposed to have any use for one."

Beekman snorted. "Who decided that? Well, never mind. I guess we've all learned something about preparedness."

"You don't have anyone qualified to conduct an investigation anyhow," said Marcel.

"Qualified?" Beekman looked like a man facing a world of idiots. "You're talking about poking around in an old building. Look for writing on the wall and take some pictures. Maybe find a couple of pots. What kind of qualifications do you need?"

Marcel grinned. "You'd break all the pots."

"Okay, let the Academy know. Tell them to send out another ship, if they want. But they'll have to hurry."

"They will that" said Marcel. He knew there wouldn't be time for a second mission to reach them from Earth. They'd have to divert somebody.

III

It surprises me that courage and valor have not been bred out of the human race. These are qualities that traditionally had to an early demise. They are therefore not conducive to passing one's genes along. Rather it is the people who faint under pressure who tend to father the next generation. -gregory MACALLISTER, "Straight and Narrow," Reminiscences

Hutch was not looking forward to spending the next few weeks locked up inside Wildside with Randall Nightingale. He took his meals with the other passengers, and occasionally wandered into the common room. But he had little to say, and he inevitably looked ill at ease. He was small in stature, thin, gray, only a couple of centimeters taller than the diminutive Hutch.

It was an unfortunate circumstance for a reclusive man. The run between Quraqua and Earth usually carried upward of twenty passengers. Had that been the present situation, he could have retreated easily into his cabin and no one would have noticed. But they only had four. Five, counting the pilot And so he'd felt pressure and was doing his best to participate.

But his best served only to create an atmosphere that was both tentative and cautious. Laughter flowed out of the room when he appeared and everyone struggled to find things to talk about.

The biosystem on Pinnacle was, after six billion years, far and away the oldest one known. Nightingale had been there for the better part of a decade, reconstructing its history. Most of the theoretical work was said to be done, and therefore she understood why Nightingale

would be going home. But nevertheless it seemed coincidental that he should choose just this moment.

In an effort to satisfy her curiosity, she'd looked for an opportunity to speak with him alone. When it arose, she casually wondered whether someone in his family had taken ill.

"No," he'd said. "Everyone's doing fine." But he volunteered nothing more. Didn't even ask why she'd inquired.

Hutch smiled and suggested she'd been concerned because his name had appeared unexpectedly on the passenger manifest. She hadn't realized he was coming until just a few hours before departure.

He replied with a shrug. "It was a last-minute decision."

"Well, I'm glad everybody's okay."

— After the conversation, if one could call it that, she'd gone to the bridge and pulled up the files on the Nightingale mission.

The Maleiva system had been initially surveyed by the James P. Taliaferro twenty-one years ago. Its results had excited the scientific community for two reasons: Maleiva III was a living world, and it was going to collide with a rogue gas giant. The expedition under Nightingale had been assembled and dispatched with fanfare and some controversy.

Others, seemingly better qualified, had competed for the opportunity to lead the mission. Nightingale was chosen because he was energetic, the Academy said. A man of exquisite judgment. If he had no experience in exploring a biosystem whose outlines were only vaguely understood, neither had any of the other candidates. And if he was younger than some that the establishment would have preferred to see nominated, he was also, as it happened, married to the commissioner's daughter.

But the mission had been a disaster, and the responsibility had been laid directly on Nightingale's shoulders.

It was possible that what happened to him at Maleiva III might have happened to anyone. But as she read some of the attacks made on his judgment and on his leadership, on thinly veiled suggestions that he was a coward, she wondered that he hadn't retreated to a mountaintop and dropped out of sight.

No one ever got used to the gray mists of the hyper lanes, where superluminals seemed only to drift forward at a remarkably casual rate. Travelers watching from the scopes felt as if they were moving through heavy fog at a few kilometers per hour.

Wildside slid quietly through the haze, and Hutch could easily imagine that she was somewhere northeast of, say, Newfoundland, gliding over the Atlantic, waiting for foghorns to sound. She'd set the ship's screens, which masqueraded as windows, to display a series of mountain vistas, urban views, or whatever the passengers thought they'd like. Seated in the common room, she was looking out over London, as if from an airship cabin. It was broad daylight, early afternoon, midwinter. Snow was falling.

They were in the sixth day of passage.

"What's really out there?" asked Scolari, who had joined her for lunch.

"Nothing," she said.

He canted his head. "Must be something."

"Not a thing. Other than the fog."

"Where's the fog come from?"

"Hydrogen and helium. A few assorted gases. It's our universe in a disorganized, and cold, state."

"How'd it happen?" he asked.

She shrugged. "Nothing big ever formed. It has something to do with the gravity differential. Physicists will tell you the real question is why we have planets and stars."

"Gravity's different here?"

They were both eating fruit dishes. Hutch's was pineapple and banana with a slice of cheese on rye. She munched at it, took a moment to contemplate the taste, and nodded. "The setting's lower, much weaker, than in our universe. So nothing forms. You want to see what it looks like?"

"Sure."

Hutch directed Bill to put the outside view from the forward scope on the screen.

London blinked off and was replaced by the mist.

Scolari watched it for a minute or so and shook his head. "It almost looks as if you could get out and walk faster than this."

"If you had something to walk on."

"Hutch," he said, "I understand sensors don't work here either."

"That's true."

"So you really don't know that there's nothing out there. Nothing in front of us."

"It's not supposed to be possible," she said. "Solid objects don't form here."

"What about other ships?"

She could see he wasn't worried. Scolari didn't seem to worry much about anything. But everyone was mystified by hyper travel. Especially by the perceived slowness. And by the illusion of shadows in the mist. Those came from the ship's own lights. "According to theory," she said, delivering the answer she'd given many times before, "we have our own unique route. We create a fold when we enter, and the fold goes away when we leave. A collision with another ship, or even a meeting with one, isn't supposed to be possible."

Nightingale came in, ordered something from the autoserver, and sat down with them. "Interesting view," he said.

"We can change it."

"No, please." He looked fascinated. "It's fine."

She glanced at Scolari, who bit into an apple. "I love gothic stuff," he said.

But the conversation more or less died right there.

"Do you plan to return to Pinnacle, Randy?" Hutch eventually asked. "Or will you be going on another assignment?"

"I'm retiring," he said, in a tone that suggested it should have been obvious.

They both congratulated him.

"I've bought a seaside place in Scotland," he continued.

"Scotland." Hutch was impressed. "What will you be doing there?"

"It's tucked away on a remote coastline," he said. "I Me remote."

"What will you do with your time?" persisted Scolari.

He poured himself a cup of coffee. "I think, for the first year, absolutely nothing."

Scolari nodded. "Must be nice." He commented that he'd lined up a teaching post at the University of Texas, went on for a bit about how good it would be to see his folks again after all these years. And then asked a question that made Hutch wince: "Randy, do you have any plans to write your memoirs?"

It was of course a minefield. Scolari undoubtedly knew that Nightingale was a celebrity of sorts, but probably didn't have the details.

"No." Nightingale stiffened. "I don't think many people would find my life very exciting."

Hutch knew from experience that she and her passengers would form a tight bond. Or they'd come to dislike one another intensely.

Small groups in long flights always developed one of those two behavior patterns. Some years ago, a sociologist had been aboard to study the phenomenon and had given his name to it. The Cable Effect. She expected to see this one divide in two, with Nightingale on one side and everyone else bonded on the other.

The voyage so far had been short on entertainment and long on conversation. They'd forgone the games and VRs With which passengers usually entertained themselves, and instead had simply talked a lot.

There'd already been some personal admissions. That was always an indication that passengers were coming together, but it usually took several weeks. Embry confessed the third night out that she was seriously considering giving up medicine. Couldn't stand people constantly complaining to her about how they felt. "The world is full of hypochondriacs," she'd said. "Being a doctor isn't at all the way most people think it is."

"My mother was a hypochondriac," said Toni.

"So was mine. So I should have known before I went to medical school."

"Why'd you go?" asked Hutch.

"My father was a doctor. And my grandmother. It was sort of expected."

"So what'll you do if you give it up?"

"There's always research," suggested Scolari.

"No. Truth is, I'm just not interested. I'm bored with it."

Toni Hamner, despite Hutch's initial impressions, turned out to be a romantic. "I went to Pinnacle because it was so different. I wanted to travel."

"You did that," said Embry.

"And I loved it. Walking through places built by something that wasn't human. Built hundreds of thousands of years ago. That's archeology."

"So why are you going home?" asked Scolari.

"My tour was up."

"You could have renewed," said Hutch. "They're paying bonuses to have people stay on."

"I know. I'd already done a one-year extension. I'm ready to do something else."

"Uh-huh," said Embry. 'That sounds like a family."

Toni laughed. "At least checking out the prospects."

Scolari nodded. "None on Pinnacle?"

She thought it over. "It isn't that there aren't some interesting men out there. In fact, there were a lot of guys. But they tend to be married to the business. Women are more or less perceived as strictly entertainment value."

She never mentioned her ex.

Only Nightingale had not revealed himself, and now they sat, gazing at the eternal fog while he said, yes, he wished his life was interesting enough that people would want to read about it. And he said it with such conviction that she wondered whether he actually believed it.

Scolari went back to the foggy outdoors. "Does anyone," he asked, "have any idea about the architecture of this place? How big is it out there?"

"As I understand it," Hutch said, "that question has no-"

Bill's message light began to blink.

"… no relevance," she finished. "Go ahead, Bill."

"Hutch," he said, "we have a transmission from the Academy."

"On-screen, Bill."

Embry walked in as the fog blinked off and the message appeared:

TO: NCA HAROLD WILDSIDE

FROM: DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS

SUBJECT: COURSE CHANGE

HUTCHINS, WENDY HAS FOUND RUINS ON DEEPSIX. DIVERT IMMEDIATELY. GET PICTURES, ARTIFACTS, WHATEVER YOU CAN. ESSENTIAL WE HAVE DETAILS ON ORIGINAL INHABITANTS. NO ONE ELSE WITHIN RANGE. YOU ARE APPOINTED ARCHEOLOGIST FOR THE DURATION. COLLISION WITH MORGAN IMMINENT, AS YOU KNOW. TAKE NO CHANCES.

GOMEZ

It had been a mistake. Hutch should have taken the transmission privately. She stole a glance at Nightingale but could read nothing in his face.

"Uh," said Scolari, "how far out of the way is that?"

"About five days, Tom. One way."

The chime sounded for Nightingale's meal. "I don't think I'm anxious to go," Nightingale said.

Hell. She didn't really have a choice. They'd sent her a directive. She couldn't argue it, if only because" a round-trip transmission would take several days. She'd been around long enough to know that ruins on a world thought uninhabited was a major find. And they were handing it to her. Had she been alone, she'd have been delighted. "I'm going to have to do this," she said, finally. "I'm sorry for the inconvenience. In the past, when something like this has happened, the Academy has compensated passengers for lost time."

Nightingale closed his eyes and she heard him exhale. "I assume they'll charter another ship for us."

"I don't think there'd be much point unless there's something nearby. If they have to send one from home, it'll take almost five weeks to arrive. By then, the project will be long over, and we'll be on our way back anyway."

"I'm tempted to sue," Nightingale persisted.

That was an empty threat. Potential travel diversions and inconveniences were written into everyone's contract. "Do whatever you think best," she said quietly. "My best estimate for the total delay is about three weeks."

Nightingale put down his knife and fork with great deliberation. "Outstanding." He got up and left the room.

Embry wasn't happy either. "It's ridiculous," she said.

"I'm sorry." Hutch tried a smile. "These things happen."

Scolari rolled his eyes and slumped back in his chair. "Hutch," he said, "you can't do this to me. I've got a week booked in the Swiss Alps. With old friends."

"Tom." She allowed herself to look uncomfortable. "I'm sorry, but I think you're going to have to reschedule."

He stared right through her.

Hutch was by now striving to control her own temper. "Look," she said, "you've both been around the organization long enough. You know what this kind of discovery means. And you also know that they haven't given me an option. Please complain where it'll do some good. Write it, and I'll be happy to send it."

Toni, when she was told, sighed. "Not my idea of a fun time," she said. "But I can live with it."

Within an hour Hutch had realigned their flight path, and they were bound for Maleiva.

She kept out of the way for the balance of the day. If it couldn't be said that the congenial mood of the first few days returned, it was also true that the anger and resentment dissipated quickly. By morning, everyone had more or less made peace with the new situation. Embry admitted that the opportunity to watch a planetary collision might be worth the inconvenience. As to Scolari, he might have begun to realize that he was, after all, the lone young male with two attractive passengers.

Hutch judged the time was right to take the next step.

All except Nightingale were in the common room during the late morning. Toni and Embry were playing chess while Scolari and Hutch debated ethical problems served to them by Bill. The immediate issue was whether it was proper to pass on to others as certain a doubtful religious stance on the grounds that belief made for a more secure psychological existence. Hutch watched for the chess game to finish, then called for everyone's attention.

"Usually," she told her passengers, "there's a boatload of people on these flights, and half of them are archeologists. Does anyone have an archeological background?"

Nobody did.

"When we get to Deepsix," she said, "I'll be going down to the surface. Just to look around, see what can be seen, and maybe collect some artifacts. If anyone else would like to go, I could use some volunteers. The work's easy enough." She drew herself up to her full height. They looked at one another, then gazed at the ceiling or the walls.

Embry shook her head no. "Thanks anyhow," she said. "I'll watch from here. Hutch, that's the place where they lost a landing party back near the turn of the century. Eaten, as I recall." She picked up her queen and studied it. "I'm sorry. I really am. But I have no stake in this. If there was something here they wanted to look at, they had twenty years to do it. Now at the last minute they want us to go down and take care of their business. Typical."

"I'm sorry, Hutch," said Scolari, "but I feel the same way. Bureaucratic screwup, and they expect us to run out there and put our lives on the line." He looked past her, not wanting to meet her eyes. "It's just not reasonable."

"Okay," she said. "I understand. I'd probably feel the same way."

"You're supposed to take pictures," Toni said. "Do you have a scan?"

Hutch had a case of them, stocked in the supply compartment. That at least wouldn't be a problem.

Toni pushed back in her chair. She was watching Hutch carefully, but keeping her expression blank. Finally, she smiled. "I'll go," she said.

Hutch suspected that, had one of the others volunteered, she would have found a reason to stay behind. "There's no pressure, Toni."

"Doesn't matter. My grandkids'll ask me about this one day. I wouldn't want to have to say I stayed up here and watched it from the dining room."

The remark earned her a pointed glance from Embry.

As was his custom, Nightingale retired early to his quarters. He knew that the others were more comfortable in his absence, and he was sorry about that. But the truth was that the small talk bored him. He spent his days working on the book that he hoped would one day be perceived as his magnum opus: Quraqua and Earth: The Evolution of Intelligence. It was one of the supreme ironies that humans had traced the forces that had produced extraterrestrial intelligence in the known instances, but had not yet satisfactorily applied the lessons to their own species. At least until he had appeared on the scene.

He was content to spend his evenings with Harcourt and DiAlva, his great predecessors, rather than listen to the endless chatter that passed for conversation in the common room.

The people he was traveling with were simply not bright, and time was precious. He was coming to a fuller appreciation of that melancholy reality as the years slipped by. One doesn't live forever.

Tonight, though, he was too distracted to think of anything other than Deepsix. Maleiva III. The world with no future. Do you have any plans to write your memoirs? Scolari's intent had been uncertain. Had he been laughing at Nightingale? It was the sort of question asked of him again and again, with increasing regularity, as the Event approached, and people remembered. Aren't you the Nightingale who lost six people?

He would have liked some rum. But he knew from hard experience that when he got like this, he'd drink too much.

Soon it would be over. Once back on solid ground, he'd retire to the villa his agent had bought for him. It was situated on a promontory, out of the way, off a private road. No visitors. No neighbors. No one left to answer to.

If he'd been smart, he'd have gotten off Pinnacle years ago, before it all came front and center again. But he'd let it go, thinking that since he was no longer involved, people would have forgotten him. Forgotten he was ever there.

Aren't you the Nightingale who botched the first mission so thoroughly that we never went back?

He had no close friends, but he was not sure why that was. Consequently, there'd never been anyone with whom to share his considerable professional success. And now, in this increasingly sterile environment, he found himself reflecting more intensely on his life, and sensing that if indeed it was a journey he hadn't gone anywhere.

Now, with the return of Maleiva HI to the news, with the increase of public interest in everything that had to do with the doomed world, his situation was proceeding rapidly downhill. He had even considered changing his name when he got home. But there were serious complications to doing that. The paperwork involved was daunting. No, it should be sufficient just to keep himself out of the directories. He'd already made one mistake, telling these people where he was going, that he was headed for Scotland.

He'd established a code. Any money due him, any formal transactions, anyone trying to reach him for any reason, would get filed in the code box. Then he could respond, or not, as he pleased. No one would know where he was. And if he was careful, no one near Banff, where he proposed to settle, would know who he was.

Aren't you the Nightingale who fainted?

On that terrible day, the creatures had ripped into him. The e-suit had been of limited protection, had not stopped the attack, but had prevented the little sons of bitches from injecting their poison. Nevertheless, the beaks had gone into soft flesh. His neck, though physically all right, had never really healed. Some psychic scar that wouldn't go away and the doctors couldn't cure.

Anyone would have done the same thing he did.

Well, maybe not anyone. But he hadn't been afraid, any more than anybody else. And he hadn't run, hadn't abandoned anyone. He had tried.

The luxury liner Evening Star was carrying fifteen hundred passengers who expected to party through the collision. One of these was the internationally famous Gregory MacAllister, editor, commentator, observer of the human condition. MacAllister prided himself on maintaining a sense of proper humility. On hunting expeditions, he carried his own weapons. He always made it a point with his associates to behave as if they were equals. He was unfailingly polite to the waves of ordinary persons with whom he came in contact, the waiters and physicians and ship captains of the world. Occasionally he made joking references to peasants, but everyone understood they were indeed only jokes.

He was a major political force, and the discoverer of a dozen of the brightest lights on the literary scene. He was ex-officio director of the Chicago Society, a political and literary think tank. He was also on the board of governors of the Baltimore Lexicography Institute, and the editor emeritus of Premier. He was an influential member of several philanthropic societies, although he persisted in describing poor people publicly as incompetent and lazy. He had played a major role in hiring the lawyers who'd taken the Brantley School Board to court in the Genesis Trial. He liked to think of himself as the world's only practicing destroyer of mountebanks, frauds, college professors, and bishops.

He had reluctantly agreed to travel on the Evening Star. Not that he wasn't excited by the prospect of watching entire worlds collide, but that the whole activity seemed somehow a trifle proletarian. It was the sort of thing done by people who lacked a set of substantive values. Like going to a public beach. Or a football game.

But he had consented, admitting finally to his own curiosity and to an opportunity to be able to say that he'd been there when this particular piece of history was made. Furthermore, it allowed him to demonstrate his solidarity with ordinary folks. Even if these ordinary folks tended to own large tracts of real estate along the Cape and inshore on the Hudson.

After all, a little planet-smashing might be fun, and might even provide material for a few rambles about the transience of life and the uncertainty of material advantage. Not that he was against material advantage. The only people he knew of who would have leveled material advantage so that no one had any were of course those who had none to start with.

His decision to attend had also been influenced by the passenger list, which included many of the political and industrial leaders of the period.

Although he would never have admitted it, MacAllister was impressed by the amenities of the giant ship. His stateroom was more cramped than he would have preferred. But that was to be expected. It was nonetheless comfortable, and the decor suggested a restrained good taste rather than the polished superficial luxury one usually found aboard the big superluminal liners.

He enjoyed wandering through the maze of dining rooms, bars, and lounges. Several areas had been converted into virtual verandas, from which when the time came, the passengers would be able to watch the Event.

Although MacAllister had originally planned to spend much of his time working, he took instead to holding court in a bistro called The Navigator on the starboard side, upper deck. It overflowed each evening with notables and admirers, usually second-level political types, their advisers, journalists, a few CEOs, and some writers. All were anxious to be associated with him, to be seen as his friends. On his first night out, he'd been invited to dine at the captain's table. Not quite settled in yet, he'd declined.

If MacAllister had enemies who would not have been sad to see him left somewhere in the Maleiva system, preferably on the doomed planet, he knew that the world at large perceived him as a knight-errant, righting wrongs, puncturing buffooneries, and generally enlisted in the front rank of those who were striving to keep the planet safe for common sense.

He enjoyed a reputation as a brilliant analyst and, even more important, as a model of integrity. He sided neither with progressive nor conservative. He could not be bought. And he could not be fooled.

Women-offered themselves to him. He took some, although he acted with discretion, assuring himself first that there was no possibility of an enraged husband turning up. He harbored a great affection for the opposite sex, although he understood, during an age of weak males, that women belonged in kitchens and in beds. That they were happiest in those locations, and that once everyone got around to recognizing that simple truth, life would become better for all.

Midway through the voyage, he heard the report that artificial structures had been found on Deepsix and commented on it in the journal he'd kept all his life:

We've known about Maleiva III and the coming collision for twenty-odd years, he wrote, and suddenly, with a few weeks left, they discover that unfortunate world has had a history. Now, of course, there will be some advanced finger-pointing to determine which rascals are responsible for having overlooked the detail. It will, of course, turn out to be the fault of the pilot of the Taliaferro, who is safely dead. And they'll find that the failure to check the satellite data at home can be laid to a grade-three clerk. It'll be an entertaining show to watch.

There is now no time to inspect this culture, which is about to be lost. An entire species will be wiped out, and there will be no one alive who knows anything about them other than that several meters of stone once stuck out of a snowbank.

Maybe in the end it's all any of us can expect.

ARCHIVE

TO: NCA HAROLD WILDSIDE FROM: DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS SUBJECT: DEEPSIX PROJECT

HUTCHINS, BE ADVISED PRESENCE OF PREDATORS ON DEEPSIX. ORIGINAL PROJECT RECORDS SUGGESTS EXTREME CAUTION. I AM INFORMED THAT THE REIGNING EXPERT ON THE SUBJECT, RANDALL NIGHTINGALE, IS ON BOARD YOUR SHIP. TAKE HIM WITH YOU WHEN YOU GO DOWN.

GOMEZ

TO: NCA WENDY JAY

FROM: DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS

SUBJECT: ARCHEOLOGICAL SITES

ATTN: GUNTHER BEEKMAN. WE HAVE DIVERTED WILDSIDE TO ESTABLISH ARCHEOLOGICAL INSPECTION T?AM ON DEEPSIX PRISCILLA HUTCHINS WILL LEAD EFFORT. REQUEST YOU AND CAPT. CLAIRVEAU RENDER EVERY ASSISTANCE.

GOMEZ

IV

At the critical moment of a critical mission, when his people most needed him, Randall Nightingale fainted dead away. He was rescued by Sabina Coldfield, and dragged to safety by that estimable woman at the cost of her own life. Everyone now seems shocked that the mission failed, and that no further attempt will be made to examine the mosquitoes and marsh grass ofMalena III. They say it costs too much, but they're talking about money. It does cost too much. It costs people like Cold field, who was worth a dozen Nightingales

— GREGORY MACALLISTER, "Straight and Narrow," Reminiscences

Marcel no longer believed the inhabitants of Deepsix were long dead. Or maybe dead at all.

"I think you might be right," said Kellie. She buried her chin in her palm and stared at the screen. They were examining visuals taken earlier in the day.

When this mission was completed, Marcel would certify Kellie Collier as fully qualified for her own command. She was only twenty-eight, young for that kind of responsibility, but she was all business, and he saw no point requiring her to sit second seat anymore. Especially with star travel beginning to boom. There were a multitude of superluminals out there begging for command officers, commercial carriers and private yachts and executive and corporate vessels. Not to mention the recent expansion of the Patrol, which had been fueled by the losses last year of the Marigold and the Rancocas, with their crews. The former had simply disintegrated as it prepared to jump into hyperspace; its crew had made it into the lifepods but had exhausted their air supply while waiting for a dilatory Patrol to respond.

The Rancocas had suffered a power failure and gone adrift. Communications had failed, and no one had noticed until it was too late.

As people moved out to the newly terraformed worlds, where land was unlimited, the public was demanding a commitment to safety. Consequently the Patrol had entered an era of expansion. It was hard to know how far a young hotshot like Collier might go.

Kellie was studying the foothills of one of the mountain ranges in central Transitoria. "I don't think there's any question about it," she said. "It's a road. Or it used to-be."

Marcel thought she was seeing what she wanted to see. "It's overgrown." He sat down beside her. "Hard to tell. It might be an old riverbed."

"Look over here. It goes uphill. That was never a watercourse." She squinted at the screen. "But I'd say it's been a long time since anyone used it."

They had, during the five days that had passed since the first discovery, seen widely scattered evidence of habitation. More than that, they'd seen the remnants of cities on three continents. The cities were long dead, buried, crushed beneath glaciers. It also appeared they had been preindustrial. Further elucidation would have to wait until Hutchins arrived and took her team down for a close look. But there were no structures that could be said to dominate the surrounding landscape, and the snow wasn't so deep as to bury major engineering work. There were no bridges, no dams, no skyscrapers, no signs of construction on a large scale. Just here and there a fragment in the snow. A rooftop, a post, a pier.

On an island they'd named Freezover, there was a ring of stones. A cart waited in the middle of a barren field near Bad News Bay, near the place at which Nightingale's mission had come to grief; and an object that might have been a plow had been sighted at Cape Chagrin in the Tempis.

But the road-

It was approximately thirty kilometers long, and they could trace it from its beginnings in a river valley, cross-country along the boundary of a small lake, onto a rise at the foot of one of the mountains. (Kellie was right: It could not be a watercourse.) It disappeared briefly into a tangle of forest before emerging again near the ocean.

The road ran past the base of one of the taller mountains. It towered almost seven thousand meters over the forest. Its northern side was sheared away, creating an unbroken drop from the cloud-shrouded summit down onto a gradual slope. When the sunlight hit the rock wall at dawn, they detected a cobalt tint, and so they called it Mt. Blue.

"The sightseer route," said Marcel. Kellie shrugged. "Maybe. I wish we could go down and look."

"The Wildside should be able to settle things when it gets here."

She folded her arms and let him see she was about to ask for something. Instead: "It's lucky there was an archeologist within range."

"Hutch?" Marcel allowed himself a smile. "She's no archeologist. Actually, she's in our line of work."

"A pilot?"

"Yeah. I guess she's all they had. But she's been down on some sites."

Kellie nodded, stood, and looked at him carefully. "You think she'd let me go down with her?"

"If you asked, she probably would. Probably be glad to get the help. The real question is whether I'd allow it."

Kellie was attractive, tall, with dark bedroom eyes, sleek bkck skin, and soft shoulder-length hair. Marcel knew that she found no difficulty having her way with men, and that she tried not to use her charms on him. Bad form, she'd told him once. But it came as natural to her as breathing. Her eyelids fluttered and she contrived to gaze-up at him even though he was still seated. "Marcel, they said we should render all assistance."

"I don't think they meant personnel."

She held him in her gaze. "I'd like very much to go. You don't really need me here."

Marcel considered it. "The lander's probably going to fill up with the science people," he said. "We'll have to give them priority."

"Okay." She nodded. "That's not unreasonable. But if there's room…"

Marcel was uneasy. He knew Hutch, not well, but enough to trust her. The experts weren't sure when Deepsix would start coming apart. And there was dangerous animal life down there. Still, Kellie was a grown woman, and he could see no reason to refuse the request. "I'll check with her, see what she says."

Beekman was lost in thought when Marcel took a seat beside him. He was frowning, his gaze turned inward, his brow wrinkled. Then he jerked into awareness and looked unsteadily at the captain. "Marcel," he said, "I have a question for you."

"All right." They were in project control.

"If there's really something, somebody, down there capable of building a house or laying a road, should we be thinking about a rescue operation?"

Marcel had been thinking about little else, but he could see no practical way to approach the problem. How did one rescue aliens? "Wildside only has one lander," he said. "That's it. How many do you think we could bring off? Where would we put them? How do you think they'd react to a bunch of cowboys rolling in and trying to round them up?"

"But if there are intelligent creatures down there, it seems as if we'd have a moral obligation to try to save a few. Don't you think?"

"How much experience have you with ET life-forms?" asked Marcel.

Beekman shook his head. "Not much, really."

"They might be people-eaters."

"That's unlikely. We're talking about something that makes roads." Beekman looked seriously uncomfortable. "I know the lander's small, and we've got only one. But we could take a few. It's what the Academy would want us to do." He was wearing a gray vest, which he pulled tightly about him as if he were cold. "How many does it hold? The Wildside lander?"

Marcel asked Bill. The numbers popped up on the screen. Eleven plus a pilot. "Maybe we should wait until we're confronted by the problem," he said.

Beekman nodded slowly. "I suppose."

"Taking off a handful," pursued Marcel, "might not be a kind act. We'd be rescuing them so they could watch their world die." He shook his head. "It would be dangerous. We'd have no way of knowing what they would do when we walked up and said hello. We wouldn't be able to communicate. And then there's the gene pool."

Beekman heaved himself out of his chair and went over to the wallscreen, whkh looked down on towering cumulus and cold blue seas. "We could probably synthesize the genes. Give them a chance to continue." He stared at Deepsix.

"It's not our call," said Marcel. "The Academy knows what we've found. If they want us to do a rescue operation, let them tell us so."

During the next couple of days, there were other discoveries: a collapsed structure that might have been a storage building along a river in Northern Tempus, a wooden palisade hidden in a forest, an abandoned boat frozen in the ice at Port Umbrage. The boat, lying on its side, was about twelve meters long, and it had masts. But its proportions suggested the mariners had been considerably smaller than humans. "Looks like a galley," said Mira. "You can even see a cabin in the rear."

Chiang Harmon agreed. "It would be small for one of us, but it's there. How old's the ice?"

"Probably been there since the beginning." She was referring to the system's encounter with the Quiveras Cloud. Port Umbrage, they believed, had been frozen solid three thousand years ago, and had never thawed. It was in the far northern latitudes on the east coast of Gloriamundi.

"What else can we conclude about the boat?" Beekman asked.

"Prow looks like a sea serpent," said Chiang. "Little bit of a Viking flavor."

"You know," said Mira, "I hadn't noticed that. But you're right. They have art."

Art was important to Mira. Working on an Academy vessel, she understood that a civilization's art was what defined it. In more personal terms, it was why one lived at all. One worked in order to make the time to enjoy the finer pleasures. She'd confided to Marcel that Beekman's people, with few exceptions, were "quite parochial," and were so consumed chasing down the details of the physical world that most had never learned to enjoy themselves. She considered herself a Sybarite in the highest sense of the word.

She was one of the older persons on board. Mira had, in her own phrase, crashed through middle age and come out the other side. She was nevertheless willowy, attractive, precise. One of those very fortunate women who seem unaffected by passing years.

"They had art," Beekman corrected.

"If we could get a close look at it," said Chiang, "we might be able to figure out what they looked like. What we really need is to see it up close."

Mira nodded. "Next time," she said, "we need to make sure we have a lander with us." She sounded as if she thought somebody had blundered, and she was looking directly at Beekman.

Later, Pete Reshevsky, a mathematician from Oslo, complained that he couldn't see what all the fuss was about. "There's nothing down there except ruins," he said. "And it's pretty obvious that whatever was here, they were pretty primitive. So we don't really have anything to learn from them." Reshevsky was small, sharp-nosed, muscular. A man who spent about half his time in the gym. His smile seldom reached his dark eyes. "We'd be better off," he continued, "if everyone would stick to business and try to keep in mind why we're here."

In the morning Wildside arrived. "Its captain wants to speak with you," Bill told Marcel.

Marcel liked Priscilla Hutchins. He'd worked with her on occasion, and had found her competent and easygoing. She'd become something of a legend twenty years ago when she'd piloted the expedition that discovered the omega clouds.

Marcel had envied her that mission. He'd been working for Kos-mik. Inc., at the time, making the long run out to Quraqua every few months. That had been a spirit-killing experience. The money was good, and he'd been ambitious, looking for promotion into the hierarchy. Hutchins had been little more than a kid when it all happened, but the incident had glamorized piloting for the general public and persuaded Marcel that he'd had enough posting back and forth to nowhere. Within months, he'd resigned from Kosmik and signed on with the Academy.

He was pleased to have Hutch in the neighborhood. It was a curious coincidence that the woman who'd played a major, if indirect, role in shaping his own career, should arrive at this moment. If he was going to be called upon to make decisions regarding the possible existence of aliens, it would be helpful to have her input.

"Put her through," he said.

She was just barely tall enough to have met the minimum standards for a license. She had dark eyes, black hair cut short, animated features that were capable of lighting up a room when she chose. She greeted him with a broad smile. "Marcel," she said, "good to see you again. I understand you've hit the jackpot."

"More or less. Do you think they'll give me a bonus?"

"The usual, I suspect."

"How much do you know?"

"Only that there's evidence of habitation. A tower. Are any of them still alive down there?"

"We haven't seen anybody." He brought her up to date. The cities we know about are here and over here; there've been indications of inhabitants in these half dozen places. He used graphics to specify. "Biggest of the cities is in Southern Tempus." He showed her. It was deep under a glacier. He didn't think she'd be able to cut through to it in the time available.

How much time was available?

"The actual collision will occur around dinnertime, December 9. We expect the planet itself will begin breaking apart about forty hours earlier." It was late Saturday evening, November 25. "But we can't really be certain. You won't want to push your luck."

"What do we know about the natives?"

"Not much. They were small. About the size of five-year-olds, looks like. And we have evidence they were on four of the continents."

"Where do you suggest we set down?"

"The tower's as good as anyplace. It looks as if you can get right in with a minimum of digging. But there is a downside: The area's directly on a fault line."

She hesitated. "You think it'll be all right for a few days?"

"Don't know. Nobody here wants to take responsibility for that kind of guess."

"Show me where it is."

"It's in northern Transitoria-"

"Where?"

Marcel directed Bill to post a chart.

She looked at it, nodded, and asked about the Event. "What precisely is going to happen? And when?"

"All right. Gunther-that's Gunther Beekman, the head of mission-tells me conditions should remain relatively stable until the breakup begins. Once that starts, though, the end will come quickly. So you'll want to get out early. I'd suggest a week early. Don't monkey around with this. Get in, get your artifacts, get out.

"You'll probably experience quakes, major storms, stuff like that, early on. When Deepsix gets inside something called the Turner Horizon, the atmosphere will be ripped off, the oceans torn out, and the crust will turn to oatmeal. All pretty much within a few hours. The core will be all that's left by the time it plunks into the soup. Just a chunk of iron."

Her eyes came back to him. "Okay. I guess we won't want to dawdle."

"Do you expect to stay and watch it? The collision?"

"Now that I'm here? Sure. If my passengers don't scream too loudly."

For a long moment neither spoke. "It's good to see you again, Hutch," he said. It had been almost two years. She'd been coming in from Pinnacle, about to dock, and he was on his way out with a survey team. They'd talked a few minutes over the system, as they were doing now.

But they hadn't been physically in the same room for twice as long. They'd attended a navigation seminar at home on the Wheel. He'd been drawn to her, had spent part of an evening at a dinner party with her. But conditions had never been right. They'd always been going in opposite directions.

She was looking at pictures. "It's not much of a tower, is it?" It was circular, made of stone, with eight windows, each at a different level, facing a different direction. It stood twelve meters high. But the sensors had indicated another fifteen meters down to its base below ground, where it appeared to be connected to the interior of the city wall. There was a possibility they could use it to get directly into the city.

Marcel had propped two pictures of it on his console. One was a close-up. The other depicted the tower in all its isolation.

"When are you planning to start?" he asked.

She canted her head. "Soon as we can pack the sandwiches."

"Hutch, my number one would like to go down with you."

She looked pleased. "Sure. If he wants, we'll be glad to have him."

"He's a she. Name's Kellie Collier. She's good. Be a big help if you run into trouble."

"I can use her. You don't have any archeologists on board, I don't guess?"

"No. I've got a boatload of mathematicians, physicists, climatolo-gists."

Hutch nodded. "How about an industrial-sized laser?"

He laughed. "Wish I did." "Okay. It was worth a try." "Hutch, one other thing." "Yes?"

"As I'm sure you know, we don't have a lander. If you get in trouble, I can't come after you."

"I know. Have no fear, I plan to be very careful."

"Good. And do me a favor while you're down there?"

"Sure."

"Keep a channel open. So I can listen to what's going on."

Hutch had put off informing Nightingale that Gomez thought it would be a good idea if he accompanied the landing party. She doubted he'd want to go, and was even less persuaded he'd be of use if he did. But at the moment she, Toni, and Kellie Collier were the entire team. She was going to need a couple of volunteers to stand guard and help carry out the artifacts. If they were able to find any artifacts.

She thoroughly disliked this part of her job. They were calling on her to do something she knew little about, and she'd been around Academy politics long enough to know that Gomez would get credit for anything that came off successfully, and Hutch's name would be forever blackened by any failure.

Like the loss of Richard Wald twenty years ago.

Wald had been a preeminent archeologist whom Hutch had piloted to Quraqua. During a long test of wills with a group of terraformers, Wald had been lost to a tidal wave. That episode had become legendary. Wald had stayed too long at an underwater site on that world, had stayed even while the wave approached, and in the end Hutch had been unable to lift him safely away. Some people had blamed her for the misfortune, claiming that she was the only one who had a clear view of events, and that she'd waited too long to warn him.

She wondered whether Nightingale was another instance of the Academy's tendency to find scapegoats.

It was time to get it over with. She finished talking with Marcel, stopped by the common room for a sandwich, and then strolled down to Nightingale's quarters and knocked on the door.

He opened up and looked surprised. "Hello, Hutch," he said. "Come in." He'd been working at his computer. An image of Deepsix floated on the wallscreen. She glanced at it, at its blue seas, its cloud masses, its vast ice-covered continents. "Beautiful world," she said.

He nodded. "Cold world. They all look good from orbit."

"Randy, I'm sorry about the delay getting home."

"Hutch." His eyes fixed hers. "You didn't come here to go on about flight schedules. What can I do for you?"

She handed him a copy of the transmission. He read it, looked at her, dropped his eyes again to the paper, looked up. "This is what Gomez wants," he said. "What do you want?"

She'd expected him to decline without hesitation. "I'd be pleased if you came. I can use some help."

"Who else is going?"

"First officer from Wendy."

"That's it?"

"And Toni."

"You understand, despite what Gomez thinks, I have no special knowledge. I know the place is dangerous, but any living world is dangerous. You don't need me to tell you that. And I'm not an archeologist."

"I know."

"If anyone were to ask my advice, Hutch, I'd say forget it. Stay away from the place."

"I don't have that option."

"I know. You still want me?"

"Yes. If you'll come, I'd like very much to have you."

Marcel was surprised to discover how little interest in going down to the surface existed among his passengers. The general consensus seemed to be that if it were true there were natives of one sort or another on Deepsix, it was hard to see the significance of the fact. Nobody really cared. The culture was clearly primitive, and therefore there would be nothing to learn.

He understood that exocology, that branch of the sciences which concerned itself with the social structures of alien societies, wasn't part of their specialty, but he thought nonetheless they'd want to be on the ground for a major scientific find. A few came forward, commented that they wished they could go down, but then, when he offered to ask Hutch, backed off. Just too much to do. Experiments to set up. Otherwise, I'd go in a minute. You understand.

Only Chiang Harmon volunteered. And Marcel suspected he wanted to go because Kellie was going.

Theoretically, the ground mission should be simple. Just land, get pictures and samples, and come back. If natives show up, get pictures of them, too. Hutch hadn't brought up the thorny issue of attempting to rescue any inhabitants, so he was going to let it lie. He decided that if locals appeared, and they indicated they wanted help, then he would try to provide it. Otherwise, he would simply let it go. It was a decision that kept him awake at night, but it seemed the only practical approach.

There was another aspect to the mission that worried him. He knew how the scientific mind worked. Hutch's team would get down there, they'd be looking at a new marvel, and they'd inevitably discover things that would be hard to explain. And they'd want to get the last possible artifact, the last possible answer, and he had no trouble imagining Deepsix gliding toward its unhappy conclusion while he pleaded with Hutch to get off the surface, and she continually reassured him that she would. That she needed only another hour.

Of course Hutch didn't officially possess a scientific mind. And she'd stated she planned to be away with time to spare. So why not take her at her word?

On the Evening Star, Gregory MacAllister had just excused himself for the evening and left The Navigator, headed for his quarters, when a young woman approached and asked if she might speak with him briefly. He recognized her as having been present in the bistro during the evening's discussion on the postmodernist movement in Russian theater. She'd been seated toward the rear, and had contributed nothing, but had remained attentive throughout.

That the woman was extraordinarily attractive cut no ice with him. MacAllister never had trouble collecting beautiful women. But he could be impressed by a person's ability to concentrate, which always implied talent.

He was no respecter of money or position, nor could he be won over by charm or by that series of affectations known as charisma. During his sixty-odd years, he had found there were as many louts in the patrician classes as there were ignoramuses farther down the social spectrum. He liked to believe that only intellect engaged him, al-

though he was inclined to assess intellect as a direct corollary of an individual's regard for MacAllister's opinions.

"My name is Casey Hayes," she said. She fumbled in a jacket pocket and produced a press card. "I'm with Interweb."

MacAllister allowed his eyes to drift momentarily shut. A journalist.

She was tall, with fashion-model features, and lush brown hair brushed back in the current style. She wore gray slacks and a dark jacket with a diamond stud. No ordinary journalist, this one, he decided.

"What can I do for you?" he asked, noncommittally.

"Mr. MacAllister, have you been listening to the reports out of the Maleiva system?"

"Regarding the ruins? Yes, I've been keeping up with them. Of course."

He had slowed his pace but not stopped. She fell into step beside him. "It occurred to me," she said, "that this is precisely the sort of event that would interest you. A solitary tower in a faraway place."

"Really?" Journalists always saw in him a potential story, and they were perfectly willing to fabricate whatever circumstance might dictate to get him to talk. There was just no knowing when MacAllister might say something outrageous and shock the public sensibility, or perhaps offend a whole bloc of people. Like last year's remark at Notre Dame, where he was receiving an award, that anyone who truly wished to develop tolerance toward other human beings should start by casting aside any and all religious affiliation. When challenged by one of the other guests, he had asked innocently whether anyone could name a single person put to death or driven from his home by an atheist over theological matters. Had the individual been fully functional, MacAllister had thought, he would have questioned the editor's own celebrated intolerance.

But thank God these people were never quick on their feet.

"Yes," she continued. "I've been a reader of yours ever since college." She launched into a short dissertation on the wonderfulness of his work, and he was inclined to let her go on. But it was late and he was tired. So he encouraged her to come to the point.

"On Maleiva HI," she said, "we're looking at a lost civilization. Maybe some of them are even still alive." She beamed a smile intended to sweep his resistance into the night. "What were they like, do you think? How long had they been there? Does this kind of climax suggest that their entire history, everything they've ever accomplished, is really of no consequence?"

"Young lady," he began.

"Casey."

"Young lady, how on earth would I know? For that matter, why would I care?"

"Mr. MacAllister, I've read Reflections of a Barefoot Journalist."

He was surprised. Barefoot was a collection of essays from his early days, jabbing every social stupidity from breast worship to the timorousness of husbands. But it also contained a long essay defending the bizarre notion, originally promulgated by Rousseau, that there was much to be learned from those untouched by the decadent influence of civilization. That of course was before he'd grasped the truth, that decadence was rather an appealing state. "None of it applies," he said. "The fact that somebody lived on Deepsix who knew how to pile stones on top of one another scarcely seems to be of any significance. Especially since they and the stones are about to go to a happier world."

She looked at him and he saw determination in her eyes. "Mr. MacAllister, you must be wondering why I stopped you."

"Not really."

"I'd like very much-"

"To do an interview with me."

"Yes. As a matter of fact, I would. If you could spare the time."

He'd been a young journalist himself once. Long ago. And it was hard to refuse this particular woman. Why was that? Was he being compromised by his wiring? "About what?" he asked.

"I'd just like to do a general conversation. You can talk about whatever pleases you. Although since we're both here for the Event, that would undoubtedly come up."

He thought about demanding the questions in advance. But he wouldn't want to have it get about that one of the world's most spontaneous thinkers had to have everything up front. "Tell me, uh…" He hesitated, his mind blank. "What did you say your name was, again?"

"Casey Hayes."

"Tell me, Casey, how do you happen to be on this flight? Did you have some sort of foreknowledge about this?"

She tilted her head and gazed steadily back at him. He decided he liked her. She seemed intelligent for a woman journalist.

"Why, no," she said. "In fact, I'm not supposed to be working at all. The ticket was a birthday gift from my parents."

"Congratulations," he said. "You're very lucky to have such parents."

"Thank you. I'll confess I thought that the prospect of watching worlds crash into one another had considerable possibility for a story. If I could get the right angle."

"Let us see if you've done so, Casey. How did you plan to approach the matter?"

"By finding one of the world's most brilliant editors and presenting his reactions to the public."

The woman had no shame.

She gazed steadily at him. He thought he saw the glitter of a promise, of a suggestion for a reward down the road, but ascribed it to the same male software that rooted him in place, that prevented his precipitate retreat to his quarters. "Maybe," she continued, "we could talk over lunch tomorrow, if you're free? The Topdeck is quite nice."

The Topdeck was the most posh eating spot on the vessel. Leather and silver. Candles. Bach on the piano. Very baroque. "Doesn't seem quite right," he said.

"All right" She was all compliance. "Where would you suggest?"

"I put it to you, as an alert journalist. If you were going to interview someone on the significance of the Titanic, or the Rancocas, where would you propose to hold the conversation?"

She looked blank. "I'm not sure," she said.

"Since both have been recovered and, to a degree, reconstructed, surely nothing would serve as effectively as one of the forward staterooms."

"Oh," she said. And again: "Oh! You mean go down to the surface."

Did he mean that? But yes, why not? History of a sort was about to be made. It wouldn't hurt his reputation to be present at the nexus. He might be able to put the appropriate interpretation to events. The world's uplifters, sentimentalists, and moralists would be in rare form during these next few days, drawing what lessons they could from the death of a sentient species. (How sentient, of course, would never become an issue.) There would be the usual references to the event as a warning from the Almighty. It occurred to him that if any of these unfortunate creatures were actually found, there would be a heart-_ wrenching outcry for some sort of desperate rescue effort, presumably from the decks of the Evening Star.

Why not indeed?

"Yes," he said. "If we want to talk about Deepsix, then Deepsix is the place we should go."

She was hesitant. "I don't see how we can arrange it," she said. "Are they sending any tours down?"

He laughed. "No. But I'm sure it can be managed. We have a couple of days yet. I'll see what I can do."

When he got back to his stateroom, MacAllister locked the door and sank into a chair.

The journalist reminded him of Sara.

Not physically. The angles of Sara's face were softer, Sara's hair was several shades darker, Sara's bearing not quite so imperial. They were both about the same size and weight, but once you got beyond that, it was hard to see a physical similarity.

Yet it was there.

The eyes, maybe. But Sara's were green, Casey's blue. Nonetheless, he recognized the steady gaze, and maybe something in her expression, in the way her smile played at the corners of her mouth or the way her voice softened when she thought she could work her will no other way.

Or maybe his imagination had simply run wild, because he was on a flight that was going to become memorable, and he would have liked very much to share it with Sara.

After spending twenty years relentlessly attacking marriage as an institution for the mentally deficient of both sexes, an evolutionary trap, he had met her one evening during a presentation to a group of young journalists. She'd invited him to dinner because she was working on an assignment and it required an interview with him. He was at the time perhaps America's best-known misogynist. The grand passion always wears out, he'd maintained. He'd set its maximum limit at one year, three months, eleven days.

With Sara, he never got a chance to test his figures. Eight months after he'd met her, three weeks after the wedding, she'd died in a freak boating accident. He hadn't been there, had been in his office working on Premier when it happened.

It was a long time ago now. Yet no day ever passed that he did not think of her.

Sara had lived in many moods, somber and delighted, pensive and

full of laughter. Her last name had been Dingle, and she used to tell people that the only reason she'd consented to marry him was to effect the name change. It had, she said, always been an embarrassment.

He couldn't have said why, but that was the Sara whose spirit occupied his stateroom at the moment. Stupid. He was getting old.

He collected a strawberry clipper from the autobar and called up the library catalog. There was a new novel by Ramsey Taggart that he'd been wanting to look at. Taggart was one of his discoveries, but he'd begun coasting. MacAllister had spoken with him, shown him where he was going wrong. Nevertheless the last book, a dreary adultery-in-the-mountains melodrama, had shown no improvement. If the trend continued in this latest book, MacAllister would have no choice but to take him to task more formally. In public.

He thought through the conversation with Casey, because it seemed to him he was missing something. He was not one to put him-self to trouble on behalf of others, and yet he'd volunteered to do an on-site interview that would seriously inconvenience him. Why had he done that?

Gradually, it occurred to him that he wanted to go down to the surface of Maleiva III. To walk among its ruins and let its great age surround him. To soak the sense of oncoming disaster into his blood, What would it be like to stand on the surface of that doomed world and watch the giant rushing down?

To manage things, he would have to win over the assistance of Erik Nicholson.

Nicholson was the captain of the Evening Star, a small man, both in physical stature and in spirit. He was, for example, quite proud of his position, and strutted about like a turkey. He spoke in a manner that was simultaneously distant and weak, as if he were delivering di-vine instructions from the mountaintop and hoping you'd believe

MacAllister was scheduled to join the captain for dinner next evening. That would serve as an opportunity to draw him into a pri-vate conversation and get the ball rolling. The trick would be to find a reason strong enough to persuade him it would be in his interest to send the ship's lander to the surface. With MacAllister in it.

The book came up and he started on it. Once or twice, though, he glanced around the room to reassure himself he was really alone.

V

All the important thing? that ever happened to me occurred while I was going someplace else. -Gregory MacAllister, Notes from Babylon

Wendys shuttle delivered two passengers, the additions to the ground survey team, to Wildside. Hutch met them in the bay, where they traded introductions.

Kellie Collier was a head taller than Hutch and wore a standard blue-trimmed white Wendy Jay jumpsuit She shook Hutch's hand warmly and said how pleased she was to be included.

Chiang Harmon's Asian ancestors revealed themselves in the shape of his eyes but nowhere else that she could see. His hair was brown, he was big-boned and broad-shouldered, and he seemed a trifle clumsy. Hutch decided on the spot she liked him'. She also recognized that he had more than a professional interest in Kellie.

"Either of you ever been down on a frontier world before?" she asked.

Kellie had. Although she confessed she'd never traveled anywhere beyond the bases and outposts. "No place where there might have been trouble," she admitted.

On the other hand, she knew how to use a stinger.

"We don't have any stingers on board," said Hutch.

Her eyebrows rose. "You're going down onto a potentially lethal world without weapons?"

Hutch showed her a cutter.

"What is it?" she asked.

Hutch turned it on. A blade of white light appeared. "Laser," she said. "Cut through anything."

"I don't think I'd want to let the local gators get that close."

"Sorry," said Hutch. "They're all we have. We have to make do."

They had half a dozen on board. They were probably a notch or two more efficient than the cutter Biney Coldfield had used to fight off the cardinals. They were a basic tool for archeologists, but in the right hands they also made an effective weapon. But Hutch was unsure whether her volunteers were people to whom she was willing to entrust the weapons. If they weren't, she decided, she shouldn't take them along.

She'd given long consideration to the wildlife hazards on Deepsix. There'd be no repetition of the earlier mistakes. She'd put together a set of operational requirements that everyone would adhere to without exception. She gave each of them a copy, and insisted they read and sign it before the discussion went any farther. Any deviation, she explained, would result in the offender's being shipped back into orbit. Posthaste.

Did everyone understand?

Everyone did.

She showed them around Wildside. They found Scolari and Embry in the common room, where Chiang asked whether they were going down to the surface, too. When they replied that they weren't, both looking uncomfortable and a shade indignant, Kellie glanced at Hutch, and it was impossible to miss the judgment she'd just made.

"Why not?" Kellie asked innocently. "It's the chance of a lifetime."

"I'm not an archeologist," said Scolari defensively. "And to be honest, I think it's a damn-fool thing to do. That place down there is full of wild animals, and it's going to start breaking up at any time. I don't plan to be there when it happens. Not for the sake of a few pots."

Embry smiled coolly and let it go.

Hutch would have preferred more young males in the group, because she hoped they would be cutting engraved stones out of walls and hauling them back to the lander. Gravity on Deepsix was.92 Earth normal, and.89 Pinnacle, which was the level to which Toni was accustomed. It would help somewhat, but they might still have use for some muscle.

Nightingale joined them, and they did another round of introductions, and then took time for a training session. Hutch explained the importance of getting pictures of whatever they might find, and of taking measurements and mapping where everything was. "We do all that," she said, "before we touch anything."

She described the hazards, not only from predators, but simply from moving around in an ancient building. "Be careful. Floors will give way; overheads will cave in. Sharp objects won't penetrate your suit, but they can still punch holes in you." She invited Nightingale to speak about his experience. He was understandably reticent, but he advised them not to underestimate anything. "The predators on Deepsix have had an extra couple of billion years to evolve. They have very sharp teeth and some of them look innocuous. Trust nothing."

She handed out the cutters and talked about how they would be used and where things could go wrong. She watched while they practiced, and required each to demonstrate proficiency. "Be careful in close quarters, if it comes to it. The cutter is almost certainly more dangerous than anything we're going to meet."

Nightingale met that remark with a frown. But he said nothing.

She dismissed the rest of the team and ran a short course for Chiang in wearing the e-suit. The others were experienced with working inside a Flickinger field.

They joined Scolari and Embry for dinner. Whatever tension might have existed seemed to have dissolved. Embry even made a point of taking Hutch aside and apologizing. "I hope you don't think this is personal," she said. "My objection is to management. If they hadn't had a chance to do this earlier and get it right-"

"I understand," Hutch said.

The lander was loaded and ready to go. Hutch opened the cargo hatch and turned to face her four passengers. "We've stowed rations for ten days," she said. "That's more than we'll need. Temperature is a few degrees below zero Celsius at noon near the tower. Atmosphere is breathable, but the mix has a little more nitrogen than you're used to. Breathe enough of it and you'll start feeling detached and lazy. So we'll leave the e-suits on when we're outside. There's no known problem with biohazards.

"I want to reemphasize that nobody wanders off on his or her own." She looked around, made eye contact with each of them to make sure her meaning was clear, and to assure herself they would comply. She was prepared to refuse passage to anyone who looked amused. But they all nodded.

"A day on Deepsix is a bit over nineteen hours long. We'll be landing near the tower in the middle of the night, and we'll stay with the lander until sunrise. After that we'll play it by ear.

"Incidentally, we'll be going down on snow. We don't think it's very deep because it's close to the equator, but there's no way to know for sure." She looked at Nightingale. "Randy, anything to add?"

He stood up. "I just want to underline what Hutch said. Be careful. Protect one another's backs. We don't want to leave anybody down there." His voice sounded a bit strained.

"I tend to ask people to do things," Hutch continued, "rather than tell them. Habits are hard to break. But I'll expect immediate compliance with any request.

"You'll have a vest that you should put on after you activate the e-suit. You can put tools, sandwiches, anything you like, in the vest. Keep the cutter in the vest and never put it in a trouser or shirt pocket. The reason is simple: If you need it and it's inside the suit, you won't be able to get to it. Furthermore, if you figure out a way to get your fingers around it, and you activate it inside the suit, you'll be limping for a long time to come.

"Any questions?"

There were none.

Hutch checked the time. "We're going to launch in eight minutes. In case anybody wants to use the washroom."

If the experts were right, they had twelve standard days before breakup would begin, which meant they really had about a week before conditions would become unduly dangerous on the surface. So her intention was to move with dispatch.

Kellie's enthusiasm caught hold of the others, and they carried it into the lander. Everyone was excited, and even Nightingale seemed to have shed his dark mood.

Somebody applauded when she launched. A half hour later they dropped into a blizzard, and emerged finally into gloomy, overcast skies at an altitude of four thousand meters. The landscape below was utterly dark. The sensors provided glimpses of rolling hills and broad plains marked by occasional forest. Several large clearings might have

been frozen lakes. The ocean, the Coraggio, lay a couple of hundred kilometers north, behind a wall of mountains.

The lander possessed dual-purpose jet/rocket engines, to enable it to maneuver in space, or to function as an aircraft. It was an exceedingly flexible vehicle, owing largely to its spike technology, which was the heart of its lift capability, allowing it to hover, to land in any reasonably flat space, and to leave the atmosphere without the necessity of hauling along vast amounts of its hydrogen fuel.

Power for all systems was supplied by a Bussard-Ligon direct-conversion reactor.

Hutch listened to her volunteers talking about how anxious they were to get into the tower, and she wondered about her own responsibility bringing them down. She couldn't do the work alone, yet she had the sense that only Nightingale understood the dangers. She had never before led people into a hazardous situation. She had seen what Nightingale's errors had cost, what they'd done to him personally, and she wondered why she was taking so large a risk. What the hell did she know about keeping people alive in what Kellie had accurately described as a lethal environment? She thought seriously about calling the whole thing off, returning to Wildside, and sending her resignation to Gomez.

But if she did that no one would ever know who had built the tower.

Hutch picked the structure up on her sensors and put it onscreen. It was a night-light image, brighter than it would be in normal optics. Nevertheless it looked old, dark, abandoned. Haunted.

She was descending almost vertically, using the spike and guide jets, coming in cautiously. Her instruments did not reveal whether the snow-covered surface would be firm enough to support the spacecraft.

She'd left the storm behind, but there were still a few flakes blowing past the windscreen. Otherwise, the night was calm, with only a breath of wind. Outside air temperature read -31 C. Here and there stars were visible through the partly cloudy skies.

Hutch turned on the landing lights.

Kellie was seated beside her, her dark features illuminated in the glow of the instrument panel. Watching her, Hutch became aware of a precaution left untaken. "Kellie's our alternate pilot," she said. "In the event something unexpected happens and I become…" She hesitated."… kaput, Kellie will take over. Will succeed to command."

Kellie glanced in her direction, but said nothing.

"I'm sure nothing'll happen," Hutch added.

The ground surrounding the tower was flat, bleak, and empty. There was a scattering of hills on the western horizon, a patch of woods, and a couple of solitary trees.

"I'll set down as close to it as I can," she said.

The snow seemed to run on forever, losing itself finally in the dark. There was, she thought, a lot to be said for having a moon.

The lander rocked gently, and the tower, cold and dark, reached up toward them.

Hutch might have used the AI to make the landing, but she preferred to fly on her own in this type of circumstance. If something unexpected happened, she didn't want to be at risk while the AI thought about an appropriate course of action.

She lowered the treads. The snow cover looked undisturbed.

It was hard to believe an entire city lay below that smooth white surface.

She took a moment to visualize its dimensions. The wall to which the tower might or might not be attached went off that way under the snow for a kilometer and a half, then turned north, angled back and forth a bit, and eventually returned to the tower, which was at the southwest corner of the fortification.

The city had apparently lain at the top of a low hill.

The lander sank through the night.

"Easy," said Kellie, her voice so low that Hutch suspected she wasn't supposed to hear it.

Hutch kept the nose up, cut back on the spike, and reached for the ground the way a person might descend into a dark room.

Wind blew up around them, and she could almost feel a draft come through the hull. She phased back the power, allowing the land-er's weight to ease down. The cabin was silent.

They touched the snow.

She let the vehicle settle and cut power. A few flakes fell on the windscreen.

"Good show," said Nightingale.

"Hutch, you down?" It was Marcel's voice.

"On target," she said.

During her career, Hutch had walked on probably twenty worlds and moons. This was the fifth time she'd landed on a world about which little was known, the first during which she'd been in charge.

They were twenty meters from the tower.

Hutch turned the lander's lights on it. Pocked and beaten by long winters, it was circular, not more than three stories high. Although she was thinking in human terms. It wasn't wide: She could walk around it in a minute.

There were eight windows, all at different levels, each looking in a different direction. The lowest would permit easy access. The top of the tower was circled by twin ring cornices projecting just above the uppermost window. A convex roof capped the structure.

She activated her e-suit and felt the familiar push away from the seat and the back of the chair as if a cushion of air had formed around her. Kellie ran a radio check with her and nodded. Okay. She pulled on a utility vest and asked Toni to pass up the microscan from the backseat. She clipped it on and put a cutter into a pocket.

"What are you going to do?" asked Nightingale. He looked worried.

"Historic moment. It's worth preserving." She popped the inner airlock hatch, set the cabin air pressure to match the outside level, and got out of her seat. "Everybody please get into your e-suit. Set the breather for conversion mode." That would allow the system to work off the environment so they didn't have to wear air tanks.

Kellie passed out the Flickinger generators. They attached them to their belts and activated the suits. The converters kicked in and commenced moving air.

"Mine won't work," said Toni.

Kellie looked at it, made an adjustment, and reset it. "Try it now."

The field whispered on and Toni held up a thumb. "Okay."

"I thought," said Chiang, "we were going to wait until morning."

"We are. Chiang, I'd like you to come stand in the airlock."

"Okay," he said, joining her. And after a moment: "Why?"

"In case of screwups, surprises, whatever." She checked the time. "We're about two hours from sunup. Soon as we have light, we'll go into the building."

"Nothing's going to sneak up on us out there," Chiang said. "Why don't we just take a look now?"

"When we have daylight." She trained the sensors to do a sweep along a patch of forest. It was the only place she could see where a predator might hide. Other than the tower itself.

Green lights flashed, and the outer hatch opened. "Anything moves out there," she said, "I want to know about it." She climbed out onto the ladder.

Chiang produced a lantern and played its beam across the snow. "Looks like Christmas."

Hutch climbed down, tested the ground, and sank in about halfway up her shins. The field kept her feet warm and dry. "Snow's a bit soft," she said.

"So I see."

The tower loomed over her. Morgan was a bright green star in the western sky, where its brilliance washed out even Deneb. It was 84 million kilometers away, and the two worlds were rushing toward each other at a combined velocity of just under seventy kilometers per second.

The tower itself was singularly dull. A pile of stone blocks and not much more. She took its picture. Took it again.

She kept an eye on the line of trees. Somebody, Nightingale, she thought, undiplomatically asked whether Kellie knew how to fly the lander.

Hutch heard no response. Kellie, she suspected, had answered with a glance.

She faced the spacecraft, providing the scan with a good look, gave it a moment to adjust to the lighting, and took the lander's picture also.

"That's good," said Kellie. "Come on back now."

There was still a picture she wanted, one she would hang in whatever future quarters she might occupy. She moved to the far side of the vehicle, got far enough back until she had both the nose of the spacecraft, its Wildside designator, and the tower, all in the frame. "Perfect," she said.

Dawn broke gray and listless.

The sun was larger than Sol. But it seemed dusty and not quite tangible, almost as if it were one of those solar illusions called sun dogs one sees from North America's Great Plains.

Deepsix had a rotational period of nineteen hours, six minutes, eleven seconds. It was a few million kilometers closer to its sun than Earth was to Sol, but Maleiva was older and cooler.

There was snow on the tower roof. Hutch wondered who had lived in the building, how long ago, where they had gone.

It was possible that the tower marked the site of a climactic battle, or a place where opposing forces had come together to establish an alliance. A Plato might have conducted discussions on this hillside, in warmer times. Or a Solon laid out a system of laws.

Who knew? And no one ever would, except for what little she could salvage.

They descended from the lander, checked their gear, and began trudging through the snow toward the ground-floor window. The merest whisper of wind was audible around the tower. The snow was crusted, and it crunched loudly underfoot, breaking the general stillness.

Two birds appeared in the distance, well out to the northwest. Nightingale turned to look at Hutch, and a chill passed down her spine. But he said nothing.

The birds were flying in great slow circles, wings out, riding the air currents.

The ground-level window had a frame, in which remained a few shards of what might once have been glass. Inside the building they saw a room, utterly bare save for some wooden sticks and debris.

Through an open doorway, a narrow wooden staircase ascended between beams into the ceiling. The steps were close together, far too close to accommodate human feet.

Hutch set her scan to record everything, hung it around her neck, and climbed through the frame. There was just enough clearance for her head. The floor seemed solid. Beneath a layer of snow and earth, it was constructed of planks. She examined a plaster wall, stained and crumbling, punched full of holes. Several sets of shelves had been built into it.

The ceiling was low, not quite two meters. Not enough to allow even Hutch to stand up straight.

She looked into the other room, the one with the stairway, and saw a third chamber.

The stairway apparently rose to the top of the tower. And down several levels to the bottom. It was made of wood.

Hutch signaled the others to come in.

Chiang pushed on the ceiling. Dust drifted down.

The chambers above and below also had one window each. They appeared identical to the one at ground level, save that the windows were in different locations.

They climbed to the room above, and then to the level above that. They were all scrunching down to avoid hitting their heads. "Marcel was right about these folks," grumbled Kellie. "They were a little on the short side."

After the initial inspection they went back to the lander and Hutch distributed gear luminous cable and chalk to mark off areas where finds were made; bars and lamps, compressed air dusters, whatever else she'd been able to think of. Find anything unusual, she told them, call me. And almost anything you find will be unusual.

As the day brightened, they spread out through the tower. There were eight levels above ground. They counted six more going down. The topmost space consisted of a single chamber with a surprisingly high ceiling, enough to allow everyone except Chiang to stand upright. There was a hook up there, and they found two objects on the floor: one that might once have been a piece of chain, and a smashed wooden tripod.

"What do you think?" asked Toni.

"Maybe," said Kellie, "it was used to sharpen axes. See, you could put a stone in here."

They found at each level a charred niche that must have been a fireplace. In addition, at the bottom of the structure, a door opened out to the north. Into the interior of the city. It was closed, warped, and it wouldn't budge. They decided to finish examining the building before taking it down.

The rooms were empty, save for a chair arm that one would have described as a child's furnishing, a flat piece of wood that might once have been a tabletop, a few rags, a shoe, and some other debris so far corrupted that it was impossible to know what it might once have been.

The shoe was quite small, designed for the foot of an elf. But the tabletop became a discovery. "It's engraved," said Chiang.

The engravings were worn, so much so that little could be made out. Hutch couldn't even be sure whether the symbols were intended to be representative of actual objects, whether they were geometrical figures, pictographs, or letters.

The tripod had also been carved. Decorated. But these, too, had faded beyond any hope of recovery. They were examining it when Marcel's voice broke into her thoughts. "We just got a report back from the Academy. I thought you'd be interested in knowing they've named your city."

"Really? What?"

"Burbage Point."

"They named it for Burbage?" He was the senator who was eternally holding up the Academy as an example of mismanaged funds.

"I guess."

"My God. Maybe they're trying to send him a message."

"Not that bunch. They think they're ingratiating themselves."

"Anything else, Marcel?"

"Yes. The analysts have been looking at the scans for the cities. We've located nine now, most under heavy ice, all under something. And they all have defensive ramparts, by the way. Walls."

"That locks it."

"Yep. Primitive civilization. There is one exception, one without a palisade, but that's on an island. Incidentally, they're naming all these places for people they think can give them money, or get money for them. We now have Blitzberg, Korman City, Campbellville…"

"You're not serious."

He laughed. "You ever know me to kid around?"

Nightingale's eyes caught hers, and she knew exactly what he was thinking: And these nitwits have us down here risking our necks.

"Marcel," she said, "any more information about Burbage Point?"

"A little. It looks as if there were some wars. Somebody took the city at one point and pulled the walls down. Apparently left only the tower standing."

"What's our position vis-a-vis the city? We've got a door at the bottom of the building, leading out toward the north. Any idea what we'll see when we go through it?"

"Probably just ice."

"Okay. We'll let you know how it turns out."

"I'm listening to every word, Hutch. We've redirected a couple of the satellites, so we won't lose you when we're over the horizon."

"All right." Not that it would do the landing party any good if it got into serious trouble.

They'd brought the pieces of chain and the ax sharpener down to the lower levels to bag and tag. Kellie was writing the description of where the pieces had been found and was about to seal the wrapper on the tripod when Chiang asked to see it.

He studied it for a moment, held the bottom of the one complete leg against the floor, looked up the staircase to the top of the tower. "You know," he said, "we might be in an observatory."

"How do you mean?" asked Toni.

"I'd bet my foot the roof used to open."

Kellie looked from the tripod to Chiang, puzzled. "You mean you think this thing supported a telescope?"

"It's possible," he said.

Toni grinned at Kellie. "And you said it was an axe sharpener."

Kellie laughed and her eyes sparkled. "I could still be right. They might have opened the roof to man the battlements."

Hutch looked at it. "It seems too small," she said. "The eyepiece would be down at your hips."

Chiang aimed a thumb at the ceiling'. "Don't forget who lived here."

They trooped back up to the top level. There was a break down the middle of the ceiling. A separation. They dug around in the dirt and vegetable debris that covered the floor and found a small metal plate and an object that might have been a sidebar.

"You might be right," said Hutch, trying to imagine a tiny astronomer with a tiny telescope peering through an open roof. "It would mean," she said, "they had some knowledge of optics."

VI

Show me a man of unflinching rectitude and I'll show you a man who hasn't been offered his price. And it's a good thing for the progress of the species. Throughout our long and sorry history it has been men who supposed themselves to be exemplars of integrity who have done all the damage. Every crusade, whether for decent literary standards or to cover women's bodies or to free the holy land, has been launched, endorsed, and enthusiastically perpetrated by men of character.

— Gregory MacAllister, "Advice for Politicians," Down from the Mountain

"Mr. MacAllister." Captain Nicholson rested his elbows on the arras of his chair and pressed his fingertips together. "I'd like very much to oblige you. You know that"

"Of course, Captain."

"But I simply cannot do it. There are safety considerations. And in any case it would be a violation of company policy.". He showed MacAllister his palms, signifying his helplessness in the matter.

"I understand," said MacAllister. "But it is a pity. After all, how often does an event like this occur?"

The captain's gold-flecked brown eyes reflected a degree of uncertainty. He obviously did not want to offend the influential editor. But if MacAllister pressed his request, Nicholson would be pushed into a no-win situation.

MacAllister didn't Want that.

They were in the captain's reception room, sipping Bordeaux munching finger sandwiches. A private brunch. The bulkheads were appointed with brass and leather, a few leather-bound books occupied shelves on either side of the room, and electric candles supplemented a pair of lamps. A schematic of the Evening Star occupied an entire bulkhead, and the Starswirl logo of TransGalactic Lines looked down from above a virtual fireplace.

They sat in padded chairs, angled toward each other. "I completely understand your reluctance," MacAllister said in a matter-of-fact I'd-feel-exactly-the-same-way manner. "And I can see you're not one to be easily intimidated."

Nicholson modestly signaled his agreement with the proposition. There was much about the captain that was cautious. Conservative. MacAllister guessed that he had a reliable exec and a good AI tucked away somewhere to take over and run things in the event a non-routine decision had to be made. It seemed likely that Nicholson had gained his position by influence, had possibly married into it, or was the son of someone important.

"No," the captain said, "it's quite so, Mr. MacAllister. We do have an obligation to abide by the rules. I know you of all people would understand that."

MacAllister kept a straight face. Me of all people? "Of course, Captain. I couldn't agree with you more." He used a tone designed to ease the sudden tension. "It is unfortunate, though, to let an opportunity of this nature slide."

"What opportunity is that?" asked Nicholson.

"Well…" He shook his head, sipped his wine, and waved the subject off. "It's of no consequence. Although my guess is that it would be quite a coup."

" What would be quite a coup, Mr. MqcAllister?"

"Deepsix is about to pass into legend, Erik. May I call you Erik?" MacAllister's tone warmed.

"Yes. Of course." Nicholson softened, pleased to go on first name terms with his celebrated guest. "Of course, Gregory."

"After next week, Maleiva HI will be gone forever. People will be talking about this cruise, and wondering about that world's ruins, for decades, and possibly centuries, to come. And"-he looked wistfully at a spot over Nicholson's left shoulder-"pieces of those ruins are.lying around down on the ground, waiting to be picked up." He drained the glass and set it on a side table. "A few of those pieces, on display here on the Star, would be an invaluable asset."

"In what way?"

"They would generate a great deal of publicity. Relics from a lost

civilization. Exhibited on the ship that recovered them. What a testament to the Evening Star and its captain. And to TransGalactic. I'd expect you could anticipate a great deal of gratitude from your employers."

Nicholson made a sound halfway between a snort and a laugh. "Not likely," he said. "Baxter and the rest of those people are too wrapped up in themselves to appreciate that kind of acquisition."

"Maybe."

"Still…" The captain grew thoughtful. "It would be nice."

"It would be very easy to do." MacAllister saw that he had judged his man correctly. Nicholson was not greedy for money. A suggestion that he pirate some artifacts for himself would have gone nowhere. But the notion that upper management might see their way to appreciate him a bit more. Ah, yes. That was working nicely.

The captain fingered his glass. "I wouldn't want you to misunderstand me, Gregory. I abide strictly by the policies and procedures laid down for the safe operation of this vessel."

"As any competent commanding officer would." MacAllister refilled both glasses. "Erik, I'm sure you have certain prerogatives, conditions which in your judgment allow you to interpret procedures in a manner that would benefit TransGalactic's passengers, and the corporation itself."

"Yes," he admitted, "that's certainly true."

MacAllister gazed admiringly at the ship's schematic and let his companion consider the situation.

"You really think," said Nicholson, "that stuff is just lying around on the ground?"

"Oh, I've no doubt. Just pick it up and cart it off. That's all it would take. And I ask you, when that world is gone, gone forever beyond any power to recall, what do you suppose, say, an idol from a Maleivan chapel would be worth?"

"Oh, yes. I'd think so. You're quite right on that score."

MacAllister could see him wrestling with his fear of getting in trouble. "This would seem to be your opportunity, Erik."

"You don't think the archeological team that's down there now would object?"

"I can't imagine why they would. As I understand it, they've only got one lander. How much can you haul away in one lander?" He tried

to look thoughtful. "There's an excellent place down on B deck, near the pool, that would serve nicety as a museum."

"The hyper wing." It was an area currentfy given over to displaying the ship's various propulsion systems, especially the FTL drive. "Yes," he said. "It is tempting."

"If you wanted to do it," said MacAllister, "I'd be willing to go along. Cover the story. Give it some credential, so to speak."

"You mean you'd write one of your commentaries?"

"I'd do that, if you like."

"We could put the artifacts-"

"In the museum."

"Stage a ceremony. Would you be willing to participate? Possibly say a few words?"

"I'd be honored, Erik."

Nicholson nodded sagely. To himself, more than to MacAllister. "Let me think about it, Gregory. If there's a way to manage it, we'll go ahead."

VI

Marcel kept the speaker on so he could follow what was happening on the surface. That gave him access to all conversations that took place on the allcom. The transmissions were relayed out of the lander either directly to Wendy or to one of the commsats.

He was uncomfortable. Living worlds were unpredictable places, and this one especially, as it drew closer to Morgan. But they should be relatively safe for the present. Beekman was certain that gravitational effects from the giant planet would not be felt until late in the process because the collision would be direct, like two vehicles hitting each other head-on. No gradual spiraling in here.

He'd been listening while Hutch and her people prowled through the tower, watching the images being transmitted back by the mi-croscan Hutch wore on her vest. The place wasn't much to look at, just bare walls and floors covered with snow and dust.

They'd cut a hole in the tower wall at ground level to preclude having to climb through the window. Hutch had posted Chiang by the newly made door to watch for signs of potential predators. She then stationed Toni at the window in the astronomer's perch, with the same responsibility.

Meantime she, Kellie, and Nightingale were trying to cut through

the door on the bottom level. They weren't talking much at the moment, but he could hear the hiss of the laser working on stone.

Beekman came in, looked at him, frowned, and sat down. "Marcel," he said, "are you all right?"

"Sure. Why?"

"You don't look happy."

Kellie's startled voice came over the speaker: "Look out with that thing, Randy."

Marcel folded his arms across his chest in a defensive posture. "Somebody's going to get killed down there," he said. "If I had my way, we'd just write the damned thing off and let it go."

Beekman had always maintained an exceedingly low opinion of the competence of Academy management. Marcel expected him to make an observation in that direction. Instead, he remarked that Marcel was probably correct, that the ground team was unlikely to find anything useful in so short a time, and that it was indeed dangerous.

"Okay." Hutch's voice. "That should do it. Give it a minute and we'll see if we can break it loose."

"You know," Beekman said, "you might remind her that they should be more careful."

"She knows who she's working with." He folded his hands behind his head. "I'd rather not become a nuisance."

"What if something happens?"

"We'll let management worry about it."

Kellie's voice: "Okay, throw some more snow on it."

"I'd feel better," said Beekman, "if we had a bona fide archeologist down there."

Marcel didn't agree. "We're probably safer with Kellie and Hutch. They might not get all the details right, but I'd rather have them in charge if trouble starts."

"Still won't open,"said Nightingale.

"Let me try."

"How big's the door?" asked Beekman.

"A little more than a meter high. Everything's on a small scale."

"I don't think we cut all the way through."

Beekman leaned down and fingered the send key.

"What are you going to tell them?" asked Marcel.

"To be careful."

"I'm not sure they'll be receptive to gratuitous advice. They've already threatened to cut me off."

Another laser ignited.

"Stay with it." Nightingale's voice. "Here. Get it here."

It went on for several more minutes. At one point Hutch cautioned someone to relax. Take it easy. We'll get through. Then Marcel heard the sound of scraping stone and some grunts. And finally cries of satisfaction.

When things got quiet again he switched over to his private channel with Hutch. "What have you got?" he asked.

"Used to be a passageway," she told him. "It's just a lot of ice and dirt now. I'm not even sure where the walls are."

Beekman got coffee for them and began to describe how preparations for the collision were going. Much of the detail was boring, but Beekman inevitably became so enthusiastic when he started talking about the Event, that Marcel pretended more interest in the details of the observations than he really felt. In fact, he didn't understand fine points like gravity wave fluctuations, and didn't much care how the planetary magnetic fields were affected. But he nodded at the right times and tried to look surprised when Beekman seemed to be springing some new piece of breakthrough data on him.

Then Hutch's voice interrupted the flow. "Marcel, are you still there?"

"I'm here. What have you got?"

"I think we're into the Astronomer's private quarters. They're in pretty good shape. Looks like a suite of rooms. With cabinets-" She stopped a moment to caution one of the others to use care.

"Cabinets? What's in them?"

"They've been cleaned out. But they're in decent condition. And they've got symbols carved into them."

"Good," said Marcel. "That's important, right?"

"Yes," she said. "That's important."

As he had with Beekman, he tried to sound enthusiastic. "Anything else there?"

"A couch. You believe that? For a little guy. You wouldn't be able to use it, but a ten-year-old could."

It was less than dazzling news. "Anything more?"

"A table. Pretty badly smashed, though. And another door. In back."

He heard Kellie's voice: "Hutch, look at this."

"Can we have more light?"

"I'll be damned,"said Nightingale.

Beekman frowned with impatience. But while they waited to hear what was happening, the AI broke in. "Marcel? I'm sorry to interrupt, but we have an anomaly."

"What is it, Bill?"

"Strange object adrift."

"On-screen, please."

Marcel couldn't make it out. It looked like a long pin. Very long. It extended from one side of the screen to the other. And apparently beyond.

"Bill, what is this thing? What are its dimensions?"

"/ am unable to determine its function. It's three thousand kilometers long. Roughly."

"Three thousand klicks," said Beekman. "That can't be right."

"Actually, three thousand two hundred seventy-seven, Gunther."

Marcel made a face and pushed back in his chair. "That's one odd-looking puppy, Gunny." It was long enough to reach from the tip of Maine down through Miami and well out into the Atlantic.

"Its diameter is seven and a fraction meters."

"Well," the planetologist said, "seven meters across and three thousand kilometers long." He looked at Marcel and shook his head. "That's not possible."

"Are you sure, Bill?" Marcel asked. "We don't think those kinds of dimensions can happen."

"I'll recheck the results of the scan."

"Please do."

"Bring it up to full mag," said Marcel. "Let's see a piece of it up close."

Bill complied. It consisted, not of a single very long barrel, but of a series of parallel shafts. They could see between the shafts, see the night sky beyond.

"The dimensions are correct as reported," said Bill.

Marcel frowned. "So what is it, Gunther? What's it do?"

"Don't know."

"Bill, is it a ship of some sort?"

"I do not see how it could be, Marcel. But this is not a type object with which I have any experience."

"Is this typical of the entire construct?"

"This is typical," said Bill. "The shafts are solid. They are connected at regular intervals by braces. A few cables are adrift at one end, and an asteroid is attached to the other."

An asteroid. "Bill, is it doing anything? The construct?"

"There is no sign of activity."

"You reading any energy output? Any evidence of internal power?"

"Negative."

Beekman was staring at the image. "I just can't figure it, Marcel. Object that long. It shouldn't hold together. Stresses would have to break it up."

"Wouldn't that depend on what it was made from?"

"Sure. But something like this would have to be pretty strong stuff. Diamond, maybe. I don't know. It's not my field."

"Range is sixty-two thousand kilometers, increasing. It appears to be in orbit around Maleiva III."

"What do you think?" asked Marcel. "Want to chase it down?"

"Hell, yes. Let's go take a look."

Marcel gave instructions to Bill, and let Hutch know what they were doing. "It sounds," she told him, "as if there's more to Deepsix than the Academy thinks."

"A lot more, apparently. You sure that place down there looks preindustrial?"

"It's all stone, mortar, and planks. Right out of the Middle Ages."

"Okay," he said. "By the way, it sounded as if Kellie found something a couple of minutes ago. But we got distracted."

Hutch nodded. "I don't think what we have is quite as interesting as your pole. But it looks like an armored vest. It was in one of the cabinet drawers." She turned toward it so he could see it. Like everything else, it was in miniature. It would have been secured from behind, and was designed apparently to protect as low as the groin. It was severely corroded.

Toni Hamner hated to admit to herself that she was bored, but it was true. She'd expected the expedition to be exciting. But she should have known it wouldn't work out that way: She'd been around the archeologists at Pinnacle and knew how deadly dull excavations could be. This, she'd thought, would be different. This time she would be with the first people in the door. She'd be there when the discoveries got made. But so far it had been just a lot of digging and dredging out of debris. Now, standing guard in the entrance to the tower, looking out across that flat dreary plain, she yearned for it to be over.

A flight of birds passed overhead. They were brown, with long beaks, flying in formation. For a few seconds they filled the sky, and then they were gone, headed southwest.

She let her mind drift back to the brief shipboard romance she'd been enjoying with Tom Scolari. She hadn't thought highly of Scolari in the beginning, but she'd begun to change her mind and was actually getting quite caught up with him when they'd come here and she'd watched him turn his back on Hutch. That seemed to her to be mean-spirited. Or cowardly. She couldn't decide which.

She was anxious to get home. To see old friends and restart her life. To see a few live shows. Go to an expensive restaurant again. (How long had it been?)

Below, the digging went on.

Hutch was taking a break when Marcel called to tell her how difficult it was to explain the presence of the construct. Could she keep an eye open for anything that indicated the inhabitants were more advanced than we were giving them credit for? She would, but she knew they'd find nothing high-tech near the tower.

They'd opened a passageway behind the Astronomer's apartment, and were now engaged in widening it. The work went slowly. Hutch had brought containers and digging implements so that they weren't entirely dependent on the lasers, which were dangerous in the close confines of the corridor. They had to remove the rock, dirt, and ice, which entailed a lot of crawling around.

It was only possible for one person at a time to dig in the passageway. A second carried away the debris, dragging it back through the Astronomer's apartment. A third picked it up there, hauled it through the connecting corridor and into the bottom of the tower, where he, or she, sorted through it looking for anything of value. They found a few shards, a knife, a broken shaft with a blade insert, and a couple of pieces of stone with engraved symbols. In time, as the bottom chamber began to fill up with detritus, they started carrying it up to the next level.

Eventually, they brought in a collapsible worktable and set it up

in the ground-level room. A plan of the site was hastily put together, and the locations of the artifacts were recorded thereon. The artifacts themselves were brought to the table to be tagged and bagged.

The cabinet they'd found in the Astronomer's apartment was made of wood. It had inlays and metal hinges, a door pull and some fasteners. It also contained several scrolls, too far gone to risk trying to unroll. They put them in separate bags, and sealed them.

"I can't see that it matters much," said Nightingale. "Nobody'll ever be able to read any of that."

Hutch set the bags carefully off to one side. "You'd be surprised what they can do," she said.

At midafternoon, Chiang, Hutch, and Toni went back down into the tunnel. Kellie was posted topside, and Nightingale stood guard at the tower entrance. He'd been there only a few minutes when a thing came out of a patch of trees several hundred meters to the south. It was on two legs, and it had feline grace and a feline appearance. Nightingale, who'd been standing out in the sunlight, scrambled inside. The cat stood for perhaps a minute looking toward the tower. Toward him. He wasn't sure whether it had seen him. But when it started walking casually in his direction, he alerted everyone. Within minutes, they were all in the doorway.

It was moving across the plain as if it had nothing whatever to fear. "King of the hill," whispered Chiang, setting his cutter up a couple of notches.

The creature was considerably taller than a human male and maybe twice the mass. It was a model of muscles and grace.

"What do we do, boss?" asked Chiang.

Right, thought Hutch. Remind me I'm in charge.

It continued striding toward them, throwing a quick and unconcerned glance at the lander.

Effective laser range was about five meters. They'd be able to smell its breath. "Randy," she said, "you know anything about this critter?"

"Nothing whatever." Nightingale was standing well away from the entrance. "I'll tell you this, though. It's a cat. And cats are pretty much the same wherever you find them."

"Which means what?" asked Chiang.

"Anything smaller than they are, they eat."

Marcel broke in: "Shoot it, Hutch. As soon as it gets close."

She didn't have the option of firing a warning shot, because the cutter didn't produce a bang, or anything akin to it. Not that this thing looked as if it would be scared off by a loud noise.

She was suddenly getting advice from everyone: "Be careful." "Look out." "Don't let it get too close."

She picked up some profanity from Nightingale.

There came a moment when it paused perceptibly, when its muscles tightened, when its weight shifted slightly. It had seen her.

"Hutch." Marcel again. "What's happening?"

No point hiding. "Stay out of sight," she told the others. And she stepped out in full view of the creature.

The lips curled back, revealing more teeth. It came forward again. Hutch raised the weapon and leveled it.

"Shoot, for God's sake!" said Nightingale.

Hutch told him to be quiet. The cat's eyes brushed hers. She broke the connection, looked off to one side.

She wanted to see a sign that it was in fact hostile. She wished it would drop down on all fours and charge. Or simply pick up its pace. Or raise its claws.

It did none of these things. It just kept coming. And Hutch suspected it had no experience with weapons. It saw nothing she could do to harm it.

She turned the cutter on the stone side of the building, activated the beam, scorched the rock, and brought the weapon level again.

The creature stopped.

Chiang stepped out beside her.

It stood for several moments, uncertain.

Hutch took a step forward,

It began to back away.

"It's no dummy," said Chiang.

It angled off behind the lander, and it kept the vehicle between itself and the tower while it retreated back into the patch of woods from which it had come.

It was a short day, of course, less than ten hours from dawn to dusk. Nobody was hungry when the sun went down, and, other than Nightingale, they wanted to stay with the job. Hutch brought them out of the tower anyhow.

It had grown dark when they logged in their most recent finds.

These consisted mostly of vases and utensils and a few tiny hunting knives. There was also an armchair and a pack that seemed to be full of fabric.

They took the pack out to the lander cabin and secured everything else in the cargo bay. Then they called it a day and climbed inside.

Hutch opened the bag and took out a small faded blue cloak. It was ribbed, with a ring and chain at the top to fasten the collar. In its own time, it might have been a deep purple. Now it was too washed-out to be sure. The cloth was brittle, and a small piece of it broke off in her hands. She passed the garment to Kellie, who bagged it.

Next was a shirt.

And a robe.

Both were cut down the sides, presumably to accommodate limbs, but what those limbs might have looked like, or even how many there might have been, was impossible to know.

They found leggings.

And a pair of boots.

The boots were disproportionately wide. "Duckfeet," said Kellie.

Many of the garments sported decorations, sunbursts and diamond-shapes, representations apparently of flowers and trees, and various arcane symbols.

They were delighted. Even Nightingale seemed to loosen up and find occasional reason to smile. They inventoried and packed everything, including the bag itself.

"Not a bad day's work," said Toni, with a satisfied smirk.

Hutch agreed. First day down, they'd done pretty well.

The lander had a washroom about the size of a closet. It wasn't convenient, but it would be adequate to their needs.

One by one, they retreated into its cozy confines to wash up and change clothes. There was a fair amount of grumbling during the process, especially from Chiang and Kellie, neither of whom could move easily inside it. Both eventually gave up and got dressed in the rear of the cabin.

Hutch broke out the reddimeals. They had a choice among pork, chicken, fish cakes, hamburger steak, sauerbraten. The meals came with salads and snacks.

She produced two candles, lit them, and killed the lights. Then she set out five glasses and a bottle of Avignon Blue. She uncorked it and filled the glasses. "To us," she said.

They drank the second round to the owner of the bag who'd been thoughtful enough to leave it behind for them.

When they'd finished and were sitting quietly in the candlelight, Hutch congratulated them for what they'd accomplished. "It'll be a short night," she said. "Dawn comes early here. But we can sleep a bit late if we need to.

"Tomorrow, I want to change the emphasis of the search. The Academy will like what we've gotten so far. But time's limited. What we really need is to find something that'll shed some light on who these people were. On their history."

"How do we do that?" asked Toni.

"Look for engravings. Something with pictures on it. Writing. Symbols. Pictographs.

"We probably won't find much in the way of documents on paper, or paperlike materials. We have the scrolls that somebody might be able to do something with, but what we really want is stuff that's clearly legible. Check pottery for symbols or pictures. Anything like that, we-" A queasy sensation blossomed in her stomach, something she couldn't quite get hold of. The candles flickered.

"What was that?" asked Toni.

They looked at one another.

Tremor.

She switched to Marcel's private channel. "I think," she told him, "we just experienced a minor quake."

"Everybody okay?" he asked.

"Yeah. It wasn't much. But it's not a good sign."

"We have sensors on the ground. I'll check them, see what they say."

"You were right," Marcel told her a few minutes later. "It was a 2.1."

"How strong is that?"

"Barely perceptible."

"Scares birds," she said.

"Yeah. I suppose."

"I thought we weren't supposed to feel anything until the last day or so."

"I don't think I ever said that, Hutch. But I did warn you that the tower area is not stable. You're sitting right on top of a fissure. The experts up here are telling me that it's not a good place to be with Morgan coming."

"Morgan's still pretty far."

"Not far enough. It's massive. Think Jupiter."

"All right. We'll be careful."

"Maybe you should leave. Get out of Dodge."

"If it gets serious, we'll do that."

"I think it is serious. How about going to one of the other sites?"

"Where do you suggest?"

"Any of the cities."

"Which one's accessible?"

He paused. "Well, what do you mean by accessible?"

"That we don't have to cut through ten or twenty meters of ice to get to it."

"I don't know anywhere you can walk in the front door. But even if you have to do some digging, they'll be safer."

"But probably not after the couple of days we'll need to get into one of them." Everyone else in the cabin had become intensely interested. "We won't take any chances, Marcel. Okay? If things start to go downhill, we'll clear out."

When she signed off, Chiang leaned toward her. "I was at the University of Tokyo for a few years," he said. "Lamps used to swing all the time. It really doesn't have to amount to something." He wore a cheerful short-sleeved blue team jersey stenciled Miami Hurricanes. "We'll be okay," he said.

They talked the problem over. How important was the tower and its contents? Hutch knew that a professional archeologist would have told them it was priceless. But she confessed there was really no way to know.

In the end they compromised. They'd spend one more day there. Then find someplace safer to work.

A wind kicked up. The sky was full of stars and the snowscape sparkled.

Chiang found it difficult to sleep, knowing Kellie was so close. Just the seat in front of him. But he hadn't realized she was awake until he heard her moving. He leaned forward and touched her elbow. "You okay?" he asked.

She angled her seat so she could see him. Her eyes were dark and lovely. Her hair fell down around her collar, and he ached to take it, take her, in his arms. "The quake's not good," she said, looking toward the tower. "That thing could come down on our heads."

"Sorry you came?"

"Wouldn't have missed it." Her eyes came back to him. "On the other hand…" She took a deep breath and he tried not to stare at her breasts. And whatever she was going to say was left unfinished.

VII

Women were intended by their Maker to be cheerleaders. One has only to examine their anatomy and their disposition to recognize that melancholy fact. So long as they, and we, keep this rockbound truth firmly in mind, the sexes will perform their joint functions with admirable proficiency.

— Gregory MacAllister, "Night Thoughts," Notes from Babylon

Wendy was still two hours away from the object, but they were close enough to have good visuals, which were displayed in various aspects across a bank of screens in project control. The area was crowded with Beekman's people, clustered in front of the monitors and hunched over consoles.

The object had turned out to be an assembly of fifteen individual shafts, connected by bands set at regular intervals of about eighty kilometers. Eight shafts were on the perimeter, six in an inner ring, and one in the center. They were of identical dimensions, each with a diameter of about three-quarters of a meter, each long enough to stretch from New York to Seattle. There was considerable space between them, so Marcel could see through the assembly, could detect stars on the far side.

A rocky asteroid was attached to one end, webbed in by a net. The overall effect, Marcel thought, was of a lollipop with a stick that projected into the next county.

The end opposite the asteroid just stopped. A few lines trailed out of it, like dangling cables. Marcel noticed that the fifteen cylinders were cut off cleanly, suggesting the object had not broken away from some larger structure, but rather had been released.

"Impossible thing," said Beekman, who was delighted with the find. "Far too much mass for so narrow a body."

"Is it really that big a deal?" asked Marcel. "I mean, it's in space. It doesn't weigh anything."

"Doesn't matter. It still has mass. A lot of it along the length of the assembly."

Marcel was studying the configuration: The asteroid was up, the lower end of the assembly was pointed directly at Deepsix.

Beekman followed his eyes. "At least its position is about what we'd expect."

"Stable orbit?"

"Oh, yes. It could have been there for thousands of years. Except-"

"What?"

He delivered a puzzled grunt. "It just shouldn't hold together. I'll be interested in seeing what the thing's made of."

John Drummond, a young mathematician from Oxford, looked up from a screen."Impossibilium," he said.

Marcel, fascinated, watched the image. It was so long they couldn't put the entire thing on a single screen without shrinking the assembly to invisibility. One of the technicians put it up across a bank of five monitors, the lollipop head on the far left, and the long thin line of the supporting pole stretching all the way over to the far right-hand screen. "So it's not a ship of any kind, right?" he asked.

"Oh, no," said Beekman. "It's certainly not a ship." He shook his head emphatically. "No way it could be a ship."

"So what is it? A dock?" asked Marcel. "Maybe a refueling station?" They homed in on one of the braces. It appeared to be a simple block of metal, two meters thick, supporting all fifteen shafts in their positions. "Where do you think it came from?"

Beekman shook his head. "Deepsix. Where else could it have come from?"

"But there's no indication they ever had technology remotely like this."

"We really haven't seen anything yet, Marcel. The technology may be under the ice. Kellie's tower might be very old. Thousands of years. We didn't look very advanced a few centuries ago either."

Marcel couldn't bring himself to believe that all evidence of a high-tech civilization could just disappear.

Beekman sighed. "The evidence is right outside, Marcel." He tried to rub away a headache. "We don't have any answers yet. Let's just be patient." He looked at the screens and then glanced at Drummond. An exchange of some sort took place between them.

"It's probably a counterweight," Drummond said. He was about average size and generally uncoordinated, a thin young man with prematurely receding hair. He seemed to have had trouble adjusting to low gravity. But he'd come to Wendy with a reputation for genius.

"Counterweight?" said Marcel. "Counterweight for what?"

"A skyhook." Beekman glanced at Drummond, who nodded agreement. "There's not much else it could have been."

"You mean an elevator from the ground to L.E.O.?"

"Not Earth orbit, obviously. But yes, I'd say that's exactly what it was."

Marcel saw several smiles. "I was under the impression there was no point putting up a skyhook. I mean, we've got spike technology. We can float vehicles into orbit. Why go to all the trouble-" He stopped. "Oh."

"Sure," said Beekman. "Whoever built this thing doesn't have the spike. They've got some other stuff, though, that we don't. We could never make one of these. Not one that would hold together."

"Okay," said Marcel. "What you're telling me, if I understand this correctly, is that this is the part of the skyhook that sticks out into space and balances the section that reaches to the ground, right?"

"Yes."

"That brings up a question."

"Yes, it does," said Beekman. "Where's the rest of the skyhook?" He shrugged. "Remove the counterweight, and everything else falls down."

"Wouldn't we have seen it if that had happened?"

"I'd think so."

"Maybe they cut it loose near the bottom of the elevator. If that happened-"

"Most of it would get yanked out into space and drift off."

"So there could be another piece of this thing out here somewhere."

"Could be. Yes."

"But what we're saying is that it was put up and then taken down?"

"Or fell down."

They retired into the project director's office, and Beekman waved him to a chair. A large globe of Deepsix stood in one corner.

"It's crazy," said Marcel. "You can't hide a skyhook. Up or down."

"Maybe the pieces that collapsed are under the glaciers," Beekman said. "We really can't see much of the surface." He zeroed in on the equator and began to turn the globe. "Although it would have to be along here somewhere. Along the equator where we can see the ground."

They called up pictures of Maleiva HI and began looking. For the most part, the equator crossed open ocean. It touched a few islands in the Coraggio east of Transitoria, rounded the globe without any land in sight, passed through Northern Tempus, leaped the Misty Sea, and returned to Transitoria a couple hundred kilometers south of Burbage Point. The tower.

"Here," said Beekman, indicating the archipelago, "or here." The Transitorian west coast.

"Why?" asked Marcel.

"Big mountains in both places. You want the highest base you can get. So you put it on top of a mountain."

"But a structure like that would be big."

"Oh, yes."

"So where is it?" Marcel looked at both sites, the archipelago, where several enormous mountains stood atop islands that appeared to be volcanic. And the coastal range, which featured a chain of giants with cloud-covered peaks.

"I don't know." Beekman held out his hands.

"Tell me," said Marcel. "If you had a skyhook, and something happened to it, so it collapsed, which way would it fall?"

The project director smiled. "Down."

"No. I'm serious. Would it fall toward the west?"

"There'd be a tendency in that direction. But the kind of structure we're talking about, thousands of kilometers of elevator shaft and God knows what else. Mostly it would just come down." Someone was knocking. Beekman kept talking while he opened the door and invited Drummond inside. "If it were here, in Transitoria, the base could be hidden on one of these peaks under the clouds. But that still doesn't explain where the wreckage got to. It should be scattered across the landscape."

Marcel looked at Drummond. "Maybe not," Drummond said.

"Suppose you wanted to take it down. With minimum damage to the terrain below. What do you do?"

"I have no idea, John," Beekman said. "But I'd think we would want to separate the shaft at a point where the longest possible section would get hauled up by the counterweight. What's left-"

"Falls west-"

"— into the ocean." Beekman drummed his fingers on the table-top. "It's possible. If you've got a hell of a good engineer. But why would someone deliberately take it down? I mean, that thing's got to be an architectural nightmare to put up in the first place."

"Maybe they developed the spike and didn't need it anymore. Maybe it was becoming a hazard. I'd think one of those things would need a lot of maintenance."

"Well." Beekman shrugged. "There are a number of mountains in that range. We'll have an orbiter in the area in a bit. Why don't we run some scans and see what we can see."

MEMO FOR THE CAPTAIN

11726 1427 hours From Bill

The cruise ship Evening Star transited from hyperspace four minutes ago. It has set course for Maleiva III and will arrive in orbit in approximately two hours.

People boarding cruise liners usually did so via standard GTOs, Ground-to-Orbit vehicles that employed the spike for lift and standard chemical thrusters for velocity. The Star's onboard lander was a luxury vehicle, seldom used, maintained primarily to accommodate VIPs who had commercial or political reasons for shunning the more public modes of transportation.

It resembled a large penguin. It had a black-and-white hull with retractable white wings. The nose was blunt, almost boxy, with Evening Star emblazoned in black script below the TransGalactic Starswirl. The interior was leather and brass. It had a small autobar and a pullout worktable so that riders could shuffle papers or relax as they wished.

After making arrangements to send the shuttle down, Nicholson had become concerned that some of his other passengers would learn about the flight and demand places on board. He had consequently impressed on MacAllister that he was to say nothing to anyone. The news that he wished to take another journalist along had been unsettling, but Nicholson had been caught by then, committed, and wanted to do nothing to upset his illustrious guest.

This was not the first time the old editor had discovered the advantage of his reputation for volcanic outbursts against those who, for whatever reason, had incurred his wrath. Consequently he and Casey remained, aside from the pilot, the only persons aboard.

The pilot's name was Cole Wetheral. He was a taciturn man who would have made a successful funeral director. He had morose eyes and a long nose and long pale fingers that fluttered across the controls as if they were an organ keyboard. He gave preflight instructions and information in a stentorian tone: "Please be seated." "You will wish to check the status board above your seat before attempting to move around the cabin." "We want you to enjoy your excursion; please feel free to ask if there is anything you need." He informed them also that it would be early morning local time when they arrived.

Casey looked dazzled, and MacAllister wondered whether it was a condition brought on by the chance to visit a world a few days before it was to end, or by his own presence. He waited until she was inside, then climbed in and sat down beside her.

"Have you ever been down on another world before, Mr. MacAllister?" she asked.

He hadn't. Had never seen a point to it. He perceived himself as the end product of three billion years of evolution, specifically designed for the Earth, and that was where he was inclined to stay. "I expect," he told her, "that this will be the only visit I ever make to alien soil."

She had, as it turned out. She'd been to Pinnacle and Quraqua, and to Quraqua's airless moon, with its enigmatic city on the plain. Doing features, she explained.

The pilot closed the hatches. Interior lights came on. He spent about a minute hunched over his control board, then reached up and threw a couple of switches on an overhead panel. "We are depressur-izing the bay," he said. "We'll be ready to depart in just a couple of minutes."

The vehicle rose slightly.

"I appreciate your doing this," Casey told him.

He smiled benevolently. MacAllister liked doing things for people. And there was nothing quite so gratifying as the appreciation of a young person to whom he was lending the luster of his name. "To be honest, Casey," he said, "I'm glad you asked. Without your initiative, I'd have spent most of the next week in The Navigator."

The lander's motors whined and began to pulse steadily.

She smiled. MacAllister had made a career of attacking women in print, as he had attacked college professors, preachers, farmers, left-wing editorial writers, and assorted other do-gooders and champions of the downtrodden. Women, he'd argued, were possessed of an impossible anatomy, top-heavy and off-balance. They could not walk without jiggling and rolling, and consequently it was quite impossible for men of sense to take even the brightest of them seriously.

Many women perceived him as that most dangerous kind of character: an articulate and persuasive demagogue. He knew that, but accepted it as the price he had to pay for saying the things that everyone else knew to be true, but which they denied, even to themselves. To a degree, his literary reputation protected him from the rage that surely would have fallen on the head of a lesser man. It demonstrated to him the intellectual bankruptcy of both sexes. Here, after all, was this sweet young thing, beaming and smiling at him, hoping to improve her career through his auspices, and quite willing to overlook a substantial series of ill-tempered remarks on his side, should he choose to make them, simply because they would provide excellent copy. "There is a perfectly good reason, my dear, why the downtrodden are trodden down. If they deserved better, they would have better."

The bay doors opened.

"We'll lose all sense of gravity after we launch," said the pilot.

Harnesses swung down and locked them in. The interior lights blinked and went out. Then they sank back into their seats and began to move through the night. MacAllister twisted around and looked back at the great bulk of the Evening Star. Lights blazed fore and aft. An antenna mounted just beyond the launch pod rotated slowly.

The power and majesty of the great liner was somehow lost when it was in dock. He'd not been all that impressed when he'd boarded her back at the Wheel. But out here the Star was in her element, afloat among strange constellations beneath a sun that wasn't quite the right color, above a world whose icy continents bore unfamiliar shapes. This view alone, he decided, was worth the side trip.

"Did I tell you," said Casey, "I'm checked out to pilot these things?" She looked pleased with herself.

That fact caught MacAllister's respect. Deep space seemed to be her journalistic specialty. Acquiring a pilot's skills told him she was serious. "Excellent," he said. He turned away from the view, glanced at her, then looked out again at the shimmering atmosphere below. "So how did you manage that?"

"My father owns a yacht."

"Ah." He recognized the family name. "Your father's Desmond Hayes."

"Yes." She clamped her teeth together as if she'd been caught in a faux pas. And he understood: rich man's daughter trying to make it on her own.

Desmond Hayes was the founder of Lifelong Enterprises, which had funded numerous biotech advances, and was one of the major forces behind recent life-extending breakthroughs. He was notoriously wealthy, had a taste for power, and talked often of running for political office. He was seldom seen without a beautiful young woman on his arm. A ridiculous figure, on the whole.

"Well," MacAllister said, "it's always a good idea to have a backup pilot."

They were over clumps of cumulus now, bright in the starlight. MacAllister heard and felt the beginnings of atmospheric resistance. He brought up the autobar menu. They were well stocked. "How about a drink, Casey?"

"That sounds like a good idea," she said. "A mint driver would be nice, if they have one."

He punched it in, handed it over to her, and made a hot rum for himself. "Wetheral," he said, "let's take a look at the countryside before we set down."

It proved to be a singularly uninviting landscape, mostly just snow and ice. The narrow equatorial belt provided dense forest along its southern edge, open country to the northeast, and low rolling hills and occasional patches of trees near the tower.

At dawn, they cruised over a shoreline dominated by enormous peaks. "This is the northern coast," Wetheral explained. Several strips of beach presented themselves. In all, it was a magnificent seascape.

They continued their exploration while the sun rose higher, until finally MacAllister informed Wetheral they'd seen enough. "Let's go talk to the people at the tower," he said.

The pilot brought them back toward the south, and thirty minutes later they descended toward Burbage Point. A few trees rose out of the snow.

"Dismal place," she said.

But MacAllister liked it. There was something majestic in the desolation.

Despite the short night, they were up early and back in the tower immediately after sunrise. Hutch, Nightingale, and Kellie returned to the tunnel to recommence digging, while Chiang took over guard duty at the entrance and Toni went up to the roof.

This second sunrise on the new world was bright and enticing. The snow glittered in the hard cold light. The trees from which the cat had appeared glowed green and purple, and a sprinkling of white clouds drifted through the sky.

They'd been working only ten minutes when Kellie found a few half-legible symbols on one of the walls.

She recorded them with the microscan, and they decided to try to salvage the images themselves. But when they used the lasers to remove the segment of wall, it crumbled. "There's a technique for this," Hutch grumbled, "but I don't know what it is."

Marcel broke in on the private channel. "Hutch?"

"I'm here. What've you got?"

"We think it's a skyhook."

"You're kidding."

"You think I could make this up?"

"Hold on. I'm going to put you on the allcom, and I want you to tell everybody." She switched him over.

He repeated the news, and Nightingale announced himself stunned.

"What does Gunther think?" asked Kellie.

"It's Gunther's conclusion. Hell, what do I know about this stuff? But I'll give him this: I can't imagine what else it could be."

"That means," said Hutch, "this place isn't representative at all. We've wandered into a remote site that didn't keep up with the rest of the world."

"Looks like it. But there's no evidence of technological civilization anywhere on the surface."

"They had an ice age," said Hutch. "It got covered."

"We don't think even an ice age would completely erase all signs of an advanced culture. There'd be towers. Real towers, not that debacle you have. Maybe they'd get knocked over, but we'd still be able to see they'd been there. There'd be dams, harbor construction, all sorts of things. Concrete doesn't go away."

"What's going to happen to it?" asked Kellie. "The skyhook?"

"In about a week it'll go down with Deepsix."

"So where does that leave us?" asked Hutch. "Are we wasting our time here?"

She heard Marcel sigh. "I don't know anything about archeology," he said. "We've forwarded everything we have to the Academy, and to the archeologists at Nok. They're considerably closer, and maybe we'll get some suggestions back from them."

"There's something else here," said Kellie. She'd uncovered a metal bar.

"Hold on, Marcel." Hutch moved into position to give Wendy a good look.

Kellie tried to brush the dirt away. "Careful," Hutch said. "It looks sharp."

Nightingale dug a dart out of the frozen clay. Feather stalks remained at its base.

The bar was attached to a crosspiece. And the crosspiece became a rack. The rack was stocked with tubes.

They were narrow and about two-thirds of a meter long. Hutch picked one up and examined it by torchlight. It was hollow, made of light wood. Brittle now, of course. One end was narrowed and had a fitting that might have been a mouthpiece.

"You thinking what I am?" asked Kellie.

"Yep. It's a blowgun."

They found a second dart.

And a couple of javelins.

"Stone heads," Hutch said.

And small. A half meter long.

They also found some shields. These were made of iron and had been covered with animal skins, which fell apart when they touched them.

"Blowguns and skyhooks," said Marcel. "An interesting world."

"About the skyhook-" said Nightingale.

"Yes?"

"If they actually had one at one time, part of it would still be here somewhere, right? I mean, that would have to be a big structure. And it has to be on the equator, so it's not under the ice somewhere."

"We're way ahead of you, Randy. We think the base might have been in a mountain chain along the coast a few hundred kilometers southwest of where you are. We're waiting for satellites to get into position to do a scan."

"The west coast," she said.

"Right. Some of the peaks in that area seem to have permanent clouds over them. If we find something, you'll want to take a run over there yourself. We might be looking at the ultimate dig site."

They carried the blowguns, the javelins, and several darts up to ground level. Outside, the wind had blown up again, and snow had begun to fall. They had no bags of sufficient size for the rack, so they cut the plastic in strips and wrapped it as best they could. But when they tried to move it to the lander, the wind caught the plastic and almost ripped it out of their hands. "Bendo and Klopp," said Nightingale, referring to a currently popular comedy team that specialized in pratfalls.

Hutch nodded. "I guess. Let's leave it here until things calm down."

They took a break. Kellie and Nightingale went back to the lander for a few minutes, and Hutch hoisted herself onto the table to rest. Spending all day bent over in tunnels, endlessly scraping, sweeping, and digging, was not her game.

Toni broke in on the allcom: "Hutch, we've got company."

"Company?" She signaled to Chiang, who was standing in the doorway, and drew her cutter. It was, she assumed, the cat.

"Lander coming in," said Toni.

Hutch opened her channel to Marcel. "Who else is out here?"

"A cruise ship," he said. "Just arrived this morning."

"Well, it looks as if they're sending down tourists."

"What?"

"You got it. They must be crazy."

"Don't know anything about it. I'll contact their captain."

She was getting another signal. "I'll get back to you, Marcel." She punched in the new caller. "Go ahead."

"Ground party, this is the pilot of the Evening Star lander. We would like to set down in the area."

"Not a good idea," said Hutch. "It's dangerous here. There are wild animals."

There was no response for almost half a minute. Then: "We accept responsibility for everyone who is on board."

"What's going on?" she asked. "Why are you here?"

"I'm carrying two journalists who would like to visit the tower."

"I don't believe this," she said. "The tower is dangerous, too. It could fall down at any time."

There was a new voice, a baritone with perfect diction: "We've been warned. It's on record. So you need not concern yourself further."

"May I ask who's speaking?"

"Gregory MacAllister," he said. "I'm a passenger on the Evening Star." He implied a merely at the beginning of the sentence, which in turn suggested modesty by someone who was in fact a great deal more than merely a passenger.

Hutch wondered if this would turn out to be the Gregory MacAllister. "I don't think you understand," she said. "We are formally designated an archeological site. You're in violation of the law if you land."

"What section of the code would that be, ma'am?"

Damned if she knew. There was such a law. But she had no idea where to find it.

"Then I think we'll have to continue as is."

She switched to another channel. "Bill, tie me in to the Evening Star. Get me a command channel if you have one."

Bill replied with an electronic murmur and then told her none was available. "There's only one main link,"he said.

"Put me through."

She listened to a series of clicks and a chime. Then: "The Evening Star welcomes you to first-class accommodations on voyages throughout the known universe." The voice was female. "We feature luxurious cabins, a wide range of international cuisines, leading entertainers, three casinos, and special accommodations for parties. How may we serve you?"

"My name's Hutchins," she said. "I'm with the landing party at the dig. I'd like to speak with someone in command, please."

"I'm fully authorized to respond to all requests and complaints. Ms. Hutchins. I'd be pleased to help you."

"I want to talk to the captain."

"Perhaps if you explained your purpose in making this request-"

"Your captain has put some of his passengers in danger. Would you please put me through to him?"

There was a pause, then barely audible voices. Finally: "This is the duty officer. Who are you again?" A human being this time. A male.

"I'm Priscilla Hutchins. The archeological project director on Deepsix. We have a team on the ground. You people have sent down some tourists. And I wanted you to know that there are hazards."

"We have tourists on the surface?"

"Yes, you do."

"I see." A pause. "What kind of hazards?"

"They could be eaten."

Still another delay. Then: "Do you have some sort of authority I should be aware of?"

"Look. Your passengers are approaching a protected archeological site. Moreover, it's an earthquake zone, and somebody could get killed. Please recall them. Or send them somewhere else."

"Just a minute, please."

He clicked off the circuit.

The lander pilot came back: "Ms. Hutchins, we are going to set down near the tower. Since it seems to be snowing, and I assume visibility isn't any better on the ground, please clear your people away for the moment."

"They're directly overhead," said Kellie.

Hutch called everyone into the tower. "Stay inside until they're on the ground," she said. Then she switched back to the lander. "Are you still there, pilot?"

"I'm still here."

"Our people are out of the way. You're clear to come in. If you must."

"Thank you."

Marcel came back on: "Hutch."

"Yeah, what'd they tell you?"

"You know who's on board?"

"Gregory MacAllister."

"Do you know who he is?"

Now she did. This was Gregory the Great. Self-appointed champion of common sense who'd made a fortune attacking the pompous and the arrogant, or, depending on whom you listened to, simply those less gifted than he. Years before she'd been in a graduate seminar with a historian whose chief claim to fame was that he'd once been publicly chastised by MacAllister. He'd even put an account of the assault up on the screen and stood beside it grinning as if he'd touched greatness. "Yes," she said. "The only person on the planet who could bring church and science together. They both hope he dies."

"That's him. And I hope he's not listening."

"What am I supposed to do with him?"

"Hutch, management would not want you to offend him. My guess is that it'll be your job if you do."

"How about if I just feed him to the big cat?"

"Pardon?"

"Let it go."

"I think it would be a good idea to treat him well. Let him look at whatever he wants to. It won't hurt anything. And don't let him fall on his head."

The snow had grown heavier and become so thick MacAllister didn't see anything until moments before they touched down. He got a glimpse of the other lander, and of the tower beyond, and then they were on the ground, so softly he barely felt the impact. Wetheral had the personality of a pinecone, but there was no question he was a competent pilot.

The man himself turned around in his seat and studied them momentarily with those sad eyes. "How long," he asked, "did you folks plan on being here?"

"Not long," said MacAllister. "An hour or so."

The snow was already piling up on the windscreen.

"Okay. I have a few things to take care of. Make sure you activate your e-suit before you go out, and we want you to keep it on the entire time you're here. You can breathe the local air if necessary, but the mix isn't quite right.

"The captain also directed me to ask you both to be careful. There've been wild animal sightings."

"We know that," said MacAllister.

"Good. There's a great deal of paperwork involved if we lose either of you." He said it without a trace of irony.

"Thank you," said Casey.

They went through the airlock and climbed down out of the spacecraft into the storm. "To do the interview correctly," MacAllister said, "we're going to want to wait until it subsides." Ordinarily, heavy weather provided great atmosphere for interviews. But in this case the tower was the star of the show, and people needed to be able to see it. "Wetheral, how long before this blizzard lets up?"

The pilot appeared in the hatch. "I don't know, sir. We don't have a weather report."

"Seems as if it might be a good idea to get one."

"Won't be one for this area," he said seriously.'He looked around, shook his head, and came down the ladder.

The archeologists' lander was dead ahead. It was smaller than the Star's vehicle, and sleeker. More businesslike.

A woman materialized out of the driving snow. She wore a blue-and-white jumpsuit and he knew from the way she walked it was Hutchins. She was trim, built like a boy, and came up almost to his shoulders. Her black hair was cut short, and she looked unfriendly. But he shrugged it away in his usual forgiving manner, recognizing anger as a natural trait exhibited by females who didn't get their way.

"You're the mission commander, I take it?" he asked, extending his hand.

She shook it perfunctorily. "I'm Hutchins," she said.

He introduced Casey and Wetheral.

"Why don't we talk inside?" Hutchins turned on her heel and marched off.

Delightful.

They clumped through the snow. MacAllister studied the tower while he tried to get used to the e-suit. He should have been cold, but wasn't. His feet, clad in leisure shoes, sank into the drifts. But they stayed warm.

The tower loomed up through the storm. At home, it would have been no more than a pile of rock. Here, amidst all this desolation, it was magnificent. But the Philistines had punched a hole in the wall. "Pity you chose to do that," he told Hutchins.

"It made egress considerably easier."

"I quite understand." He did, of course. And yet this tower had obviously stood a long time. It should have been possible to show it a bit more respect. "I don't suppose we have any idea how old it is?"

"Not yet," she said. "We don't have an onboard facility for dating. It'll take a while."

The storm caused him to speak more loudly than necessary. He was having a hard time getting used to the radio. Hutchins asked him to lower his voice. He did and focused on trying to keep it down. "And there's nothing else?" he asked. "No other ruins?"

"There are some scattered around the planet. And there's a city buried down there." She pointed at the ground.

"Really?" He tried to imagine it, a town with houses and parks and probably a jail under the ice. "Incredible," he said.

"Watch your head." She led him through the entrance they had made. He ducked and followed her into a low-roofed chamber with a table on which were piled some cups and darts. He had to stay bent over.

"Tight fit," he said. The small-gauge stairways caught his eye. "The inhabitants were, what, — elves?"

"Apparently about that size."

"What have you learned about them so far?" He wandered over to the table and reached for one of the cups, but she asked him, if he would, to avoid handling them. "Forgive me," he said. "So what can you tell me about them?"

"We know they favored blowguns."

He smiled back at her. "Primitives."

Hutchins's people drifted in to meet him. They struck him as by and large a forgettable lot. The other two women were reasonably attractive. There was one young male with a trace of Asian ancestry. And he recognized the second male but couldn't immediately place him. He was an elderly, bookish-looking individual, with a weak chin and a fussy mustache. And he was in fact staring at MacAllister with some irritation.

Hutchins did the introductions. And the mystery went away. "Randall Nightingale," she said.

Ah. Nightingale. The man who fainted. The man carried relatively uninjured out of battle by a woman. MacAllister frowned and pretended to study his features. "Do I know you from somewhere?" he asked with benign dignity.

"Yes," said Nightingale. "Indeed you do."

"You're…"

"I was the director of the original project, Mr. MacAllister. Twenty years or so ago."

"So you were." MacAllister was not without compassion, and he let Nightingale see that he felt a degree of sympathy. "I am sorry how that turned out. It must have been hard on you."

Hutchins must have sensed the gathering storm. She moved in close.

MacAllister turned to his companion. "Casey, you know Randall Nightingale. A legendary figure."

Nightingale took an aggressive step forward, but Hutchins put an arm around his shoulder. Little woman, he thought. And a little man. But Nightingale wisely allowed himself to be restrained. "I haven't forgotten you, MacAllister," he said.

MacAllister smiled politely. "There, sir, as you can see, you had the advantage of me."

Hutchins drew him away and turned him over to the Asian. Something passed between them, and he coaxed Nightingale out of the chamber and down the child's staircase.

"What was that about?" asked Casey.

"Man didn't like to read about himself." MacAllister turned back to Hutchins. "I'm sorry about that," he said. "I didn't expect to find him here."

"It's okay. Let's just try to keep it peaceful."

"Madam," he said, "you need to tell that to your own people. But I'll certainly try to stay out of everyone's way. Now, can I persuade you to show us around the site a bit?"

"All right," she said. "I guess it can't do any harm. But there's really not much to see."

"How long have you been on the ground, if you don't mind my asking?"

"This is our second day."

"Do we know anything at all about the natives, the creatures, who built it? Other than the blowguns?"

Hutchins told him what they had learned: The natives were of course preindustrial, fought organized wars, and had a form of writing. She offered to take him to the top of the tower. "Tell me what's up there, and I'll decide," he said.

She described the chamber and the levered ceiling which apparently had opened up. And she added their idea that the natives might have owned a telescope.

"Optics?" he said. "That doesn't seem to fit with blowguns."

"That's our feeling. I hope we'll get some answers during the course of the day."

MacAllister saw no point making the climb. Instead they descended into the lower chambers, and Hutchins showed him a fireplace and some chair fragments.

Near the bottom of the tower they looked into a tunnel. "This is where we're working now," she said.

The tunnel was too small to accommodate him. Even had it not been, he would have stayed out of it. "So what's back there?" he asked.

"It's where we found the blowguns. It looks as if there was an armory. But what we're really interested in is finding writing samples and maybe some engraved pictures. Or possibly sculpture. Something that'll tell us what they looked like. We'd like to answer your question, Mr. MacAllister."

"Of course." MacAllister looked around at the blank walls. "We must have some idea of their appearance. For example, surely the staircase is designed for a bipedal creature?"

"Surely," she said. "We're pretty sure they had four limbs. Walked upright. That's about the extent of what we know."

"When do you expect to be able to determine the age of this place?"

"After we get some of the pieces back to a lab. Until then everything is guesswork."

Wetheral was still standing by the chair fragments, trying to catch Hutchins's attention. "Yes?" she said.

"May I ask whether you're finished with these?"

"Yes," she said. "We've already stowed a complete armchair in the lander."

"Good." He looked pleased. "Thank you." And while she watched, clearly surprised, he gathered the fragments, a beam, and a piece of material that might once have been drapery. And he carried everything up the staircase.

"The ship hopes to salvage a few pieces," MacAllister explained. His back was beginning to hurt from all the bending. "Anything that might interest the more historically minded passengers."

She showed no reaction. "I can't see that it'll do any harm." "Thank you," said MacAllister. "And if there's nothing we missed"-he turned to Casey-"this might be a good time to go outside and, if the weather will allow, do our interview."

VIII

The results of archeologcal enterprise at home are predictable within a set of parameters, because we know the general course of history. Its off-world cousin is a different breed of cat altogether. Anybody who's going to dig up furniture on Sinus II or Rigel XVII better leave his assumptions at the door.

— Gregory MacAllister, "Sites and Sounds," The Grand Tour

It was the first time in his adult life that Nightingale had seriously considered assaulting someone. That he had resisted the impulse, that he had not taken a swing at the smirking, self-satisfied son of a bitch, was a result not of Hutch's restraining hand or of any reluctance over attacking somebody considerably more than twice his size. It had been rather his sense of the impropriety of violence that had shut him down.

Nightingale had grown up with a code. One did not make a scene. One retained dignity under all circumstances. If an opponent was to be attacked, it was done with a smile and a cutting phrase. Unfortunately, he hadn't been able to come up with the cutting phrase.

Now, working in the tunnel with Toni and Chiang, he was embarrassed by his outburst. He had not gotten it right had not come dose to getting it right. But he had, by God, confronted MacAllister, and that at least had relieved part of the burden he'd been carrying all these years.

MacAllister had written an account of the original expedition, titled "Straight and Narrow," as the lead editorial for Premier. It had appeared shortly after Nightingale's return, when the investigation was still going on, and it had laid the blame for failure at his door, had charged him with mismanaging the landings, and had concluded by branding him as a helpless coward because he'd fainted after being wounded. The article in fact made light of his wounds. "Scratches," MacAllister had remonstrated, as though he'd been there.

It had branded him publicly and, in his view, had caused the examining board to render a verdict against him, and to shut down plans for future expeditions. We need to put Maleiva III behind us, one of the commissioner's reps had told him after the commissioner herself had cut off all contact. Didn't want to be seen with him.

"Straight and Narrow" had appeared again, six years ago, in a collection of MacAllister's memoirs. A fresh attack. And the man had pretended not to know him.

"You okay?" asked Chiang.

They were working to clear the chamber where they'd found the blowguns, the area they now called the armory. But he realized he had stopped in the middle of the effort and was staring off somewhere. "Yeah," he said. "I'm fine."

Toni and Chiang were both watching him. They'd asked on the way down what had caused his outburst, and he'd put them off. How could he possibly tell them? But it galled him that MacAllister, glib, irresponsible, that judge of all mankind, had been within reach, and that he had been impotent. What a pathetic creature he must have appeared.

John Drummond had made his reputation within a year of receiving his doctorate by devising the equations named for him, which had provided a major step forward in understanding galactic evolution. But he'd done nothing of note during the decade that had passed since that time. Now, at thirty-five, he was approaching the age at which he could be expected to begin tottering. Physicists and mathematicians traditionally make their mark early on. Genius is limited to the very young.

He'd adjusted to the realities, and had been prepared to spend the balance of his career on the periphery, criticizing the results of his betters. His reputation was secure, and even if he did nothing else notable, he still had the satisfaction of knowing that, during his early twenties, he'd outpaced damned near everybody else on the planet.

Despite that sense of his own contributions, he could not help feeling overawed in the presence of people like Beekman and al-Kabhar, who were known and respected everywhere they went. Drum-mond inevitably detected a note of condescension in his treatment by his peers. He suspected they perceived him as someone who, in the end, had to be regarded as a disappointment, who had not quite lived up to the promise of the early years.

He had consequently become somewhat defensive. His profession had passed him by, and he suspected that his selection to join the Deepsix mission had been a political choice. He had been simply too big a name to leave off the invitation list. It would have been better, he sometimes thought, to have been a mediocrity from the start, to have been perceived as a man of limited promise, than to have raised such hopes in others and in himself, and gone on to disappoint them all.

Like Chiang, he was also attracted to Kellie Collier, although he'd never made any sort of advance. He drank coffee with her when the opportunity permitted, spent what time with her that he could. But he feared rejection, and he detected in her manner that she would not take him seriously as a desirable male.

He was not entirely surprised when Beekman invited him into his office to ask whether he wanted to join the team that would inspect the artifact they'd found orbiting Maleiva HI. It was an offer most of his colleagues would have coveted, and his reputation may have left the project director with little choice. But Drummond wasn't anxious to embrace the honor, because it seemed to mean he would have to leave the ship. And the idea of going outside frankly scared him.

"That's very good of you, Gunther." He loved using the great man's first name.

"Think nothing of it. You deserve the honor."

"But the others-"

"— will understand. You've earned this assignment, John. Congratulations."

Drummond was thinking about the void.

"You do want to participate, don't you?"

"Yes. Of course I do. I just thought that the more senior members should have the privilege." His heart had begun to pound. He knew spacewalking was supposed to be simple. You just wore air tanks and a belt and magnetic shoes. And comfortable clothing. They emphasized comfortable clothing. He didn't like heights, but everything he'd read about work in the vacuum indicated that wasn't a problem either.

Before the offer had come, before he'd thought it out, he'd made the mistake of telling several of his colleagues how he'd like to cross to the assembly, to touch it and walk on it. He knew that if he refused the offer, no matter what reason he gave, it would get out.

"Do you know how to use a cutter?" Beekman asked.

"Of course." Punch the stud and don't point it at your foot.

"Okay. Good. We'll be leaving in two hours. Meet in front of the cargo bay airlock. On C Deck."

"Gunther," he said, "I've never worn an e-suit."

"Neither have I." Beekman laughed. "I suspect we'll be learning together." Then, abruptly, the conversation was over. The office door opened. Beekman had picked up a pen. "Oh, by the way," he said without looking up, "the captain says if you want to eat, you should do it now, and keep it light. Best not to have a fresh meal in your stomach when we go out."

Drummond closed his eyes and wondered whether he could get away with claiming to be ill.

Marcel regretted having allowed Kellie to travel down to the surface. Had she been available, she would have accompanied the inspection team over to the assembly, and he could have held himself in reserve for an emergency. Or for a less arduous afternoon.

He didn't like taking Beekman's people outside. None of them had ever before gone through an airlock in flight. There was in fact little that could go wrong. The Flickinger field was quite safe. But it still made him uncomfortable.

At Beekman's request, Marcel had brought Wendy to the Maleiva HI end of the assembly, the section most distant from the asteroid and closest to the planet. There, they could see quite clearly that it had been detached from a larger construct. The terminal ends of the shafts had latches and connectors.

He matched course, speed, and alignment so they maintained a constant relative position. That was crucial, not only because having the airlock within a couple of meters of the assembly was convenient, but because the sight of the two objects moving in relation to one another would almost certainly sicken his embryo spacewalkers. The only problem was that the two globes currently in the sky, Deepsix and the sun, would be in apparent motion. Enough to make you dizzy if you weren't used to it.

"Don't look at them," he advised his team. "You've got a bona fide alien artifact out there, unlike anything we've ever seen before. Concentrate on that."

Beekman had chosen two people, a man and a woman, to go out with him. Both were young, and both were celebrated members of his science team. The woman, Carla Stepan, had done some pioneering work in light propagation. Appropriate, Marcel thought. She was herself a luminous creature.

Drummond's reputation was known to all. But the man himself was something of a mystery. Quiet, reserved, a bit bashful. An odd choice, the captain thought.

He demonstrated how to use the e-suit. The Flickinger field had several advantages over the pressure suits of the previous century, principal among them being that it couldn't be punctured.

But someone could get so caught up in the drama of the moment that he accidentally released his tether. And the field itself wasn't entirely foolproof. It was possible with a little imagination to screw up the antiradiation shielding and fry. Or make adjustments to the oxygen-nitrogen mix and thereby render oneself incompetent or maybe dead. Consequently, Marcel insisted they were all to keep their fingers off the control unit once it had been set.

Marcel had suggested to Beekman that he, Beekman, not go. The planetologist had told him he worried too much.

Theoretically, his medical record was fine, or he wouldn't be on board. But he never really looked well. His pale complexion might have been emphasized by the black beard. But he seemed to get out of breath easily, he wheezed occasionally, and the slightest exertion brought color to his cheeks. Marcel had the authority to prevent his going, but this was Gunther's show, and the captain couldn't bring himself to deny the man an experience that promised to be the supreme moment of his professional career.

"Everybody ready?" Marcel asked. They were all standing by the airlock, Beekman and Carla obviously anxious to get started, John Drummond looking reluctant. He checked their breathers and activated their suits. Carla had some experience with cutters, so he'd assigned one to her, and he took one himself. They strapped on wristlamps. He handed out vests and waited while they put them on.

Each vest was equipped with a springlock so that a tether could be connected.

Marcel also strapped on a go-pack.

They did a radio check and went into the airlock. Marcel initiated the cycle. The inner hatch closed, and the lock began to depressurize. Beekman and Carla seemed fine. But Drummond began breathing more deeply than normal.

"Relax, John," Marcel told him on a private channel. "There's nothing to this."

"It might be the wrong time to bring this up," Drummond said, "but I have this thing about heights."

"Everybody has a thing about heights. Don't worry about it. I know this is hard to believe, but you won't notice it at all."

Carla saw what was happening and flashed an encouraging smile. She spoke to Drummond, but Marcel couldn't hear what she said. Drummond nodded and looked better. Not much, but a little.

The go lamps went on, and the outer hatch irised open. They looked across a couple of meters of empty space at the cluster of parallel shafts. They were lunar gray, gritty, occasionally pocked. As thick individually, thought Marcel, as an elephant's leg. From the perspective of the airlock, they might have been fifteen entirely separate pipes, water pipes perhaps, coming to an abrupt end a few meters to their right; but on the left they stretched into infinity. And somehow they were perfectly equidistant, apparently separated and maintained by an invisible force.

"Incredible," said Drummond, leaning forward slightly and looking both ways.

There were no markings, no decoration, no bolts or sheaths or ridges. Simply fifteen tubes, arranged symmetrically, eight on the outer perimeter, six midway, and the single central shaft.

Marcel attached a flex tether to a clip on the hull and motioned the project director forward. "All yours, Gunther," he said.

Beekman advanced to the hatch, never taking his eyes off the long gray shafts. He put his head out and drew in his breath. "My God," he said.

Marcel clipped the tether to his vest. "It'll pay out as you go, or retract as you need."

"How long is it?"

"Twenty meters."

"I meant, to the brace."

There were braces along the entire length of the assembly. The nearest was- "Almost fifty kilometers away."

Beekman shook his head. "If someone else had reported such a thing," he said, "I would have refused to believe it." He put his feet on the outer lip of the airlock. "I think I'm ready."

"Okay. Be careful. When I tell you, just push off. Don't try to jump, or I'll have to come after you." Marcel looked back at the others. "If anybody does contrive to drift away, I'll take care of the rescue. In the meantime, everyone else is to stay put. Okay?"

Okay.

"Go," he told Beekman.

Beekman hunched his shoulders. He was wearing a pair of white slacks and a green sweatshirt with the name of his university, Berlin, stenciled on it. He looked, Marcel thought, appropriately dashing. And quite happy. Ecstatic, in fact.

He leaned forward, gave himself a slight push, and cried out in sheer joy as he launched. They watched him drift awkwardly across the narrow space, one leg straight, one bent at the knee, rather like a runner caught in midstride.

Marcel stood in the hatch, letting the tether slide across his palm until he was sure Beekman wasn't traveling too fast. The project director reached out for the nearest shaft, collided with it, wrapped his arms around it, and shouted something in German. "Marcel," he continued, "I owe you a dinner."

"I want it in writing," Marcel said.

Beekman loosened his grip, found another shaft for his feet, settled down, and waved.

Carla moved up to take her turn.

Beekman and his team clambered around on the assembly while Marcel stood guard. Carla took pictures and Drummond collected sensor readings. Beekman was talking, describing what he was seeing, and taking various gauges and sensors out of his vest to answer questions for the people inside. Yes, it was magnetic. No, it did not seem to vibrate when low-frequency sound waves were applied.

Carla produced the cutter and conferred with Beekman. Marcel couldn't overhear the conversation, but they were obviously looking for the right place from which to remove a sample. The surface had

no features. The only distinguishing marks that they'd been able to see, either from the scanners or up close, were the encircling bands. And none of those was visible from here.

They made up their minds, and Carla steadied herself, took aim at one of the shafts, and brought the laser to bear.

"Careful," Marcel advised her. The field wouldn't protect her if she made a mistake.

"I will be," she said.

She switched on the cutter, the beam flashed, and the view fields in all four suits darkened.

She began to work. They were going to take off the last two meters of one of the outside shafts.

Drummond had put his instruments away and was simply holding on. He appeared to be examining the assembly very carefully, keeping his eyes away from the void. Marcel left the airlock, went over, and joined him. "How you doing?" he asked privately.

"I guess I'm a little wobbly."

"It's all right," he said. "It happens. You want to go back inside?"

"No." Drummond shook his head but kept his gaze on the assembly.

"You'll feel better in a bit. When you're ready to go back, I'll go with you."

He mumbled something. Marcel only caught"… damn fool."

"Maybe not. You might just be a little more sensible than the rest of us."

Drummond managed a smile, still looking at the metal. "Marcel," he said, "maybe I ought to go back over there before I become a problem."

"Whatever happens, John, you won't be a problem. Everything's under control."

"Okay."

Drummond did not want to make the jump. Even though there was no gravity, Marcel suspected his senses were relating to the proximity of the Wendy Jay, using that to determine what was up and down. He had maintained a position which, related to the ship, kept his head up. Now he was being asked to cross that terrible void again. People who claim there's no sense of altitude in space, Marcel thought, have never been there. He reached out to place an arm gently on his shoulder, but Drummond drew away.

"Thanks," Drummond said. "I can manage."

"It has plenty of juice," said Carla, admiring her laser. From Drum-mond's perspective, she was upside down. His eyes closed tight.

She had already sliced halfway through her target shaft. Beekman was hanging on the edge of it to make sure it didn't drift away when she'd completed the job.

Drummond's eyes opened, and he looked back at the airlock as if it were a half klick away. Its light spilled out into the vacuum.

"I thought there'd be more resistance," Carla said.

"You're okay," Marcel told Drummond. "Can I make a suggestion?"

Drummon's breathing was becoming ragged, but he didn't reply.

"Close your eyes, John. And let me take you over." Wendy hovered only two meters away. Bill was keeping the ship perfectly still in relation to the artifact. But Marcel was aware of Deepsix climbing slowly but steadily up the sky.

"Something wrong, John?" Beekman's voice.

"No," said Marcel. "We're fine."

"John?" Carla this time, sounding worried. "You okay?"

"Yes." His voice was tight and angry. He looked at Marcel. "Yeah. Please get me away from here."

Marcel put an arm gently around his waist. This time Drummond didn't pull away. "Tell me when you're ready," he said.

Drummond stiffened and closed his eyes. "Just give me a minute." But it was too late. Marcel, without waiting, anxious to end the suspense, pushed them forward, off the shaft. They floated toward the open hatch and the light.

"We'll be there in a second, John."

By then the others were watching. Carla's laser went out, and she asked whether she could help. Marcel saw that Beekman was shifting his posture, preparing to join them. "Stay put, Gunny," he said. "We're okay."

"What happened, Marcel?" he asked.

"A little motion sickness, I think. Nothing serious. Happens all the time."

Drummond struggled briefly and they bumped into the hull. But he got one hand on the hatch and pulled himself into the airlock. Marcel let him do it on his own. When John was safely on board he climbed in beside him. "Damned coward," Drummond said.

They were inside the ship's artificial gravity field. Marcel sat down on the bench. "You're being a little hard on yourself."

Drummond just stared back out of bleak eyes.

"Listen." Marcel sat back and relaxed. "There are very few people who would have done what you did. Most wouldn't have gone out there at all, feeling the way you must have." He looked at the assembly, and the stars beyond. "You want me to shut the hatch and we'll go inside?"

He shook his head. "No," he said. "Can't do that. They're still out there."

Beekman and Carla returned a few minutes later with their prize. They negotiated it carefully into the airlock, into the half-gee gravity field that was normal for ships in flight. (Maintaining full Earth normal would have consumed too much power.) The piece was as long as Marcel was high. They expected it to be quite heavy inside the ship.

Instead, a look of bewilderment formed on Carla's features. She signaled Beekman to let go and easily hefted the object herself. "Im-possibilium is the right word," she said. "It weighs next to nothing."

Beekman stared. "They're pretty good engineers, aren't they?"

"Yes," she said.

"Because of the weight?" Marcel asked.

Drummond was almost breathing normally again. He wanted to speak, and Beekman gave him the floor.

"The problem," he said, summoning each word as if it were Greek, "with this kind of construction…" He stopped to take another breath. "Problem is that you have too much mass distributed over such an extreme length."

He glanced at Beekman, who nodded.

"The strength of the structure at any given point isn't enough to support the strain put on it. Think of the, ah, Starlite Center in Chicago and imagine you had to build it from cardboard."

"It'd collapse," Marcel said.

"Exactly right," said Carla. "The kinds of building materials we have now, applied to this kind of structure"-she nodded toward the airlock door, toward the assembly-"equate to cardboard. If we tried to make one of these, its own mass would crumple it."

Beekman picked up the thread. "If you're going to erect something as big as the Starlite, you want two qualities in your building materials."

"Strength," said Marcel.

"And light weight," finished Carla. She glanced at the sample. "We know it's strong because the assembly holds together. And now we know at least part of the reason it holds together. It doesn't have much mass."

They closed up. Minutes later green lamps blinked, and the inner hatch opened. They shut off their suits and came out of the airlock.

"So what's next?" asked Marcel.

Beekman looked pleased. "We analyze it. Find out how they did it."

For August Canyon, Deepsix was aptly named. His flight to that unhappy world as pool representative for the various press services, to do a feature that was of only marginal interest to the general public, signaled beyond any doubt management's view of his future. Is there a labor strike in Siberia? Send Canyon. Did they find water on the far side of the Moon? Get Canyon up there to do the interviews.

"It isn't that bad," said Emma Constantine, his producer and the only other soul aboard the Edward J. Zwick other than the pilot.

"Why isn't it?" he demanded. He'd been simmering during the entire five weeks of the outbound flight, saying none of the things that were on his mind. But he was tired of being cooped up, tired of spending his time on virtual beaches while other people his age were doing solid investigative journalism, chasing down corruption in London, sex in Washington, stupidity in Paris.

"It'll be a good feature," she said. "Worlds collide. That's big stuff, if we handle it right."

"It would be," he said, "if we had somebody to interview." Canyon had all the credentials-graduate of Harvard, experience with Washington Online and later Sam Brewster. Brewster was an extraordinarily effective muckraker, and Canyon had been with him a year and a half, just long enough for Brewster to recognize he lacked a muck-raker's stomach while Canyon alienated every power center in the capital. After their less than amicable parting, he'd been.lucky to catch on with Toledo Express.

"We've got a whole boatload of scientists to talk to."

"Right. You ever try to get a physicist to say something people are remotely interested in hearing?"

"We've done it, on occasion."

"Sure we have. Cube theory. Gravity waves. Force vituperations. That's pretty hot stuff."

"I think that's force correlations"

He took a deep breath. "As if it mattered. What we need is a good politician. Somebody to take a stand against planetary wrecks."

"Look," she said. "Stop feeling sorry for yourself. We've got a database on these people."

"I know," he said. "Tasker's on Wendy, and he'll talk, but that's the problem. He talks forever."

"We can edit if we have to. Listen, Augie, we're here and we have to make the best of it. This isn't the assignment I'd have chosen either. But there's going to be a lot more interest in this than you think."

"Why would that be?"

"Because worlds don't crash into each other every day." She was frowning, maybe regretting not the assignment, but her partner. "Because there are ruins on Deepsix."

"But no sign of a civilization. Do you think anybody's going to care that a pile of stones goes down with everything else?"

"Augie, who built the pile?"

"I doubt that the people they're sending down there are going to have time to find out."

She smiled benignly. "That's exactly my point. Look, forget Wendy. This is a world that's been racked up. Ice age for three thousand years. No sign of cities. That means if anybody's left, it's savages. Savages are relentlessly dull. But vanished civilizations? That's news. The people we want to interview are on the ground, poking around the tower. Not in the starship. Figure out where to go with that side of the story, and we're in business."

He let his head drop back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. "You know, Emma," he said, "sometimes I really hate this job."

IX

Archeology is a career for the terminally weak-minded. An archeologst is a trash collector with a degree.

— Gregory MacAllister, "Career Night," Ports of Call

Wendy proceeded in a leisurely manner along the entire length of the assembly. They took pictures, although every section looked like every other section, counted the bands (thirty-nine altogether) that secured the shafts to each other, and arrived at last at the asteroid.

A rock rather than a chunk of iron, it was almost a perfect sphere. A metallic net was wrapped around it securing it to the assembly by means of a rectangular plate. The plate, several meters thick, had rounded edges and corners.

The extreme length of the assembly tended to diminish the apparent size of the asteroid, until one drew near. It was in fact more than a kilometer in diameter.

Marcel and Beekman watched from project control as they approached. Beekman looked disappointed, and Marcel, wondering how he could possibly be out of sorts at such a supreme moment, asked what was wrong.

"I'd hoped," he replied, "to find something that would give us an idea who put it here. What its purpose was. I thought maybe there'd be a control station at one end or the other. Something."

Marcel put a hand on his shoulder. "People leaving stuff like this around the neighborhood should include a manual."

"I'm serious."

"I know." Stupid remark.

They went outside again, just the two of them, and inspected the asteroid. They floated above the rockscape, using Marcel's go-pack to get around.

Much of the net was concealed by a layer of dust. The metal links appeared to be made of the same material as the shafts. They were only a couple of centimeters thick and were linked with crosspieces at lengths of about three-quarters of a meter.

They stopped to examine the connecting plate and were pleasantly surprised to discover a series of engraved symbols. All the characters were joined, in the manner of cursive writing. "Eventually," Beekman said, "I'd like to take this inside. Take it home with us."

It was big. Marcel measured it with his eye and concluded it wouldn't fit through the cargo airlock. "We might have to cut it in half," he said.

"Whatever's necessary-" They drifted above it and looked back the way they'd come, down the long straight line of the assembly toward the heart of Deepsix.

They took samples of everything, of the rock and the dust, of the net, of the plate. When they were finished they went back inside and had some coffee. It was after 2:00 A.M. ship time, November 27.

Beekman suggested the unknown architects had developed quantum technology, and the skyhook had simply become obsolete. Marcel was too tired to care. But just as he was getting ready to head for his quarters, Bill broke in: "Captain, we now have the satellite scans you requested of the coastal mountain range."

"Okay, Bill." Ordinarily he'd have asked to look. But not at this hour. "Anything interesting?"

"There is a structure of substantial dimensions on one of the peaks."

The door opened almost at the first touch of the laser. Beyond lay shelved walls and a vaulted ceiling. Hutch played her light over a bare wooden table. Shadowy figures looked back out of alcoves.

"Bingo,"said Toni.

Statues. There were six alcoves, and at one time there had been six figures. Five lay broken and scattered in the dust that covered the floor. One remained.

The survivor resembled a falcon. But it stood upright, in a vest and trousers that suggested pantaloons. A medallion of illegible design hung about its neck. It reminded Hutch of Horus. "You think that's what they looked like?" she asked.

"Maybe," said Nightingale. "It would fit. Little creatures, descended from birds."

Whatever might once have filled the shelves was gone.

She flashed pictures to Wendy. Hutch half expected to hear from Marcel, but it was early morning on the ship. In the interests of diplomacy, she also sent a picture to MacAllister, who was having brunch in the Star lander.

He took it rather calmly, she thought, but made it a point to thank her and ask that he be kept informed. The manner of it implied that he thought it trivial.

The room, she suspected, had been a study. Or perhaps a library.

Nightingale agreed. "I wish we could read their scrolls."

Indeed. What would a history not be worth?

The other figures had apparently all been representations of the falcon, in various poses. They gathered up the pieces, packed each of the six separately to the extent they were able, took them out to the lander, and stowed them in the cargo hold.

The snow had stopped and by late morning the last clouds cleared away. The environment was now suitable, MacAllister judged, for the interview.

Wetheral had loaded several pieces of the doll-like furniture, a couple of cabinets, a chair, and a table into the cargo section. Everything was badly decomposed, but that didn't really matter. TransGalactic could process the stuff easily enough and make them look as if they were antiques in exquisitely restored condition. The details wouldn't matter as long as some part of the original remained.

Wetheral had even made off with a javelin. It had an iron tip, and MacAllister wondered whether it had ever actually been used in combat. He tried to visualize hawks in trousers flying about trying to stab each other with these pea-stickers. The only thing more absurd than someone else's civilization, he thought, is someone else's religious views.

Casey had brought a couple of folding chairs along and had planned to sit out in the open with him while they talked, with the tower as a backdrop. Or possibly even sit inside the tower.

"The atmosphere's all wrong for any of that," he told her. "We don't want to be outside. Either in the building or in the snow."

"Why not?"

"It looks cold, Casey."

"What does the audience care?"

"If we look cold, your audience will not get caught up in the conversation."

"You're kidding."

"I'm quite serious."

"But they'll know we're inside e-suits."

"What do they know about e-suits? Only what they see in the sims. They'll see the snow; they'll see you and me sitting there in shirtsleeves. They won't see the e-suit. It doesn't look cozy."

"I want cozy?"

"Absolutely."

She sighed. "All right. So what do we do? Sit in the lander?"

"Correct. Roughing it, but not too rough."

She gave him a tolerant smile, and he knew what she was thinking. They were too far from the tower. In fact, the tower was partially hidden behind the other spacecraft. "I'll get Wetheral to move us closer."

"I've a better idea," said MacAllister. Two of the women, Hutchins and Toni What's-Her-Name, were carrying a table out to their spacecraft. He studied Hutchins and realized that her problem was that she had no sense of humor. She was certainly not the sort of woman one would want to have around on a long-term basis. Took herself far too seriously, and seemed utterly unaware that she was a lightweight.

The table was big, and they were struggling. He excused himself, got down out of the vehicle, walked over and magnanimously asked if he could help. Hutchins glanced suspiciously at him. "Yes," she said finally. "If you'd like."

It was a rectangular table, so old it was impossible to be sure what the original composition material might have been. It was large, considering the scale of the other furniture, and probably would have seated twelve of the natives. A decorative geometry that might have represented leaves and flowers was carved into its sides.

Casey joined the party and lent a hand.

The cargo section was so full there was a question whether it would fit, but after some rearranging they got it in.

"Thanks," Hutchins said. "That turned out to be heavier than it looked."

"Glad to help."

She looked at him and smiled. "Was there something you wanted to ask me?"

Not a complete dummy, he decided. "As a matter of fact, I could use your assistance. Casey and I are going to record an interview. I was wondering if you'd allow us the use of your lander."

"In what way?" She looked at him, looked at the cargo bay loaded with artifacts, and showed him she didn't much approve. "What did you have in mind?"

"Just sit in it and talk. It's warm and out of the snow, but we still get the atmosphere of the dig. And a perfect view of the tower."

"You can't close it up," she said.

He guessed that she meant they could not seal off the cabin and repressurize it. "We don't need to. The audience won't know the difference."

She shrugged. "You can have an hour. After that we'll need it back."

"That's good. Thank you very much."

She turned away. Ridiculous woman.

They climbed into the cabin, and Casey removed her link, tied a microscan into it, put it on a tray, and aimed it at her subject. She set up two more in strategic locations.

There were artifacts in the rear of the cabin, which would provide additional atmosphere. MacAllister placed himself so that a weapons rack was behind him, and the tower was visible through his window. Casey was moving things out of the way in order to get shots from different angles.

Something large and dark rose out of the trees to the west, flapped in a large uncertain circle, and descended again. Clumsy creature, whatever it was. Yes, he thought, let's have Armageddon for this cold world and all its living freight.

Hutch had turned away from MacAllister and was standing at the tower entrance talking to Nightingale when Chiang came on the circuit. "Hutch," he said, "we might have something else."

"What?" she asked. "What is it?"

"Looks like an inscription. It's in pieces, but it's writing of a sort. We've also broken through into an open corridor."

"Where are you?"

"Back of the library."

"I'm on my way."

She descended staircases and entered the tunnels, crossed the armory, and kept going until she saw lights. Toni and Chiang were examining a wall covered with symbols.

Toni looked up, waved, and moved off to one side to provide Hutch a clear view. The wall had partially collapsed, and several large pieces lay on the ground. But it was covered with lines of engraved characters, almost all quite legible.

"Lovely," said Hutch.

They were not pictographs, and there was a limited number of individual symbols, suggesting she was indeed looking at an alphabet. Furthermore, the text was divided into sections.

Paragraphs.

There was an ethereal quality about the script. It reminded her of Arabic, with its curves and flow. "You've got pictures?" she asked.

Toni patted her microscan. "Everything."

Several sections of the script, at the top, were more prominent than the text that followed. "They might be names," suggested Chiang.

"Maybe. It could be a commemorative of some sort. Heroes. Here's who they were, and there's what they did."

"You really think so?" asked Toni.

"Who knows?" said Hutch. "It could be anything."

The beam from Toni's torch fell on a shard, a piece of pottery. "We really need time to excavate," Hutch said. And to move out into the city, to find the kinds of tools these people used, to unearth their houses, dig up more icons. Maybe get the answers to such basic questions as whether they used beasts of burden, how long their life spans were, what kind of gods they worshiped. "Okay," she continued. "Let's get this stuff upstairs, then we'll come back and see what else we've got."

They cut the central section out of the wall. Chiang tried to move it, but it was too heavy to handle in the confined quarters. "Let it be for now," said Hutch. "We'll figure it out later."

He nodded, picked up a couple of the fragments, and headed back. Toni collected two more, leaving Hutch to try to gather together the smaller pieces.

Nightingale stood in the tower entry and tried to turn his mind to other things. He couldn't help glancing up every few minutes at the Wildside cabin, where MacAllister sat in his officious manner, gesturing and making pronouncements. Suddenly, the great man turned in his seat and looked directly at him. He got up, moved through the cabin, climbed down onto the ground, and started in his direction. Nightingale braced himself for a fight.

"Nightingale," he said as soon as he'd gotten close, "I wonder if I could ask a favor?"

Nightingale glared at him. "What do you want?"

"We're going to be using this whole area as a background. Could I persuade you to stay out of sight? It works better if there's a complete sense of desolation."

Casey snapped the recorder back on, smiled nervously at him, and resumed the interview: "In a week, Mr. MacAllister, Deepsix won't even exist anymore. It's cold and bleak, and that stone tower behind you is apparently the only building in this entire world. What brings you to this forlorn place?"

"Morbid curiosity, Casey."

"No, seriously."

"I'm never anything but serious. Why else would anybody come here? I'd be the last one to want to sound morose, but loss is the one constant we all have to deal with. It's the price of living. We lose parents, friends, relatives. We lose the place we grew up in, and we lose the whole circle of our acquaintances. We spend ungodly amounts of time wondering whatever happened to former teachers and lovers and scoutmasters.

"Here, we're losing a world. It's an event absolutely unique in human experience. An entire planet, which we now know has harbored intelligence of a sort and which still serves as a refuge for life, is going to end. Completely and finally. After these next few days, there will exist nothing of it other than what we can carry off."

She nodded, telling him what he already knew, that this was good stuff. "You had an opportunity," she said, "to tour the tower earlier today. What were your impressions? What about it did you find significant?"

MacAllister glanced meaningfully toward the structure. "We know that whoever built it left a telescope behind, as if to say to us, we also wanted the stars.

"But they're lost, Casey. They probably had their own versions of Homer and Moses, Jesus and Shakespeare, Newton and Quirt. We saw the blowguns, and we know they built walls around their cities, so we can assume they fought wars. They must have had their Alexandrian campaigns, their Napoleon and Nelson, their civil wars. Now, everything they ever cared about is to be lost forever. That's a disaster of quintessential proportions. And I think it's worth coming to see. Don't you?"

"I suppose you're right, Mr. MacAllister. Do you think anything like this could happen to us?"

He laughed. "I'd like to think so."

"Surely you're joking."

"I'd be pleased to believe that when the time comes for us to make our exit, we will do so as gracefully as the inhabitants of this world. I mean, the blowguns tell us all we need to know about them. They were undoubtedly every bit as perfidious, conniving, hypocritical, and ignorant as our own brothers and sisters. But it's all covered up. The disaster gives them dignity they did not otherwise earn. Everybody looks good at his funeral.

"We're not even sure what they looked like. Consequently, we'll remember them with a kind of halo shining over their ears. People will speak of the Maleivans in hushed voices, and with great respect. I predict that some fool in Congress or in the Council will want to erect a monument in their honor. When in fact the only thing we can be sure they achieved was that they made it to oblivion without getting caught in the act."

During the course of his life, Nightingale couldn't recall having ever hated anyone. Other than MacAllister. In the moment that the editor had asked Nightingale to step inside the tower, he had searched his mind for the correct riposte, the cutting remark that would slice this walking pomposity into his component parts.

But nothing had come to mind. You buffoon, he might have said, and MacAllister would have flicked him away. Windbag. Poseur.

The pilot of the Star lander walked past him with another pile of sticks. "Chair," he said.

"Okay."

"Hutch said I could have it."

"Okay."

In the end he had meekly complied with the request and stood away from the scan's line of sight. But he really couldn't do his job properly, stowed inside the tower, couldn't see everything he needed to, especially couldn't see the strip of trees from which the biped cat had emerged. So he came out every few minutes, in a small act of defiance, walked about for a bit, and then retired back inside.

He was following the conversations in the tunnels. Toni, hauling chunks of inscribed stone to the surface, announced that she'd found a coin. "What kind?" Nightingale asked, excited. "What's on it?"

He was standing outside watching the trees. Watching Wetheral.

"Just a minute," she said.

And while he waited, the ground moved.

It rolled beneath him. MacAllister and the woman in the lander stopped talking and turned to stare at him. Wetheral paused midway between the tower and his own spacecraft and stood with the chair held absurdly over his head.

The earth shrugged and threw Nightingale flat into the snow. He heard frightened cries on the allcom, watched the Wildside lander begin to lean over on one tread until the tread collapsed. The earth shook again, briefly. The ground and the sky seemed to be waiting. More was coming; he knew damned well more was coming.

He thought about retreating into the tower. But that would be stupid. Why put rocks over his head? Instead he moved out away from it, but had gone only a few steps when another shock hit. Big one this time. He went down again. A ripple ran across the landscape. The snow broke apart under Wetheral's feet. The pilot tried to run, absurdly still holding the chair. The ground ripped open and he fell in. Disappeared. His lander tilted, and it, too, slid into the hole.

All this was accomplished in an eerie silence. If Wetheral had protested, screamed, called for help, he'd been off-channel. Now a roar broke over Nightingale's ears, like an ocean crashing into a rocky headland, and the world continued to tremble. The earth shook and quieted. And shook again. An enormous stone block slammed into the snow a few meters away. He looked up, saw that it had broken off the roof, saw also that the tower had begun to lean to one side.

The hole into which Wetheral and his lander had fallen widened. Gaped. It was becoming a chasm.

MacAllister was sitting in the Wildside lander staring at him, or maybe at the tower, with his eyes wide. Now, thought Nightingale with a sense of grim satisfaction, let's see how it goes with you.

Marcel came on the link and was demanding to know what was happening. Chiang reported collapsing walls. A cloud of dust rolled out of the tower. Hutch was on the allcom telling everyone to get outside.

Kellie, who'd been on the upper level, climbed through a window, saw him, and dropped to the ground. It was a long fall but she seemed unhurt. "Did they come up yet?" she asked.

Hutch was still on the link, saying something. He needed a moment to make it out.

"Randy, you there?"

"I'm here," he said. "I'm with Kellie." Just then Chiang staggered out through the entrance.

"Over here," Kellie told him.

Nightingale caught a glimpse of their lander. It had taken off, was in the air, trying to get away from the quake. "MacAllister's stealing the lander," he said.

"Talk to me later. Where's Toni?"

"Don't know. Still inside."

"How about Chiang?"

"Chiang's here. He's with us."

"Toni?" said Hutch.

Nothing.

"Toni!"

Still no answer.

"Isn't she below with you?" Chiang asked her.

"She was headed topside."

Nightingale was knocked down again at the same moment that he heard a distant explosion.

Hutch was still calling Toni's name.

As she moved through the tunnel with her artifacts, Toni was acutely aware of the considerable weight of rock, dirt, and ice overhead. Given her choice, she'd have taken permanent guard duty, preferably at the top of the tower.

She was on her hands and knees, the slabs slung in a pack around her shoulders, thinking about Scolari. He was alone in Wildside with Embry. She had no reason to be jealous, but she felt a stab anyhow. It was hard to imagine that they had not been together these last couple of nights.

She was trying to decide how much responsibility Hutch bore for her loss when the quake came.

The floor shook. Dust rained down on her, the room sagged, and a crossbeam crashed down directly in front of her. The room continued to tremble, and she threw herself flat out and put her hands over her head. Her lamp went out. She tried crawling past the fallen beam but the room kept moving, tilting, and then a terrible grinding began above her. The overhead grated and rasped and screeched. Something cracked, loud and hard, like a tree broken in two. Or a backbone.

A weight fell on her, driving the air from her lungs, pinning her to the floor. A darkness, deeper and blacker than that in the chamber, rushed through her. She couldn't move, couldn't breathe, couldn't call anyone.

Somewhere, she heard a voice. Hutch's, she thought, but she couldn't make out what she was saying.

Her last thought was that all her plans, her new career, Scolari, her return home, the child she hoped one day to bear, none of it was going to happen.

She wasn't even going to get off this goddam world.

Hutch was crawling through the dark when Nightingale came on the circuit. "I think we've got some bad news out here," he said. "What?" she asked, bracing herself.

MacAllister watched with horror as first Wetheral and then the Star spacecraft disappeared into the chasm that had opened, that was still opening, like a vast pair of jaws. Wetheral had frozen, not knowing which way to run, had slipped and gone to his knees, and the crevice had come after him like a tiger after a deer while he futilely jabbed that pathetic pile of sticks at it as if to fend it off. He was still jabbing, falling backward, when it took him and, in quick succession, took the lander.

Their own vehicle was shaking itself to pieces. He looked at Casey, and her eyes were wide with fear.

The ground beside them broke open, and the lander began to sink. The hatch, which was not shut, swung wide, and MacAllister stared down into a chasm.

Got to get out. They would die if they stayed where they were. But the only exit was through the hatch, which hung out over the hole.

He searched for something he could use to knock out a window. Casey read his mind and shook her head. "They're not breakable," she cried.

A door in the rear of the cabin led through to the cargo locker, but he'd never fit. The angle kept getting more pronounced. They were sliding into the chasm. MacAllister leaned hard to his right, in the opposite direction, pushed against his chair arm, as if that might slow the process.

"My God, Casey." His voice squeaked. "Get us out of here."

"Me? Her face was pale. "What do you expect me to do?"

"You said you could fly these damned things."

"I said I had some experience with landers. This is a bus."

"Do it. Try it, for God's sake, or-"

She got up and climbed into the pilot's seat, taking care not to look toward the hatch.

"Use the autopilot," MacAllister urged. "Just telrit to take off."

"It doesn't know who I am," she said. "It has to be reset to respond to me."

"Then reset it."

They were sliding.

"That takes time." She blurted the words.

"Casey-"

"I know. Don't you think I know?" She was bent over the control board.

He was pushing hard, trying to get as far as he could from the airlock. "Do something!"

"I have to figure out how to disengage the autopilot."

"Maybe it's that thing over there." He pointed to a yellow switch.

"This is going to go a whole lot better if you don't talk too much just now. I'll…" She pressed a stud, apparently having found what she was looking for.

MacAllister heard a few electronic bleeps, then the soft rumble of power somewhere beneath the seat. The restraints locked him down, and he gripped the chair arms and closed his eyes.

The seat lifted, and the spacecraft seemed to begin righting itself. Locked behind squeezed-shut eyelids, he couldn't be sure what was happening and was afraid to look. He was regretting the stupidity that had brought him down to this despicable place. His life for a pile of rubble.

Gravity flowed away, and the lander began to rise. "Good, Casey," he said, speaking from his long experience that one should encourage people when they're doing what you desperately want them to do. As if she might otherwise crash the spacecraft.

He slowly opened his eyes. She was moving a yoke, pulling it back, slowly, cautiously, and he saw that she was every bit as terrified as he was. The ground was several meters below, dropping away. Thank God.

They rose over the crevice. It appeared still to be widening. Great mounds of earth and snow were crashing into it.

The vehicle dipped suddenly, and Casey fought for control.

"You're doing fine," MacAllister pleaded. "Beautiful."

"Please shut up," she snapped.

He wished she sounded more confident. He wished she would head for the north, where there was plenty of space, worlds of space, of quiet flat plain, and just set it down. It seemed easy enough. She'd already done the hard part. Yet she continued to wrestle with the yoke and the engine made odd noises and they spurted across the sky and then she slowed them down and a sudden wind hammered at them.

"Is something wrong?" he asked.

The vehicle lurched. Dropped. Soared. "The spike," she said through clenched teeth. "It's different from the system I trained on."

"Just take your time."

"Need to use the thrusters," she said.

"Can you do it?"

"If I can figure out how to aim them."

MacAllister caught a glimpse of Nightingale kneeling in the snow, watching. Lucky bastard, he thought. Luck of the draw. The crevice opens under us instead of under him. In the end, survival goes not to the fit, but to the fortunate. It explains a lot about the way Darwin really works.

At that moment the thrusters roared on. The seat came up and hit MacAllister in the rear. The ground blurred beneath him, and Casey yelped and began frantically doing things to the console. He decided that his Darwinian thought would be his last, and composed himself for the inevitable. Dead in a spacecraft accident on a distant world. But not in the canyon, at least. Not buried.

They raced over the ground toward a line of hills in the northwest, and it occurred to him that they would not be able to take him back for proper disposal. Because the madwoman at the controls was about to wreck the lander. And nobody was going to volunteer to come down from orbit to pick up the pieces.

The spacecraft was trying to turn over, and it didn't look as if Casey had any idea what she was doing. The roar of the thrusters filled the cabin and then suddenly the thunder was gone. She must have found the cutoff switch and she'd now be looking for whatever constituted the brakes.

The hills were coming up fast, and the only sounds were the wind whipping over the fuselage and the frantic pleas of his pilot.

"Come on, you son of a bitch."

She yanked back on the yoke. The slopes rolled beneath them. Beyond the land flattened. The spacecraft, having apparently spent all forward energy, and having somehow lost the levitating power of the spike, began to fall.

"Damn," said Casey.

MacAllister squeezed the arms of his chair, and they slammed into the ground. The impact jarred his neck, snapped his head back, twisted his spine. But the damned thing hadn't blown up. Casey slumped in her harness. He started to release his restraints, heard an explosion in back and smelled smoke.

He climbed out of his seat and noted that they'd never closed the hatch. Just as well. Save him the trouble of opening it.

The seats were crushed together, and he had to struggle to get to Casey. She was covered with blood, and her head lolled back. A massive bruise was forming on her jaw, and her eyes had rolled up into her head. Another blast rocked the lander. Flames began to lick up around the windows.

He released her from her harness and backed out through the airlock, half carrying, half dragging her. They were just clear when it erupted into a fireball.

Nightingale watched the thick pall of smoke rising from behind the cluster of hills to the northwest. He wasn't aware of the true significance of the last minute until he heard Kellie's voice on the circuit.

"Marcel," she said, "I think we just lost both landers."

X

Faith has its price. When misfortune strikes the true believer, he assumes he has done something to deserve punishment, but isn't quite certain what. The realist, recognizing that he lives in a Darwinian universe, is simply grateful to have made it to another sunset.

— Gregory MacAllister, Preface to James Clark: The Complete Works

Hours to breakup (est): 255

"Both landers?" Marcel was horrified. "When?"

"Just now."

"For God's sake, Kellie, how could that happen?"

"The Star's boat fell into a hole. Ours went down behind a hill and exploded. Randy and I are on our way over there now. But there's a lot of smoke."

"Who was in the lander?"

"MacAllister and the woman he came down with. Both passengers from the Star. They must have tried to get clear, but I don't think whoever was flying knew what they were doing."

"Anybody else hurt?"

"Their pilot's gone, too. I'm sure he's dead. Fell into the same hole as his lander."

Marcel stared openmouthed at Bill's image, which was watching from the overhead monitor. Nobody from either of the Academy ships had been hurt But it sounded as if it had been a clean sweep for the Evening Star. What the hell were those people doing down there in the first place?

"Okay," he said. "I'll let Captain Nicholson know. And I'll arrange to get another lander out here. Keep me informed."

"Will do, Marcel. We're on our way out now to the crash site." Marcel signed off and massaged his forehead. "Bill," he said, "who's close enough to get here in time?"

"I'll check," the AI said. "Should be somebody."

Huddled in the tunnel, Hutch had a more immediate problem. The roof had fallen in and blocked her exit. Nevertheless, the implication left her chilled. "Both of them? Well, that's sure good news." She played her lamp beam against the rock, rafters, and dirt that sealed the passageway. "I hate to add to your problems," she said, "but I could use a little help myself."

"Chiang should be there any minute."

One dead. Maybe three or four.

"Kellie," she said, "call Marcel. Tell him what happened. We're going to need another lander."

"I've already done that. He's working on it. Told me not to worry."

"Uh-oh. I always get nervous when people tell me that."

"Have no fear."

"Hutch." Chiang's voice. "How're you doing?"

"As well as could be expected. I'm not hurt."

"Did you want us to hang on until you get out?" asked Kellie.

"No. Leave Chiang. But do what you can for MacAllister and the woman. And Kellie…"

"Yes?"

"Try to salvage the lander. I don't need to tell you how helpful that would be." She switched back to Chiang. "Where are you?"

"I'm in the far passageway, near the armory."

"No sign of Toni?"

"Not yet."

She felt cold.

"I'll start digging," he said.

"Be careful. It probably wouldn't take much to bring more of this place down."

"Okay."

"I'll start from this end."

"It's going to take a while," he said.

"At your leisure, Chiang. I'm not going anywhere."

She heard his laser ignite. Hutch put her lamp down and got to work.

MacAllister had no idea what to do. He shut off Casey's suit and tried to revive her, but she didn't respond. Thirty meters away, the lander lay in the snow, scorched, crumpled, burning, and leaking black smoke.

He surveyed the place where they'd come down: flat barren hills, a few trees, some brush. He felt terribly alone. Where was that idiot woman who wanted to run everything? Now that he could use her, she was nowhere to be seen.

He contemplated the odds against a quake hitting just as he was doing the interview, and considered not for the first time whether the universe was indeed malicious.

They had crossed a — line of hills, so he could no longer see the tower. He sat helplessly, cradling Casey's body, feeling responsible, wondering how he could ever have been so stupid as to leave the safety of his stateroom on the Star.

He was immensely relieved to see two figures come out of a defile. One was the woman they called Kellie. The other was Nightingale. They paused and looked his way. He waved. They waved back and started toward him, trying to hurry through deep snow.

"Mr. MacAllister." Kellie's voice in his earphones. "Are you all right?"

"Casey's not breathing," he said.

They struggled up to his side and Kellie sank into the snow beside him. She felt for a heartbeat, then for a pulse.

"Anything?" MacAllister asked.

Kellie shook her head. "I don't think so." They worked on her for a while, taking turns.

"Looks as if we wrecked your lander," MacAllister said.

"What happened?" asked Nightingale. "Don't you know how to fly it?"

"I wasn't the pilot," he said. "Casey was. I don't have any experience with these things."

"What went wrong?"

"She wasn't used to it. It was too big. Or something." He looked down at her limp, broken form. "She was out here on a birthday gift. From her parents."

After a while they gave up. Kellie sighed and laid Casey's head gently in the snow and walked silently over to the wrecked spacecraft.

She circled it a couple of times, and they heard her banging on something on the far side.

"What do you think?" asked Nightingale nervously.

She reappeared from behind the tail. "It's scrap. We'll want to see what we can salvage."

MacAllister tried to read her eyes, to see whether she was worried. But her expression was masked. "We'd better inform whoever's in charge," he said.

"It's been done."

He was weary, exhausted, frightened. He'd brought two people with him, and both were dead.

MacAllister had trained himself over the years to avoid indulging in guilt. You have to beat your conscience into submission, he'd once written, because the conscience isn't really a part of you. It's programming introduced at an early age by a church or a government or a social group with its own agenda. Avoid sex. Respect authority. Accept responsibility for things that go wrong even when events are out of your control.

Well, earthquakes are goddam well outside my control.

Bill's bearded features reflected the general concern. "Yes, Marcel?" he asked. "What can I do?"

"Inform the Star, personal for the captain, that there's been an earthquake at the site. Ask him to call me."

7 will get right on it."

"Tell him also that his lander was wrecked. Ask him if he has another on board."

"Marcel, our data banks indicate the Star carries only a single lander."

"Ask him anyhow. Maybe there's been a mistake somewhere. Meantime, do a survey. I.need to know who's within six days' travel time. The closer the better. Anybody with a lander." Most vessels did not carry landers. There was usually no need, because ports were all equipped to provide transportation to and from orbit. Routinely, only research flights to frontier areas in which a landing was contemplated, or cruise ships, which occasionally scheduled sight-seeing tours in remote locations, made room for one.

Beekman came in. "I heard," he said. Several others entered behind him. "Are Kellie and Chiang okay?"

"As far as we know. But we're going to bring them home. The ground mission is over."

"I concur," Beekman said.

Marcel was angry, frustrated, weary. "How much time do we have to get them off?"

Beekman glanced at the calendar. "They should be reasonably safe until the end of the week. After that, it's anybody's guess."

Marcel tried to call Hutch on the private channel. But he couldn't even pick up a carrier wave.

"Is she still in the tower?" asked Beekman.

"Yes. Last I heard."

"Marcel." It was the AI. "I'm sorry to break in, but your message to the Star has been delivered. And I can find only one ship with a lander within the required range. The Athena Boardman. It's owned by-"

"I know who owns it," said Marcel. The Boardman was part of the Kosmik fleet, a vessel he had piloted himself on occasion when he worked for the government-subsidized terraformer during the early years of his career. "How far are they?"

"They can be here in four days. And we have an incoming from the Star. Captain Nicholson wants to speak with you on the cobalt channel."

Encrypted. "Set it up, Bill."

"Who died?" asked Beekman. "Do we have any names?"

"Two that we know of. The pilot of the Star's lander. And a young woman passenger. Maybe more. I don't know yet." Marcel had been scribbling in his notebook. "Bill."

"Yes, Marcel."

"Send a four-bell message to the Boardman: 'Wendy jay is declaring an emergency. We have people stranded on Deepsix vulnerable to impending Morgan event. Require your lander and your assistance to perform rescue. Time presses. Request you proceed immediately. Clairveau. Standard closing. Give them our coordinates."

"Okay, Marcel. And I have Captain Nicholson on the circuit."

Marcel asked those who'd accompanied Beekman to withdraw, and closed the door. Then he told the AI to proceed. Nicholson's image appeared on-screen. He looked scared. "Captain Clairveau," he said. "How bad is it?"

"It's bad," said Marcel.

Nicholson spotted Beekman and hesitated,

"Professor Beekman," said Marcel, "is the director of the Morgan Project, and he is the soul of discretion. One of his people is down there, too. As are several others."

Nicholson nodded. Muscles worked in his cheeks. "What exactly happened?"

Marcel told him.

He lost all of his color, and his eyes slid shut. "God help us," he said. For a long moment he was silent. Then: "Forgive me, but did you say both landers have been destroyed?"

"Yes. That's why I asked whether you might have an extra one available."

It was hard to believe he could have gone even whiter, but he did. "You mean you don't have a backup vehicle?"

"We didn't have a lander at all, Captain. Hutchins used the one from Wildside."

"I see." He nodded and seemed to be having trouble breathing. Marcel thought for a moment that a stroke might be imminent. "Okay," he said finally. "We don't have one either, so we're going to have to get help."

"We've already done that. The Boardman's only a few days away."

"Thank God." He was trembling. "You will let me know when you hear more?"

"Of course."

"Hutch, I found her."

He sounded grim and her heart sank. Hutch sat propped against a wall, tired, trying to catch her breath. Her air was beginning to get stale.

"She's dead," he said softly. "Looks as if she was killed outright. I don't think she suffered."

Hutch squeezed her eyes shut.

"Hutch, you reading me?"

She killed her transmitter until she could get control of her voice. "Yes." Another long silence. "Can you get her free?"

"I'll need a couple of minutes. You doing okay?"

"Yeah. I'm fine."

"Kellie tells me she's been trying to reach you."

"Signal's not getting through. What's the situation?"

"I'll relay it. After Kellie's done, Marcel wants to talk to you, too."

Kellie sounded frightened. "The woman passenger's dead," she said. "MacAllister's okay."

"How about the lander?"

"Wrecked."

"No chance at all?"

"None."

Three dead. And the rest stranded. My God. "Okay," she said. "We're talking about the Wildside boat, right?"

"Yes."

"What about the other one? The one that fell in the chasm?"

"Haven't looked."

"We'll want to look. Maybe we got lucky."

"Hutch," Kellie said, "how are you doing?"

"I'll be fine as soon as I see daylight again. You know about Toni?"

"Chiang told me. I'm sorry."

"We all are."

After a while, Chiang got on again: "I've got Toni out, and I'm cutting into your wall. Stay as far away from it as you can."

"Okay. I'm clear."

"Putting Marcel on."

"Thanks."

Marcel tried to sound encouraging. "Chiang tells me he'll have you out in a few minutes. You're not hurt, are you?"

"No." She looked around at the rubble.

"The Boardman's nearby. Should be here in a few days."

"That the best we can do? A few days?"

"Yes. Sorry. It's all we have." And lucky to have that, his voice told her. "Hang in there, Hutch. We'll have you all off as soon as we can."

Bill came back: "I have some mail for you. Did you want to see it?"

"Sure." What better time? "Go ahead."

"Hello, Priscilla. This is Charlie Ito."

She projected his image into the center of the chamber. This was a man who looked as if he'd enjoy collecting taxes. He had an unctuous smile and was vaguely familiar."You remember we met at your aunt Ellen's birthday party last spring. You might recall that at the time you mentioned how you'd like one day to move to Cape Cod. As it happens, an incredible deal came up yesterday, and I thought of you right away. We have a luxury seaside home that just came on the market. And I know what you're thinking, but bear with me a moment-"

She went to the next message.

"Hi, Prisctila."

It was her mother. Bright, beautiful. And as always, arriving with impeccable timing.

"I'm looking forward to seeing you again when you get home. It would be nice if we could take a few days and maybe go to the mountains. Just us girls. Let me know if that's okay, and I'll reserve a cabin.

"I know you don't like my bringing up men, but your uncle Karl recently introduced me to the most gorgeous young architect. I'd say he has a brilliant future-"

She tried again:

Hi, Hutch.

This one was audio only. Audio transmissions were less expensive.

"I know it's been a while since we've talked, but I just heard you were on Wildside when it got diverted to Deepsix."lt was from Frank Carson, an archeologist with whom she'd been through a lot in what now seemed another lifetime. "Sounds as if you're in on the action again. I envy you. I'd give anything to be with you. We're still digging into Beta Pac, and beginning finally to translate some of the local languages. But you don't care about that, right now. I just wanted you to know I was thinking about you. You're a lucky woman."

She managed a smile.

"Ms. Hutchinson."

Another audio only. With a deep baritone this time.

"You might remember we met at the United Pilots Association Conference last year. My name's Harvey Hutchins-that's right, same as yours, which is how we got talking. Anyhow, I'm a program manager for Centauri Transport. We're looking for experienced pilots. We haul supplies and personnel throughout the web. I can guarantee you challenging work, a generous signing bonus, and a wide range of fringe benefits. The openings won't last long, but I can get you in if you like-"

And a young woman with a cloying Boston accent: "Hello, Ms. Hutchins, I represent the Northeastern University Alumni Fund-Raising Committee, and we wanted to ask for your help again this year-"

There were a few more, all more or less impersonal, all from people who knew her just well enough to evade the antijunk filters that never seemed to work anyhow.

There was nothing from any of the occasional men in her life. Times like this, she wondered if her charm had failed altogether. But she understood that nobody was anxious to accept a relationship with a woman who was never home. It was a lonely existence. And maybe pulling out after this was over wasn't a bad idea. Go home and get herself a normal life.

She could hear Chiang getting close. Then light broke into the tunnel.

She helped him collect Toni's body and get it up into the tower. The twenty minutes or so they spent doing that, moving her through the narrow passageways, trying not to drop her, struggling up those irritating dwarf staircases, were possibly the longest twenty minutes of her life. The e-suit was still on, so the body still felt warm and alive. She kept looking down at her, imagining Toni's eyes, behind her lids, watching her accusingly. You brought me here…

She was trembling when they finally got her up to ground level, took her outside, and laid her in the sunlight.

MacAllister lifted Casey in his arms, and they started back. Kellie had rummaged through the burnt-out lander, collecting whatever was left that might be useful: some clothes, a few snacks, and an extra cutter. The reddimeals were fried, so they'd have to survive on donuts for the time being.

They tried to divide the load, although only MacAllister was strong enough to handle Casey. The others attempted to spell him occasionally, but they stumbled along with the body until his patience gave way and he insisted on taking care of her himself. So he carried her and they simply took frequent breaks and moved at his pace. Chiang met them about halfway, after which he and MacAllister took turns.

When they got back to the tower, they found Hutch sitting stone-faced by Toni. They laid Casey beside her.

"What about the Star boat?" Kellie asked her. "Did you look for it?"

She nodded. Kellie saw no hope in her expression. After a minute, she walked out to the chasm.

The lander hadn't fallen far. Only about fifteen meters. It was wedged between the rock walls, over a long drop to a snow-filled bottom. There was no trace of Wetheral.

Eliot Penkavic was captain of the Athena Boardman, outbound for Quraqua, hauling solar mirrors, DNA samples of over eleven thousand species of fish, birds, plants, grasses, and trees; and of more than thirty thousand assorted insect types. He had a full manifest of equipment for the ongoing effort to terraform Quraqua, and sixty-four experts and technicians of various stripes. He was three days away from his destination when the distress call arrived from the Wendy jay.

It was not a side trip he wanted to make. But the code of conduct, and the law, was quite clear. When an emergency was formally declared, when lives were reported in jeopardy, vessels were compelled to assist. After several weeks on Boardman, no one was going to be happy about his extending the flight by another nine days or so. Especially lan Helm, who was going out to the new world to take over as director of operations.

He checked his database, looking for another ship that could go in and bail out the Academy group. There were a couple in the area that could get there, but nobody with a lander. Except the Boardman.

Unfortunate.

How could the nitwits possibly have gotten themselves into such a situation?

He wrote out his reply, and then read it to the AI: Sit tight. Cavalry coming. Boardman will be there in four days, six hours. Penkavic.

"I think that sums things up nicely, sir," said the AI.

"As do I, Eve, Send it."

"It is done, Captain."

"Good." Penkavic pushed himself out of his chair. "Now for the hard part."

"Explaining it to Dr. Helm?"

"Precisely."

XI

Living well is a high-wire act without a net. It is a matter of locating one's proper place and balancing it against the programming imposed by society. We're surrounded by the wrecks of those who have crashed, the reformers, the upright, the various militants and the true believers who think the rest of us need their guidance.

— Gregory MacAllister, "The Best Revenge," Lost at Moonbase

Hours to breakup (est): 252

"Marcel," said the AI, "we have a response from the Boardman. They say they understand our problem and are on their way."

Marcel breathed an audible sigh of relief.

"They anticipate arrival in four days and six hours."

He informed Hutch, who tried to conceal the fact that she'd been holding her breath. Then he called the Star. Nicholson, who'd been delighted to hear that MacAllister was still alive, raised a fist in an unlikely gesture of exultant thanksgiving at this second piece of good news. He notified Beekman, so he could announce it to his people. When that had been done, he passed the word to the two passengers waiting on Wildside. He spoke to a woman, who commented that she was delighted help was on the way, that they'd been very lucky, and that she'd been against the mission from the start She implied that Marcel was at least partly responsible for a situation that had clearly gotten out of hand.

Captain Nicholson reached for another trank and watched his wallscreen convert itself into a hologram of a woodland scene. Thank God that at least there'd be no more deaths. Maleiva was remote from the travel lanes, and it could easily have turned out that nothing would have been close enough to come to their rescue.

Of course the damage already done was enough to ruin him. A dead passenger and a dead crewman. A wrecked lander. On a flight that violated regulations. How would he ever explain it?

It was the darkest moment in a life that had been relatively free of trouble and disappointment. But he knew that regardless of what happened now, he could not survive. He'd be hauled before a disciplinary panel, where it would be made quite plain to him and to the world what a scoundrel he was. He would be reprimanded, and he would be terminated. In the full glow of the worldwide media.

Subsequently, he could expect to be sued, held liable for any damages accruing to the families of the two victims, and for the loss of the lander. He might even be prosecuted. Not that TransGalactic would hunger and thirst after justice, but they could be expected to take every opportunity to disassociate themselves from him in an atmosphere rife with legal action.

How could he have been so dumb?

Scarcely three minutes had passed after his conversation with Clairveau when word came from the duty officer that the surviving passenger, Mr. MacAllister, desired to speak with him.

The transmission came in, audio only. "You know what's happened here?" the great man asked.

Here was the person responsible for the captain's plight. You'll be able to set up a small shrine to a lost world, he'd said. People will love it Management will admire your foresight. Your audacity. "Yes, I've heard." He tried to keep his tone level. "Are you all right, Mr. MacAllister?"

"Fine, thank you." He seemed subdued. The charming arrogance that had informed his manner was gone. "I assume you're in some difficulty as a result of this-incident."

"I don't expect any explanation I can offer will satisfy my superiors."

"No, I thought not. I wanted to apologize, Captain."

"Yes. Of course. Thank you."

"It never occurred to me that anything like this could happen."

"Nor to me. Captain Clairveau informs me you are temporarily stranded."

"Yes. I'm afraid so. Until the rescue vehicle gets here."

"It's on its way. Now, I hesitate to ask, but there's something you can do for me."

"I understand, Captain. There's no need for any of us to go publicly into the details of this unfortunate business."

"Yes. Precisely." Nicholson hesitated. There was always the possibility that someone somewhere was listening. Maybe even recording the conversation. He had no secure channel with MacAllister. "That's probably best."

When he'd signed off, the captain retired to his quarters and contemplated the dress uniform jacket he traditionally wore to meals with the passengers.

There might be a way.

He could delete the pertinent log entry and declare the flight unauthorized. That would leave Wetheral responsible.

That was not exactly to his taste, and it did not play well to his self-image. But Wetheral was dead and couldn't be harmed by any conclusion a board of inquiry might draw. Moreover, the only other living party to the conspiracy had given his word not to reveal what he knew. And he would be motivated to keep that word, since he, too, could become legally liable should the truth get out. No one else was in a position to deny that Wetheral had taken the lander down on his own. All that would be necessary was to agree on a story explaining how MacAllister and Hayes came to be on board. And that was child's play.

Maybe, he thought, he could come out of this unscathed after all.

MacAllister's associates would never have accused him of possessing an overbearing conscience. Disagree with the great man on literary standards or on a matter of historical interpretation, and one was likely to find his or her judgment and taste questioned and possibly his or her native intelligence held up to ridicule in full view of the general public. He took particular delight in neutralizing those who desperately needed to be neutralized, those overblown, self-important, arrogant half-wits who were always running about dictating behavior, morals, and theology to everyone else. And he never looked back.

Yet he stood a long time at the edge of the chasm, staring down at the Evening Star's crippled lander, thinking about the dead pilot, who had struck him as not particularly bright; and about Casey, who'd been too young to develop whatever talent she might have had. That they were dead was not directly due to any fault of his. But he

understood clearly that had he not given in to the dark impulse that had prompted him to want to visit this godforsaken place, they would be alive. It would be an exaggeration to suggest he contemplated, even for a moment, throwing himself in. But it was true that for the first time in his adult existence, he questioned whether the world was better for his being in it.

The lander was wedged tight. Below it, the chasm fell away probably another hundred meters. It was a long way down. Heaps of snow lay at the bottom, if indeed it was the bottom. And somewhere down there, beyond reach, Wetheral had come to rest.

He was still staring when he became aware that someone was speaking to him.

Hutchins.

"Mr. MacAllister," she said, "are you okay?"

"Yes." He straightened a bit. "I'm fine."

There was no way to preserve the bodies, and after a series of conferences among Nicholson, Marcel, and Hutch, it was agreed that Ton! and Casey be buried on the plain where they died.

They picked a spot about thirty meters to one side of the tower, cleared away the snow, and dug two graves. An armed party consisting of Chiang, MacAllister, and Kellie trekked to the patch of forest, cut down a couple of trees, and fashioned two makeshift coffins.

Meantime, Hutch and Nightingale collected background information from the ships. They cut three slabs of rock from the tower walls to serve as markers and engraved them. They wrapped the bodies in plastic brought originally for the artifacts. By then night had fallen, and their colleagues had returned. They stored the coffins inside the tower, posted a guard, built a fire, and slept in the open.

There was a ghostly quality to it all. Ordinarily, Flickinger fields were invisible, but they tended to reflect light in the 6100–6400 angstrom range. Orange and red. So they all developed a mild glow whose gradations varied with the intensity of the flames. When occasionally the fire flared, golden auras became visible, providing a flavor of the angelic. Or of the demonic, if one preferred. In either case, Hutch hoped it would be more than enough to keep whatever creatures might haunt the neighborhood at a respectful distance.

She took the first watch. They were well away from the tower, to ensure that the guard, equipped with night goggles, had a good view

in all directions. Nothing moved in that vast wasteland, and after two hours she wearily turned the duty over to Nightingale and curled up in a snowbank.

But she couldn't sleep, and for a time she watched him pacing nervously around the camp. It was snowing lightly, and the sky was overcast.

It had been a mistake to bring him. Even the news that help was on the way had failed to cheer him measurably. While the others had collectively taken a deep breath, and Hutch herself had shed the pall of concern that came with knowing it could easily have gone the other way. Nightingale had seemed not to react. "Good," he'd said. "Thank God." But his tone had been flat, as if it didn't really make much difference.

Nightingale wasn't young, and the next few days, with no food, were going to be difficult. She wondered how he'd hold up. Wondered how any of them would hold up. They had nobody, as far as she knew, with the kind of background they were going to need to make themselves reasonably comfortable. They had only the donuts and a few other assorted snacks. But hell, how hungry could they get in four days? If necessary, maybe they could nibble on leaves. It would be just a matter of putting something into their stomachs.

Nightingale stood in the glare of the fire, scanning the area. He seemed discouraged. Part of that obviously stemmed from the casual-ties they'd taken, and she wondered whether he was shocked by their loss, or whether he was sensing a kind of parallel with his earlier ex-perience on this world. She also knew he had no confidence in her. He hadn't said anything overt, but she could read his feelings in his eyes. Especially since their situation had turned difficult. Who are you, his attitude asked, to be making decisions? What's your de-gree? Your level of expertise in these matters? You're not even an archeologist.

A mild tremor rolled through the night. It was barely discernible, but she wondered whether it wouldn't be a good idea to head out somewhere tomorrow. Get a reading from Marcel and make for a safer place.

Nightingale knelt close to Chiang and brushed snow away from his converter. They were in no danger even if the device did become buried, of course. If the air flow into the Flickinger field were cut off, an alarm would sound.

Hutch's heat exchanger put out a barely audible hum as it warmed the envelope of air circulating inside her suit. She heard it change tone and looked at her link. The outside temperature was fifteen below. A fairly constant wind was blowing out of the northwest, and the snow was getting heavier.

Four and a quarter days until help came. It wasn't exactly a hardship situation. The e-suits would protect them from the cold, but it would occasionally be necessary to shut them off, when eating or performing other basic functions. They'd established a privacy area behind the tower. It wasn't very private, though, because Hutch insisted no one go back there without an escort. MacAllister, who had often remonstrated against the foolishness of puritanical ideals, seemed particularly upset by the arrangement. If one had to use the facility during the night, it was necessary to wake one of the others. It was not a circumstance that would help morale, he pointed out.

"Getting eaten," Hutch told him, "does nothing for morale either."

In the morning, under lowering skies, they held a farewell ceremony. Kellie recorded it for the next of kin.

Toni had been a Universalist, Wetheral a Methodist. And Casey was not known to be affiliated with any religious group.

Hutch spoke for Toni, a difficult assignment because Universalists did not believe in mantras or formal prayers. One always spoke from the heart. They all mourned the loss of one so young, she said. Nothing they could recover from the site would be worth the price they'd paid. She added that she personally would always remember Toni, who had refused to allow her to come alone to the tower.

Captain Nicholson, using VR, performed the ceremony for Wetheral. He spoke of selfless service, dedication to duty, a willingness always to put forth extra effort. Hutch concluded that Nicholson and his officer were strangers, and it seemed to her particularly painful that the man had died with no one present who knew him as a human being. His first name, she'd discovered, was Cole. She wished, at least, that they could have recovered his body.

The marker for Toni read Faithful Unto Death. Wetheral's might easily have read Buried by Strangers.

MacAllister surprised her by asking to speak for Casey.

"I knew her only briefly," he said. "She seems to have been an honest woman in an honest profession. Maybe no more need be said. Like Toni Hamner, she was only at the beginning of her life. I will miss her."

He stared down at the marker, which at his suggestion had been engraved with only her name and dates, and the single word Journalist.

When they were finished, they put the two coffins in the graves and replaced the soil.

"Wait a minute," said Helm. "Tell me again what we're going to do?"

"Five people are stranded on the surface of Maleiva III. It's the world that's going to-"

"I know about Maleiva HI. Why are we going there?"

"To rescue them," Penkavic said.

A chessboard was set up on his desk. Helm sat behind the black pieces, but his cold blue eyes had locked on Penkavic. He ran long fingers through thick gray hair and nodded, not to the captain, he thought, but to some inner compulsion of his own.

They were in Helm's private quarters. The tabletop that supported the chessboard was buried under disks, notes, schematics, printouts. "Why is that our concern?" he asked, keeping his tone polite. As if he was honestly curious. "We're, what, several days away, aren't we?"

"Yes, sir."

Helm was Kosmik's chief engineer and director of the terraform-ing project at Quraqua. "So why do they need us?"

"They need the lander. They don't have any way of getting their people off the surface."

"What happened to their lander?"

"It got wrecked. In a quake."

"That seems shortsighted."

"I don't know the details. In any case, we've already jumped out of hyper. We're maneuvering onto a new heading, and as soon as we have it we'll make the jump again. The sooner we-"

"Wait just a minute. We're carrying a full load of equipment, supplies, people. All needed at Quraqua. We have constraints on when we have to get there, Eliot. We can't just go wandering around the region."

"I understand that, sir. But there's nobody else available to do this."

Helm's tone suggested a gentle uncle trying to reason with an adolescent. "Surely that can't be."

"I checked it, sir. We're the only ship close enough. The only one with a lander."

"Look, Eliot." He got up, walked around the table, sat down on it, and pointed to a chair. Penkavk stayed on his feet. "We can't just hold up the cargo. Or the people." He leaned forward and looked at the captain. "Tell me, if we were to do this, make the run, how late would we be getting into Quraqua?"

"About nine days."

"About nine days." Helm's face grew rigid. "You have any idea what that would cost?"

"Yes, sir. But I didn't think that was a consideration."

"Come on, Eliot, it's always a consideration."

"What I know," Penkavic said, striving to keep his anger under control, "is that the law, and our own regulations, require us to provide assistance to anyone in distress. We can't just ignore it. People will die."

"Do you think the Academy will reimburse us for what this will cost?"

"No," he said. "Probably not."

"Then maybe we should consider our options."

"We don't have any options, Dr. Helm."

Helm stared at him for a long moment. "No," he said, "I suppose not. All right, Eliot. Let's go off and rescue these damned fools. Maybe we'll get some decent press out of it."

After they'd finished the memorial, they trekked back to the Wild-side lander and tried to salvage what they could of the artifacts. The tables and chairs were scorched, reduced to rubbish; the scrolls had burned; the pottery had melted. They couldn't even find the pack and the garments it had contained. A couple of blowguns, some darts, and a javelin were all that had survived.

Listlessly they returned to the tower and cleaned and bagged the few remaining artifacts.

MacAllister glowered the whole time, and when Chiang asked him what was wrong, he looked over at Hutch with genuine anger. "The bottom line," he said, "is that this is all just trash. It's old trash, but that doesn't change what it is."

Hutch overheard, and in fact he'd obviously intended that she should. It was more than she could take. "You have too many opinions, MacAllister," she told him. "I've read some of your stuff. You've a talent with the language, but most of the time you don't know what you're talking about."

He'd looked at her with infinite patience. Poor woman.

They inventoried their new set of artifacts, weapons, pieces of cloth that had once been clothing, cabinets, chairs, and tables, and set them aside to wait for the rescue vehicle.

"What do we do about food?" MacAllister asked suddenly.

"We'll have to run it down," said Chiang. "Anybody here a hunter?"

MacAllister nodded. "I am. But not with this." He glanced down at his cutter. "Anyhow, I don't know whether anybody's noticed or not, but there seems to be a distinct lack of game in the neighborhood. Moreover, there might not even be anything here we can eat."

"I doubt," said Nightingale, "that the local wildlife would supply nutrition. We never ran any tests, but at least it would fill our bellies. Provided there are no toxins or other problems."

"Good," said MacAllister. "When we catch one of them, you can sample it."

"Maybe there's an easier way," said Hutch.

Kellie's dark eyes narrowed. "To do what?" she asked. "Find a better guinea pig?"

"The Star lander isn't too deep. It might be possible to go down there and retrieve the reddimeals. They'd help get us through until the Boardman arrives."

"Not worth it," said Kellie. "We're better off trying the local menu."

"I doubt it," growled MacAllister.

"Hutch," said Marcel, "it's not your fault. You have to pull yourself together." They were on the private channel.

"You know, Marcel, it just never…" Her voice was shaking and she had to stop to collect herself."… It just never occurred to me that anything like this could happen." He could hear her breathing. "I didn't ask for this. I'm a pilot. They've got me making life-and-death decisions."

"Hutch." He made his voice as gentle as he could. "You were trying to do what you were directed to do. Everybody with you is an adult. They knew what you knew. It wasn't just your decision."

"I could have canceled it after the first tremor. Put everybody in the boat and gone back to Wildside. That's what I should have done."

"And if we all had hindsight up front, everybody'd be a millionaire."

She was quiet.

"Hutch, listen to me. They're going to need you until we get through this. You have to stop feeling sorry for yourself."

"Sorry for myself? You think that's what it is?"

"Yeah. That's exactly what it is. Your job right now is to keep your people safe until we can get them back here. You can't do anything about Toni. But you can see that nothing happens to anyone else."

She broke the connection, and he took a deep breath. He understood she'd been through a horrific experience, but he had expected more of her somehow. Had the conversation continued, he'd been prepared to suggest she retire in favor of Kellie. He wondered whether he shouldn't call her back and advise her to do just that.

But, no. Not yet. If everything went well, it was just a matter of biding their time until help came. He left the bridge and wandered down to project control, where a couple of technicians were trying to analyze the impossibilium.

Bill's image formed on a nearby screen. "Marcel? You have a text message."

Wendy was lingering in the area of the assembly, although Marcel would have preferred to return to orbit to be as close as possible to the stranded team. But he was helpless to do anything other than watch, so he'd indulged the researchers and granted their wish to stay near the giant artifact. They hovered within a few meters, while every instrument the ship possessed poked, scanned, and probed the shafts.

They lacked the laboratory facilities to do extensive evaluation of the onboard samples, but they were trying to determine melting and boiling points, specific heat and thermal conductivity, density, Young's modulus, bulk and shear modulus. They wanted to define yield and ultimate strength, electrical conductivity and magnetic permeability at varying temperatures, currents, and frequencies. They wanted to know how quickly sound moved through it, and compile an index of refraction over a range of frequencies. Beekman and his peo-

pie had begun to put together a stress and strain graph. It didn't mean much to Marcel, but the researchers took turns gaping at the results.

"On-screen."

TO: NCA WENDY JAY

FROM: NCK ATHENA BOARDMAN

SUBJECT: STATUS REPORT

FOR CAPT CLAIRVEAU. WE ARE ON SCHEDULE, MINUTES FROM MAKING OUR JUMP ONBOARD LANDER WILL BE PRIMED AND READY TO GO. MARCEL, YOU OWE ME.

"Is there a reply?"

"Tell him I'll buy him lunch."

XII

Nothing kills the appetite quite as effectively as a death sentence. -Gregory MacAllister, "In Defense of the Godly," The Incomplete MacAllister

Hours to breakup (est): 252

It was almost 1800 hours, forty-two minutes since they'd made the jump into transdimensional space, when Penkavic ordered an inspection of the lander and retired to his quarters. He had just arrived when Eve, Boardman's AI, reported all in order.

The ship had begun to quiet Many of his passengers had retired for the night The common room had pretty much emptied out, and only two or three remained in the various planning or leisure areas. A small group of technicians and climate specialists were engaged in a role-playing game in the Green Room, a contest which would probably continue well into the morning. Several biologists were still in project control arguing about stocking procedures, and a few individuals were gathered in the relatively intimate Apollo Porch, where they could look out at the stars.

Penkavic was more rattled by his confrontation with Helm than he cared to admit to himself. It wasn't just that he'd offended one of the most powerful people in the corporation. He had, after all, done the right thing, and kept both himself and Helm out of trouble. But there was a quality to Corporate's chief engineer that unsettled Penkavic, inducing a reaction that went far beyond concern over what he might or might not do to damage the captain's career. It was hard to pin down. Helm did not seem especially threatening or intimidating, but he invariably induced a sense that he and he alone understood the correct and reasonable course. In his presence, Penkavic inexplicably wanted very much to please him. Even when he disagreed strongly with the older man's conclusions.

He climbed out of his uniform, showered, and slipped into bed. But the lights had just died when Eve's voice filtered through the room. "Captain, we have a problem."

He sat up. "What's wrong, Eve?"

"The lander is preparing to launch."

"Stop it." He threw the sheet aside, put his feet on the deck, and waited for her response.

"I can't. I'm locked out."

He called for lights and threw on a robe. "Go to the red circuit," he told her. "Shut it down. Shut everything down in the launch bay if you have to."

He was out the door, headed for the lower deck.

"Negative," she said. "Lander is sealing."

She put a visual on a wallscreen. He watched the vehicle rotate, saw the bay doors open. "Who's doing it?" he demanded.

I can't tell if there is a deliberate agency at work. There seems to be a partial breakdown in Delta comm." In Eve's ability to communicate with the various automated systems.

He watched the lights in the launch bay brighten and dim, as they routinely did at the start of an operation, and then the lander floated out into the gray mist.

Penkavic now made the history books. In the only known instance in which a commercial starship attempted to maneuver in hyperspace, he banked to port, tried to calculate the location of the lander, and made an effort at intercept.

He had to work manually because Eve's condition had not stabilized. Jack Castor, his copilot, was already on duty.

He put Castor on the sensors despite his protests that they would not work.

They tried them anyhow. Short-range, long-range, pinpoint, and shotgun. It didn't matter; all returns were negative. There seemed to be nothing out there but empty space. Optical visibility was limited to a couple of hundred meters, and attempts to activate the lander AI failed.

No one knew how to pinpoint a position in transdimensional space. Because the only other physical object in the field was the lander, and they did not know where it was, the notion of position became meaningless.

Eve came back up. "The disturbance seems to have abated," she said.

"Can you tell where the problem originated?" Castor asked.

Not that the answer mattered. Penkavic knew who had arranged it.

"Lambda."

The backup mission control.

Helm was dressed and waiting for him.

"Do you have any idea what you've done?" demanded Penkavic.

"I'm aware," he said. His eyes were hooded. He seemed unusually pensive. "I know exactly what I've done."

"You've condemned those people. We were the only way they had of getting clear."

"Eliot." He nodded, agreeing with the accusation. "I wish there had been another way. But the Quraqua operation can't afford a nine-day delay. Some of the material we have on board is time-sensitive. Extremely so. As are two critical operations that depend on our making a prompt delivery. The company would have been hit very hard. Very hard. It would have cost millions, at the very least. God knows how many ongoing efforts would have to be restarted. If we had gone off to the rescue, nobody at Corporate would have thanked us, believe me."

"I don't really care-"

"I do, Eliot. And so would you, if you knew the people involved, how hard they've worked to turn Quraqua into a second Earth. What the stakes are. These idiots got themselves into their situation, and they're just going to have to get themselves out." He seemed to be studying the chessboard. Penkavic noticed the position had not changed. "God help me, I wish it could have been otherwise."

Penkavic stared at him.

"You'd have done the same thing," Helm persisted, "if you'd had my responsibilities. Known what I know."

"I don't think so," said Penkavic.

"Eliot." The kindly uncle showed up again. "Your investigation

will uncover a defective switch in the central system and a cross-connected R-box in Lambda. You'll want to find both promptly and replace them so that the problem with the AI does not recur. Unfortunately, the launch was triggered when a signal intended to shut down the mess for the night was misrouted through the bad switch to the launch system. Because the R-box activated almost simultaneously, Eve was effectively locked off for several minutes and was unable to stop the sequence. An unfortunate accident. One in a million. But quite comprehensible. Responsibility will be laid on the AIs that run the inspection programs back at the Wheel, or possibly on design glitches. In any case, no one here need be blamed."

For a long time, neither man spoke.

"Unless you insist."

Penkavic sat down and tried to resist his inclination to look the other way.

"You have a choice to make now," Helm continued. "You can accuse me, and log what you know. Or you can forget this conversation ever happened, and the incident will remain what it presently is, a piece of bad luck. I'd remind you there's always a price to be paid for progress. And that there's nothing to be gained by sending anyone to a hanging." His fingers touched the crown of the black queen. He lifted her, moved her diagonally across the board, and settled her behind a protecting knight. "I'm in your hands, Eliot."

"Incoming traffic, Marcel"

"On-screen, Bill."

"You're not going to like it," the AI added.

TO: NCA WENDY JAY

FROM: NCK ATHENA BOARDMAN

SUBJECT: LANDER DIFFICULTIES

MARCEL: REGRET TO REPORT THAT SYSTEMS BREAKDOWN RESULTED IN UNCONTROLLED LAUNCH OF LANDER DURING HYPERFLIGHT. ALL ATTEMPTS AT RECOVERY FAILED. NO CHOICE BUT CONTINUE TO QURAQUA. REGRET UNABLE ASSIST YOU. ELIOT.

Marcel was reading the message a second or third time when Beekman broke in: "How the hell do you accidentally launch a lander?"

"I don't know." A chill was expanding at the pit of Marcel's stomach.

"And they don't have a spare?"

"No."

He could hear Beekman's slight wheeze. "There must be somebody else."

"There isn't. We checked." The room had gone quiet.

"So what do we do now?"

Marcel couldn't see there was anything they could do.

"I don't think we should try it," said Kellie. "What if you get inside the damned thing and it decides to go the rest of the way into the chasm?"

They were looking down on the Star lander. It was wedged sideways, starboard side up. The hull was gouged, and the cabin roof was hammered in. One wing was bent, one of the jets looked misaligned. And both landing treads had been, broken off.

Hutch thought the descent looked more,dangerous than it was. Her link tingled, and Marcel's voice whispered her name. "I'm here," she said. "How're we doing?"

"Not so well, I'm afraid."

She read it in his voice, knew what he would say before it went any farther. "What happened?"

"Boardman. They accidentally launched the lander in hyper-flight."

"They lost it."

"Yes."

Hutch saw the others watching her. "How the hell could that happen?"

"Don't know."

"What is it?" asked Kellie.

They all looked scared. Even MacAllister. She switched the conversation onto the allcom. "Nobody else in the area?"

"No. Nobody."

"What about the Patrol?"

"Not even remotely close."

"No private vessels? A corporate yacht, maybe?"

"No, Hutch. Nothing with a lander." She listened to him breathing. "I'm sorry."

"What happened?" asked Nightingale. -

"We haven't given up," Marcel said.

"I don't suppose that means you've thought of something else."

"Not yet."

"What happened?" Nightingale demanded, louder this time. The question hung there.

"What now?"

Hutch wasn't sure who'd spoken. They stood on the brink of the chasm, staring down, while the implications settled around their shoulders.

MacAllister looked into the sky, as if to locate Wendy. "Captain Clairveau. Are you listening?"

A brief delay. Then: "I'm here, Mr. MacAllister."

"What's our course of action now?" he asked. "What do we do?"

"I don't know yet. I haven't had a chance-"

"— to analyze the situation." MacAllister could summon the tones of an angry god. He did so. "As I understand our status, rescue would seem to be out of the question. Impossible. Am I correct?"

"It would appear so."

"Am I correct?"

"Yes." Hesitantly.

"Then do us a common courtesy, Captain: The situation here has deteriorated severely. You'll make it easier on all of us if you confine yourself to the facts and refrain from cheerleading."

Marcel was silent.

And MacAllister was right. Hutch was crushed by the finality of events. "Marcel," she said, "we're going to sign off for a bit."

"Okay." But she didn't hear the distant click and knew he was still on the circuit. "I'll be here," he said at last. "If I can help."

He signed off.

Chiang kicked some snow into the chasm. "We could all just jump in," he said. "End it."

"Save the gallows humor," said Kellie.

"I wasn't trying to be funny." He folded his arms, and for an unsettling moment Hutch thought he really was considering it. She started cautiously in his direction, but Kellie got there first, took his arm, and pulled him away from the edge. He laughed. "Although," he said, "I can't see where it makes much difference."

Hutch changed her tone, implying they were now getting to serious business. "How much time do we have left?" she asked. "Anybody know?"

"Impact occurs December 9," said Kellie. "At 5:56 p.m. zulu." Ship time.

MacAllister glanced at his watch. "What kind of time are we talking?"

"Zulu," Nightingale sneered. "Orbital. Greenwich Mean. The time on your watch."

It was just after midnight on the twenty-eighth. At the tower, it was a couple of hours after sunrise.

"But the place will begin to break up," said Nightingale, "a day or so before the collision."

"Pity." MacAllister shook his head. "We have front-row seats for the most spectacular extravaganza in history, and we won't be here at showtime."

Chiang did not look amused. "Something to consider," he said. "Do we have a way to make a painless exit? When the time comes?"

MacAllister pushed his hands down into his vest pockets. "What about tranks?"

"It's a little premature to be talking like that," said Hutch.

"Is it really?" MacAllister looked down at her from a considerable height. "Well, let's all be sure to keep our spirits up. Wouldn't want anything less, would we?"

"That's enough, MacAllister," she said. "Try not to get hysterical."

"You know," Nightingale said, "if you hadn't panicked and tried to get clear with the lander, maybe none of this would have happened." He let them see he was enjoying himself.

"Look, the lander was about to go into the ditch. We tried to save it."

"You tried to save your fat ass-"

Hutch broke in and got between them. "Gentlemen, this isn't going to help."

"Sure it is," said Nightingale. "There's something to be said for truth. That's what you always say, isn't it, Mac? It doesn't matter who gets hurt; let's just get the truth out on the table. The truth is, you tried to run. The other lander was already gone, and you-"

"That's enough, Randy." She used the most threatening tone she could summon.

He glared at her and turned away.

"What is it with you two?" Hutch asked, looking at MacAllister.

The editor shrugged. "He objects to something I wrote a long time ago."

"MacAllister," she said, "you have friends everywhere."

"Even at World's End. I guess so."

Nightingale stood, looking out over the abyss. The others hunkered down in the snow. Nobody said much. Hutch pulled her knees close and propped her chin on it.

Nightingale pushed his hands into his vest pockets. The wind had already blown a covering of snow over the graves. Chiang took Kellie's arm and asked if she was okay. MacAllister glanced at the time every couple of minutes, as if he had a pressing appointment.

Hutch withdrew into her own black thoughts until Nightingale's voice brought her out of it. "There might still be a way to get to orbit," he said.

She looked at him bleakly. One did not walk off a planetary surface. "How?"

"There's a lander on the ground. Not far from here, I don't think."

"Tess!" said MacAllister.

Nightingale nodded. "That's good," he said. "You remember after all."

"I remember that you left one of the landers behind. But that's twenty years ago."

"I didn't say there was transportation. I said there might be a way." He was moving snow around with his foot, pushing it over the edge into the chasm. "It sure as hell beats jumping in there."

Hutch felt a rush of hope. Any kind of chance looked pretty good at the moment. "You said not far, Randy. How far?"

"I'm not sure. Southwest of here. Probably about two hundred kilometers. We were a little bit north of the equator."

Twenty years. Kellie shook her head. "The fuel will be long gone," she said.

MacAllister looked from Kellie to Hutch to Nightingale, hoping someone would say something encouraging.

Hutch obliged. "Maybe not," she said. "Marcel, we need you."

It took a few moments, but he came on-line. "What can I do for you, Hutch?"

"Do you have access to the schematics for Tess? The lander that got left behind in the original expedition?"

She could hear him relaying the question to Bill. Then he was back. "I'm looking at them," he said.

"What kind of reactor was it equipped with?"

"Direct-conversion Bussard-Ligon."

"Okay." Her spirits rose. "There might be a chance at that."

"I see where you're headed," said Marcel.

Kellie was puzzled. "I still don't understand where we'd get fuel for it."

"Think about it a minute," said Hutch. "Most landers are designed for the sole purpose of getting from orbit to surface. Up and down. Moving supplies and people between a ground base and a ship. The landers used in planetary exploration, though, like the one we came down in, or like Tess, are different: They were intended to get around on the ground. You take it down, and you keep it with you. It helps in the exploration, and you don't have to run it back and forth to orbit every few flights to refuel."

Kellie was starting to show interest.

"That's why they carry the Bussard-Ligon," continued Hutch.

"Which means what?" asked MacAllister.

"Their jets burn hydrogen, like all landers. The reactor maintains the ship's normal power levels. It keeps batteries charged, powers the capacitors, keeps the lights on."

"And?"

"It can also be used to separate hydrogen from oxygen to produce fuel."

MacAllister's face lit up. "You're saying it can make jet fuel?"

"All we'll need is some water," said Hutch. "Yes. That's exactly what it can do."

"There was a river nearby," said Nightingale.

"Well, how about that," said MacAllister. "We finally get lucky."

Nightingale allowed his contempt for MacAllister's ignorance to show. "Landing sites for exobiologists," he said, "were often near water. On beaches, near lakes, and so on. It's where animals congregate."

"And pilots are trained to use them," added Hutch, "whenever they can. So they can keep the tanks topped off."

"So how do we get the reactor running?" asked Nightingale. "What fuels it?"

"Boron," said Hutch.

That induced a worried look. "Where do we get boron?"

"There should be a supply in the lander. There'd have to be."

"How much would we need?" asked Nightingale.

She held thumb and index finger a few centimeters apart. "Not much at all. I'd think a couple of tablespoons will be more than sufficient to get us up and running. We'll check the specifics later."

MacAllister clapped his palms together. "Then we're in business," he said. "All we have to do is head over to the other lander, and we're out of here." He turned to Chiang. "I have to tell you, Chiang, I was worried there for a minute."

"Well," said Hutch, "we're not exactly out of the soup. The jets will give us some power, enough to get around down here. But-"

"They won't be enough," said Kellie, "to get us off-world. For that we need the spike."

"The problem we can expect," said Hutch, "is that after all these years the capacitors will be degraded. Seriously degraded. We need the capacitors at full capability to run the spike."

"You mean," asked MacAllister, "we can't use it to get into orbit?"

"That's correct."

"Then what have we been talking about?"

Hutch gazed down at the Star lander. "What we need," she said, "is a fresh set of capacitors. Any idea where we might find them?"

The engine compartment of the Wildside lander had been thoroughly fried. But the Evening Star's boat was a different story. It lay wedged in the chasm like a giant black-and-white insect. "Marcel," Hutch said, "this thing's big. How much do the capacitors weigh?"

There was a long pause. Then: "Uh-oh."

"Give me the uh-oh."

"On Deepsix, 43.4 kilograms. Each." Damned near as heavy as she was.

It wouldn't be practical to haul them overland. "We'll pull them out," she said, "and leave them in the tower. Come back for them after we get Tess up and running."

"That won't work, will it?" asked Beekman. "Can you operate the lander without capacitors?"

"Once we convert the water, sure. We just won't have much lift capability."

Marcel broke in: "Good news, folks. We've located Tess."

"How far?"

"Looks like 175 kilometers, give or take. We figure you've got about twelve days to get there. Maybe eleven. Eleven Maleivan days." Eleven nineteen-hour days.

"That doesn't sound far," said MacAllister. "A couple of us ought to be able to cover that in short order."

"It wouldn't be a good idea to stay here alone," said Hutch.

"Why not? I can't walk 175 kilometers."

"You stay here, you'll probably get eaten."

He looked uncomfortable. "Leave me a weapon."

"When are you going to sleep?"

"We've got plenty of time," said Chiang, helpfully. "You'll be able to make it."

"Think about the big cat," said Nightingale.

"Okay," he said. "Point taken."

She turned her attention to the chasm. "If that's settled, let's collect the capacitors and get on the road."

The capacitor compartments looked accessible. It was just a matter of climbing down to them.

"There's another possibility," said MacAllister. "How about trying to fly it out?"

"It's jammed in sideways," said Hutch.

"You've got an AI. It's not as if anybody would have to be on board when you made the effort."

Kellie's expression implied that she agreed.

It was conceivable. If it wasn't wedged too tight, the thrusters might break it loose. Maybe they could bring it out, land it in front of the tower, climb in, and go home.

But it did look tight. Had to be tight.

The ship's prow was angled down about ten degrees.

MacAllister saw her reluctance. "Why not?" he persisted. "If we can make it work, nobody has to risk his-or her-life climbing down and prying open engine compartments." The use of the feminine pronoun was pointed. He was reminding her who was in charge and who, therefore, should take any such risk.

"What it would probably do," said Hutch, "is rip the roof off the cabin."

"What's to lose? If we can't get it out, we don't care whether the cabin's secure, do we?"

Kellie shook her head. "Fireball time," she said. "Crunch the cabin, split the fuel tanks, everything goes up. Including the capacitors."

"Even if we try to ease it out?" said Nightingale.

"We can try it," said Hutch finally. She got the Evening Star duty officer on the circuit, and told him what they wanted to do.

"You sure?" he asked.

"No," she said. And then: "Yes. We need your assistance."

The duty officer spoke to the lander AI: "Glory, can you hear me?"

"I hear you, Mark."

"What is your status?"

The AI ran off a series of numbers and conditions. On the whole, Hutch thought, the damage might not be as serious as it looked. There was some broken circuitry, which meant control problems. Maybe they could replace them with parts from the other lander. Maybe they could fly it over to Tess and use the two to make a fully functioning spacecraft.

The AI reported that thrusters were okay, and there was lift. "Although there seem to be balancing problems."

"That's because it's on its side," said Kellie.

The vehicle weighed probably eight metric tons.

"Glory," said the duty officer, "the next voice you hear will belong to Priscilla Hutchins. I want you to code her. Do what she says."

"I will comply, Mark."

"Go ahead, Hutch," he said. "She's all yours."

"Glory, this is Priscilla Hutchins."

"Hello, Priscilla."

"I want you to engage the lifters and raise the nose until I tell you to stop."

They heard metal grind against the chasm wall. Snow broke loose and fell to the bottom. A piece of rock let go, and the lander slipped deeper into the trench.

"Glory, stop," she said.

"Priscilla, I do not have freedom of movement."

"Try firing the rockets," said MacAllister. "That should break it loose."

"Break it, period," said Kellie. She leaned over and looked down. "We could try to cut away some of the rock."

Nightingale made a face. "It would just slip down farther. If it changes its position, we might lose access to the capacitors."

He was right. The best chance lay in the original idea: Collect the capacitors, then get the other lander. But it would have been so good, so elegant, to ease the spacecraft out into the open.

Chiang must have seen the hesitation in her face. "It's your field of expertise, Hutch. Call it."

MacAllister looked to heaven. "God help us, we're in the hands of the experts. I think you ought to direct the AI to pour it on, stake everything on one roll of the dice. Get it over with."

Below the spacecraft, the walls dropped away, gradually narrowing until they sliced down into the snow. Anyone falling would become a permanent feature of the crevice.

"No," she said. "Glory's our ticket out of here. We need to take care of her."

"I'll make the climb," said Chiang.

She could see he was uncomfortable with the idea. Hutch herself had no love for precipices. But MacAllister was right: It was her responsibility, which she'd have happily ducked had Chiang looked a bit more confident. "It's okay," she said, trying to put steel into her voice. "I'll do it."

She hoped someone, possibly Kellie, would try to argue her out of it. Chiang nodded, relieved. Was she sure? he asked.

"Yeah," she said.

Kellie tossed a rock over the side and watched until it dropped silently into the snow at the bottom. "That's a long way down, Hutch."

Thanks, Kellie. I really needed that. But she bit down on the comment.

Nightingale studied the situation. "We'll just lower you and bring you back up," he said. "No way you can fall. You'll be safe as long as the lander doesn't give way at the wrong time."

"That should reassure her," said MacAllister.

Hutch began by asking the duty officer to confirm that she retained verbal control over the AI. While she was doing that, Kellie and Nightingale retreated to the tower and returned.with two long pieces of cable. Hutch tied one around her waist and handed it to Chiang. She kept the other one looped and gave it to Kellie. "Toss it down when I tell you," she said.

Marcel broke in. "Be careful."

MacAllister surprised her. He looked genuinely worried, but she wondered whether he was afraid she'd fall into the pit before retrieving the capacitors. "I don't think this is a good idea, Priscilla. There's no need. Just tell the AI to put the throttle to it."

She was touched. "Just hang on to me," she told him.

There was no nearby tree or other solid object around which to secure the line. So Chiang and MacAllister drove a couple of stakes into the ground. When they'd finished and gotten set up, Hutch took a deep breath, backed out over the rim, felt the emptiness beneath her, and smiled diffidently at Kellie.

Kellie gave her a thumbs-up.

She knew how the professionals did it, bracing their feet against the face of the rock and walking down. But she couldn't quite balance herself that well and instead simply dropped into a sitting position at the edge and eased herself over. "Okay, guys," she said. "Lower away."

They complied and she kept her eyes on the wall, which was earth-colored and rough and pebbly. Kellie was watching her and passing instructions and encouragement back and forth. "Okay, Hutch, you're doing fine."

"Hold it, she's got an abutment to deal with."

Trails of snow and pebbles broke loose and poured into the canyon.

There were no handholds. She realized belatedly that she should have looped the cable around her thighs instead of just connecting it to her belt and harness. It was dragging up on her, trying to pull her belt up under her vest. The Flickinger field did not provide sufficient resistance.

"You okay, Hutch?" Kellie asked.

"I'm fine. Keep going."

She maintained a stranglehold on the cable, gripping it so tightly that her muscles began to hurt. She told herself to relax, and checked cautiously to see where the lander was, trying to keep her eyes away from the abyss. Occasional clumps of snow and earth spilled down on her.

Kellie and Nightingale were both looking over the edge now, and she wished they'd be more careful. Last thing she needed would be to have one of them land in her lap, but when she complained, both seemed surprised.

"Just a little more," Kellie told the line handlers.

The lander was directly beneath her, and she reached down with her left foot, got nothing, wiggled around in the belt, tried again, and touched metal. She was delighted to discover that it did not drop lower as she eased her weight onto it. "Okay," she said. "I'm on board."

Safety line or not, she felt better kneeling rather than standing on the spacecraft. Despite its boxy appearance, the hull was adequately cycloid and aerodynamic. Wherever she touched it, it seemed to curve around away from her. She perched on the starboard side and gazed through the cabin windows. The door between the cargo hold and the cabin hung open. Two pieces of luggage had fallen out of the bins and lay against the downside bulkhead.

First things first: She worked her way to the communication pod, opened it, and removed as many of the parts as would come out. She also took the connectors and put everything in her vest.

The fuselage narrowed toward the tail. She moved cautiously in that direction, toward the capacitor compartments.

There was one on either side of the spacecraft, about halfway back. From her perspective, one faced up, the other down. She went after the easy one first. "Glory," she said, "can you hear me?"

"I hear you, Priscilla."

"Call me Hutch. And if you will, open the starboard compartment."

The panel popped open. The capacitor didn't look at all like the capacitors in her own lander. It was wide, silver and brown, and flattened. Hers was a dark blue box. She considered whether it would fit in Tess's compartment, and concluded it would not. But that needn't be a problem. If necessary, the installation could be done by putting them in the backseat and wiring them in.

"Glory," she said, "release the capacitor."

She heard a soft click. The unit came loose. "Okay, Kellie," she said, "send the other line down."

Kellie got it to her after several tries. Hutch tied it securely around the capacitor, knotted it, and looked up. Kellie waved.

Hutch put the assorted spare parts from the comm pod into a bag and attached it also to the line. "Okay," she said. "Take it up."

They began to pull. Hutch assisted, and the line lifted the capacitor out of its compartment and hauled it clear of the spacecraft. Kellie leaned out, trying to keep it away from the face of the cliff so it wouldn't get damaged. It swung back and forth while it rose, and then it disappeared over the crest. A moment later the line dropped back in her direction. She gathered it in.

She was just moving back into her crouch when the spacecraft dropped a few centimeters. It wasn't much, but her heart stopped. Everyone asked what had happened and whether she was okay. "Yes," she said, trying to sound composed. "Going below."

She slipped off the fuselage and dangled at the end of her line. "Lower away," she said. "Not too fast."

"Tell us when," said Kellie.

"A little more." She descended past the hull until she could see the port side. The down side.

"Glory," she said, "is the remaining capacitor secure in its compartment?"

"Yes, it is, Hutch."

"Open the compartment."

Pause. 7 can't, Hutch. It doesn't respond."

"Okay. I'm going to try it manually." She popped a panel, found the lever, and pulled on it. But it had too much give. "Not working," she said. "Kellie."

"Yes."

"There's a bar back in the tower. Have somebody get it for me."

Kellie kept talking to her, telling her that the capacitor looked good, that everything was under control, while somebody tracked the tool down. Finally, MacAllister broke in: "We've got it." And a minute later they were lowering the bar.

She caught it and went back to work.

The capacitor compartment was suspended over her head. She looked up at it and tried to insert the bar under the lip of the metal.

"Toward the top,"said Glory. "The problem's near the top."

It was difficult to work without a perch, to get any leverage on the bar when she had no place to plant her feet.

"How are you making out?" asked Chiang.

The bar was heavy. Her arms quickly got tired, and once she almost dropped it. The compartment door was jammed tight.

"Okay," she said.

She struggled on. Chiang said he thought it was taking too long and they should pull her up and let him try.

"He thinks," said Kellie, "we need more muscle down there."

"He's probably right." Hutch slid the bar into her vest and took a minute to rest her arms. Despite her boyish dimensions, she was, like all women, somewhat top-heavy, and she had to fight a tendency to turn turtle. "Let's stay with this a bit," she said. "If I can't get it, I'll be happy to give Chiang a shot."

Her vest was cutting off the blood in her armpits. She changed position, retrieved the tool, and tried again. She worked with increasing desperation and finally got the bar inside the compartment. She pulled down, pushed it in farther, and pulled again. Something gave, and the door popped open. The capacitor hung immediately overhead.

"I've got it," she said. She secured the bar to her belt, reached up into the compartment, felt around, and estimated she had a reasonable amount of clearance. She tied the line around the front and rear of the capacitor and secured it.

"Okay," she said. "Take up the slack. But not too tight."

They complied. She got out from under the compartment. "Glory," she said.

"Yes, Hutch?"

"Release the capacitor."

It dropped out of the compartment and swung back and forth in a long arc. But the line held, and her knots held. To her immense relief it did not fall to the bottom of the canyon.

After they'd recovered the second capacitor, she resisted the temptation to get out of the chasm and instead pushed up through the airlock into the spacecraft.

She salvaged as many reddimeals as she could, breakfasts, lunches, and dinners packed in self-heating containers. They weren't exactly food off the griddle, but for something to eat on the trail in an alien place, they were going to look pretty good. She picked up some coffee packs, found two bottles of wine, and some sandwiches and fruit from the refrigerator. The galley supplied unbreakable dishes, utensils, and mugs. She paused in front of the water tank. That was something they were going to need at the far end of the journey. She removed it, emptied it, folded it up, and put it in her vest.

There were other useful items: towels, washcloths, toothbrushes, soap, an extra e-suit, a lantern, a pair of Evening Star jumpsuits, more cable, two backpacks, and a medkit.

The lander slipped a few more centimeters.

She packed everything into plastic bags and they hauled them up. Kellie was urging her not to press her luck.

"Coming now," Hutch said.

And then Glory's voice: "Hutch?"

"Yes, Glory."

"Are you leaving now?"

"Yes."

"You won't be back?"

"No, Glory. I won't be back."

"Would you shut me off?"

The capacitors were marked with the manufacturer's name, Daigleton Industries, the date of manufacture, which was the previous year, and the Daigleton logo, a stylized atom.

They put them on the worktable and threw canvas over them, and MacAllister opened a private channel to Hutch. "Maybe we should leave a couple of people here to make sure they're still here when we get back."

"Who's going to take them?" she asked.

"What about the cat?"

"I can't imagine what it would do with them." She adjusted the canvas. "No, we're safer together. If this place is as dangerous as Randy thinks it is, we shouldn't leave anybody here."

"Congratulations, Hutch. Outstanding job." Marcel sounded delighted, relieved, wiped out. Had he really been following all that?

"Thanks, Marcel. We've got a bunch of survivors here."

"I see that. By the way, we have a message for you from the Academy."

"Read it," she said.

"The subject is 'Aliens on Deepsix. It says: Priscilla, you are directed to make every effort to rescue whatever inhabitants of Deep-

six you can find. Humanity requires no less of us. It's signed by the commissioner."

MacAllister snorted. "Gomez thinks she's writing for the ages. 'Humanity requires…. Poor boob. They'll be laughing at her for a thousand years."