Falling Free

Chapter 14

Silver clutched the arms of the shuttle co-pilot’s seat tightly in mixed exhilaration and fear. Her lower hands curled over the seat’s front edge, seeking purchase. Deceleration and gravity yanked at her. She spared a hand to double-check the latch of the shoulder-harness snugging her in as the shuttle altered its attitude to nose-down and the ground heaved into view. Red desert mountains, rocky and forbidding, wrinkled and buckled below them, passing faster and faster as they dropped closer.

Ti sat beside her in the commander’s chair, his hands and feet barely moving the controls in tiny, constant corrections, eyes flicking from readout to readout and then to the real horizon, totally absorbed. The atmosphere roared over the shuttle’s skin and the craft rocked violently in some passing wind shear. Silver began to see why Leo, despite his expressed anguish at the risk to them all of losing Ti downside, had not substituted Zara or one of the other pusher pilots in Ti’s stead. Even barring the foot pedals, landing on a planet was definitely a discipline apart from jetting about in free fall, especially in a vehicle nearly the size of a Habitat module.

“There’s the dry lake bed,” Ti nodded forward, addressing her without taking his eyes from his work. “Right on the horizon.”

“Will it be—very much harder than landing on a shuttleport runway?” Silver asked in worry.

“No problem,” Ti smiled. “If anything, it’s easier. It’s a big puddle—it’s one of our emergency alternate landing sites anyway. Just avoid the gullies at the north end, and we’re home free.”

“Oh,” said Silver, reassured. “I hadn’t realized you’d landed out here before.”

“Well, I haven’t, actually,” Ti murmured, “not having had an emergency yet.…” He sat up more intently, taking a tighter grip on the controls, and Silver decided perhaps she would not distract him with further conversation just now.

She peeked around the edge of her seat at Dr. Minchenko, holding down the engineer’s station behind them, to see how he was taking all this. His return smile was sardonic, as if to tease her for her anxiety, but she noticed his hand checking his seat straps, too.

The ground rushed up from below. Silver was almost sorry they had not, after all, waited for the cover of night to make this landing. At least she wouldn’t have been able to see her death coming. She could, of course, close her eyes. She closed her eyes, but opened them again almost immediately. Why miss the last experience of one’s life? She was sorry Leo had never made a pass at her. He must suffer from stress accumulation too, surely. Faster and faster…

The shuttle bumped, bounced, banged, rocked, and roared out over the flat cracked surface. She was sorry she had never made a pass at Leo. Clearly, you could die while waiting for other people to start your life for you. Her seat harness cut across her breasts as deceleration sucked her forward and the rumbling vibration rattled her teeth.

“Not quite as smooth as a runway,” Ti shouted, grinning and sparing her a bright glance at last. “But good enough for company work…”

All right, so nobody else was gibbering in terror, maybe this was the way a landing was supposed to be. They rolled to a quite demure stop in the middle of nowhere. Toothed carmine mountains ringed an empty horizon. Silence fell.

“Well,” said Ti, “here we are.…” He released his harness with a snap and turned to Dr. Minchenko, struggling up out of the engineer’s seat. “Now what? Where is she?”

“If you would be good enough,” said Dr. Minchenko, “to provide us with an exterior scan…”

A view of the horizon scrolled slowly several times through a monitor, as the minutes ticked by in Silver’s brain. The gravity, Silver discovered, was not nearly so awful as Claire had described it. It was much like the time spent under acceleration on the way to the wormhole, only very still and without vibration, or like at the Transfer Station only stronger. It would have helped if the design of the seat had matched the design of her body.

“What if Rodeo Traffic Control saw us land?” she said. “What if GalacTech gets here first?”

“It’s more frightening to think Traffic Control might have missed us,” said Ti. “As for who gets here first—well, Dr. Minchenko?”

“Mm,” he said glumly. Then he brightened, leaned forward and froze the scan, and put his finger on a small smudge in the screen, perhaps 15 kilometers distant.

“Dust devil?” said Ti, plainly trying to control his hopes.

The smudge focused. “Land rover,” said Dr. Minchenko, smiling in satisfaction. “Oh, good girl.” The smudge grew into a boiling vortex of orange dust spun up behind a speeding land rover. Five minutes later the vehicle braked to a halt beside the shuttle’s forward hatchway. The figure under the dusty bubble canopy paused to adjust a breath mask, then the bubble swung up and the side ramp swung down.

Dr. Minchenko adjusted his own breath mask firmly over his nose and, followed by Ti, rushed down the shuttle stairs to assist the frail, silver-haired woman who was struggling with an assortment of odd-shaped packages. She gave them all up to the men with evident gladness but for a thick black case shaped rather like a spoon which she clutched to her bosom in much the same way, Silver thought, as Claire clutched Andy. Dr. Minchenko shepherded his lady anxiously upward toward the airlock—her knees moved stiffly, on the stairs—and through, where they could at last pull down their masks and speak clearly.

“Are you all right, Warren?” Madame Minchenko asked.

“Perfectly,” he assured her. “I could bring almost nothing—I scarcely knew what to choose.”

“Think of the vast amounts of money we shall save on shipping charges, then.”

Silver was fascinated by the way gravity gave form to Madame Minchenko’s dress. It was a warm, dark fabric with a silver belt at the waist, and hung in soft folds about her booted ankles. The skirt swirled as Madame Minchenko stepped, echoing her agitation. “It’s utter madness. We’re too old to become refugees. I had to leave my harpsichord!”

Dr. Minchenko patted her sympathetically on the shoulder. “It wouldn’t work in free fall anyway. The little pluckers fall back into place by gravity.” His voice cracked with urgency, “But they’re trying to kill my quaddies, Ivy!”

“Yes, yes, I understand…” Madame Minchenko twitched a somewhat strained and absent smile at Silver, who hung one-handed from a strap listening. “You must be Silver?”

“Yes, Madame Minchenko,” said Silver breathlessly in her most-politest voice. This woman was quite the most aged downsider Silver had ever seen, bar Dr. Minchenko and Dr. Cay himself.

“We must go now, to get Tony,” Dr. Minchenko said. “We’ll be back as quick as we can drive. Silver will help you, she’s very good. Hold the ship!”

The two men hustled back out, and within moments the land rover was boiling off across the barren landscape.

Silver and Madame Minchenko were left regarding each other.

“Well,” said Madame Minchenko.

“I’m sorry you had to leave all your things, “ said Silver diffidently.

“H’m. Well, I can’t say I’m sorry to be leaving here.” Madame Minchenko’s glance around the shuttle’s cargo bay took in Rodeo by implication.

They shuffled forward to the pilot’s compartment and sat; the monitor scanned the monotonous horizon. Madame Minchenko still clutched her giant spoon suitcase in her lap. Silver hitched herself around in her wrong-shaped seat and tried to imagine what it would be like to be married to someone for more than twice the length of her own life. Had Madame Minchenko been young once? Surely Dr. Minchenko had been old forever.

“However did you come to be married to Dr. Minchenko?” Silver asked.

“Sometimes I wonder,” Madame Minchenko murmured dryly, half to herself.

“Were you a nurse, or a lab tech?”

She looked up with a little smile. “No, dear, I was never a bioscientist. Thank God.” Her hand caressed the black case. “I’m a musician. Of sorts.”

Silver perked with interest. “Synthavids? Do you program? We’ve had some synthavids in our library, the company library that is.”

The corner of Madame Minchenko’s mouth twisted up in a half-smile. “There’s nothing synthetic in what I do. I’m a registered historian-performer. I keep old skills alive—think of me as a live museum exhibit, somewhat in need of dusting—only a few spider webs clinging to my elbow.…” She unlatched her case and opened it to Silver’s inspection. Burnished reddish wood, satin-smooth, caught and played back the colored lights of the pilot’s compartment. Madame Minchenko lifted the instrument and tucked it under her chin. “It’s a violin.”

“I’ve seen pictures of them,” Silver offered. “Is it real?”

Madame Minchenko smiled, and drew her bow across the strings in a quick succession of notes. The music ran up and down like—like quaddie children in the gym, was the only simile Silver could think of. The volume was astounding.

“Where do those wires on top attach to the speakers?” Silver inquired, pushing up on her lower hands and craning her neck.

“There are no speakers. The sound all comes from the wood.”

“But it filled the compartment!”

Madame Minchenko’s smile became almost fierce. “This instrument could fill an entire concert hall.”

“Do you… play concerts?”

“Once, when I was very young—your age, maybe… I went to a school that taught such skills. The only school for music on my planet. A colonial world, you see, not much time for the arts. There was a competition—the winner was to travel to Earth, and have a recording career. Which he subsequently did. But the recording company underwriting the affair was only interested in the very best. I came in second. There is room for so very few…” her voice faded in a sigh. “I was left with a pleasing personal accomplishment that no one wanted to listen to. Not when they had only to plug in a disc to hear not just the best from my world, but the best in the galaxy. Fortunately, I met Warren about then. My permanent patron and audience of one. Probably as well I wasn’t trying to make a career of it, we moved so often in those days, when he was finishing school and starting work with GalacTech. I’ve done some teaching here and there, to interested antiquarians…” She tilted her head at Silver. “And did they teach you any music, with all the things they’ve been teaching you up on that satellite?”

“We learned some songs when we were little,” said Silver shyly. “And then there were the flute-toots. But they didn’t last long.”

“Flute-toots?”

“Little plastic things you blew in. They were real. One of the creche-mothers brought them up when I was about, oh, eight. But then they sort of got all over the place, and people were complaining about the, um, tooting. So she had to take them all back.”

“I see. Warren never mentioned the flute-toots.”

“Oh.”

Madame Minchenko’s eyebrows quirked. “Ah… what sort of songs?”

“Oh…” Silver drew breath, and sang, “Roy G. Biv, Roy G. Biv, he’s the color quaddie that the spectrum gives; Red-orange-yellow, green and blue, indigo, violet, all for you—” she broke off, flushing. Her voice sounded so wavery and weak, compared to that astonishing violin.

“I see,” said Madame Minchenko in a strangely choked voice. Her eyes danced, though, so Silver didn’t think she was offended. “Oh, Warren,” she sighed, “the things you have to answer for…”

“May I,” Silver began, and stopped. Surely she would not be permitted to touch that lavish antique. What if she forgot to hold onto it for a moment and the gravity pulled it from her hands?

“Try it?” Madame Minchenko finished her thought. “Why not? We appear to have a little time to kill, here.”

“I’m afraid—”

“Tut. Oh, I used to protect this one. It sat unplayed for years, locked up in climate-controlled vaults… dead. Then of late I began to wonder what I was saving it for. Here, now. Raise your chin, so; tuck, so,” Madame Minchenko curled Silver’s fingers around the violin’s neck. “What nice long fingers you have, dear. And, er… what a lot of them. I wonder…”

“What?” asked Silver as Madame Minchenko trailed off.

“Hm? Oh. I was just having a mental picture of a quaddie in free fall with a twelve-string guitar. If you weren’t squashed into a chair as you are now you could bring that lower hand up…”

It was a trick of the light, perhaps, of Rodeo’s westering sun sinking toward the sawtoothed horizon and sending its red beams through the cabin windows, but Madame Minchenko’s eyes seemed to gleam. “Now arch your fingers, so…”

Fire.

The first problem had been to find enough pure scrap titanium around the Habitat to add to the mass of the ruined vortex mirror to allow for the inevitable losses during refabrication. A forty-percent extra mass margin would have been enough for Leo to feel comfortable with.

There ought to have been titanium storage tanks for nasty corrosive liquids—a single, say, hundred-liter tank would have done the trick—conduits, valves, something. For the first desperate hour of scrounging Leo was convinced his plan would come to grief right there in Step One. Then he found it in, of all places, Nutrition; a cooler full of titanium storage canisters massing a good half-kilo apiece. Their varied contents were hastily dumped into every substitute container Leo and his quaddie raiders could find. “Clean-up,” Leo had called guiltily over his shoulder to the appalled quaddie girl now running Nutrition, “is left as an exercise for the student.”

The second problem had been to find a place to work. Pramod had pointed out one of the abandoned Habitat modules, a cylinder some four meters in diameter. It was the work of another two hours to tear holes in the side for entry and pack one end of it with all the conductive scrap metal mass they could find. The mass was then surfaced with more abandoned Habitat module skin, pounded out and rendered as nearly glass-smooth as they could make it in a shallow concave bowl of carefully calculated arc that spanned the diameter of the module.

Now their mass of scrap titanium hung weightless in the center of the module. The broken-up pieces of the vortex mirror and the flattened-out food canisters were all bound together by a spool of pure titanium wire some brilliant quaddie child had produced for them out of Stores. The dense grey metal glittered and glowed in their work-lights and the reflection from a shaft of hard-edged sunlight falling through one of their entry holes.

Leo glanced around the chamber one last time. Four worksuited quaddies each manned a laser unit braced around the walls, bracketing the titanium mass. Leo’s measuring instruments floated tethered to his belt, ready to his pressure-gloved hands. It was time. Leo touched his helmet control, darkening his faceplate.

“Commence firing,” said Leo into his suit comm. Four beams of laser light lanced out in unison, pouring into the scrap. For the first few minutes, nothing appeared to be happening. Then it began to glow, dark red, bright red, yellow, white—then, visibly, one of the ex-food canisters began to sag, flowing into the jumble. The quaddies continued to pour in the energy.

The mass was beginning to drift slightly, one of Leo’s readouts told him, although the effect was not yet visible to the naked eye. “Unit Four, power-up about ten percent,” Leo instructed. One of the quaddies flashed a lower palm in acknowledgement and touched his control box. The drift stopped. Good, his bracketing was working. Leo had had a horrid vision of the molten mass of metal drifting off into the side wall, or worse, fatally brushing into somebody, but the very beams that melted it seemed enough to control its motion, at least in the absence of stronger sources of momentum.

Now the melt was obvious, the metal becoming a white glowing blob of liquid floating in the vacuum, struggling toward the shape of a perfect sphere. Boy, is that stuff ever going to be pure when we’re done, Leo reflected with satisfaction.

He checked his monitoring devices. Now they were coming up on a moment of critical judgment; when to stop? They must pour in enough energy to achieve an absolutely uniform melt, no funny lumps left in the middle of the gravy. But not too much; even though it was not visible to the eye Leo knew there was metal vapor pouring off that bubble now, part of his calculated loss.

More importantly, looking ahead to the next step—every kilocalorie they dumped into that titanium mass was going to have to be brought back out. Planetside, the shape he was trying to get would have been formed against a copper mold, with lots and lots of water to carry away the heat at the desired rate, in this case rapidly; single-crystal splat-cooling, it was called. Well, at least he’d figured out how to achieve the splat part of it.…

“Cease firing,” Leo ordered.

And there it hung, their sphere of molten metal, blue-white with the violent heat energy contained within it, perfect. Leo checked and re-checked its centered position, and had laser number two give it one more half-second blast not for melt but for momentum’s sake.

“All right,” said Leo into his suit comm. “Now let’s get everything out of this module that’s going out, and double-check everything that’s staying. Last thing we need now is for somebody to drop his wrench in the soup pot, right?”

Leo joined the quaddies in shoving their equipment unceremoniously out the holes torn in the side of the module. Two of his laser operators went with it, two stayed with Leo. Leo checked centering again, and then they all strapped themselves to the walls.

Leo switched channels in his suit comm. “Ready, Zara?” he called.

“Ready, Leo,” the quaddie pilot responded from her pusher, now attached to the gutted module’s stern.

“Now remember, slow and gentle does it. But firm. Pretend your pusher is a scalpel, and you’re just about to operate on one of your friends or something.”

“Right, Leo.” There was a grin in her voice.

Don’t swagger, girl, Leo prayed inwardly. “Go when you’re ready.”

“Going. Hang on up there!” There was at first no perceivable change. Then Leo’s harness straps began to tug gently at him. It was the Habitat module, not the molten ball of titanium, that was moving, Leo reminded himself. The metal did not drift; it was the back wall that moved forward and engulfed it.

It was working, by God it was working! The metal bubble touched the back wall, spread out, and settled into its shallow bowl mold.

“Increase acceleration by the first increment,” Leo called into his comm. The pusher powered up, and the molten titanium circle spread, its edges growing toward the desired diameter some three meters wide, already losing its bright glow. Creating a titanium blank of controlled thickness, ready (after cooling) for explosive molding into its final subtle form. “Steady on. That does it!”

Splat-cooling? Well, not exactly. Leo was uncomfortably aware that they were probably not going to achieve a perfect internal single-crystal freeze. But it would be good, good enough—as long as it was good enough that they didn’t have to melt it down and start all over again, that was the most Leo dared pray for. They might, barely, have time to make one of these suckers. Not two. And when was the threatened response from Rodeo arriving? Soon, surely.

He wondered briefly what the new gravity technology was going to do to fabrication problems in space like this. Revolutionize seemed too mild a term, certainly. Too bad we didn’t have some now, he thought. Still—he grinned, concealed within his helmet—they were doing all right.

He pointed his temperature gauge at the back wall. The piece was cooling almost as rapidly as he had hoped. They were still due for a couple of hours of driving around until it had dumped enough heat to remove from the wall and handle without danger of deformation.

“All right, Bobbi, I’m leaving you and Zara in charge here,” Leo said. “It’s looking good. When the temperature drops to about five hundred degrees centigrade, bring it on back. We’ll try to be ready for the final cooling and the second phase of the shaping.”

Carefully, trying not to add excess vibration to the walls, Leo loosed his harness and climbed to the exit hole. From this distance he had a fine view of the D-620, now more than half loaded, and Rodeo beyond. Better go now, before the view became more distant than his suit jets could close.

He activated his jets and zipped quickly away from the side of the still-gently-accelerating module-and-pusher unit. It chugged off, looking a drunken, jury-rigged wreck indeed, concealing hope in its heart.

Leo aimed toward the Habitat, and Phase II of his Jumpships-Repaired-While-U-Wait scheme.

It was sunset on the dry lake bed. Silver gazed anxiously into the monitor in the shuttle control cabin as it swept the horizon, brightening and darkening each time the red ball of the sun rolled past.

“They can’t possibly be back for at least another hour,” Madame Minchenko, watching her, pointed out, “in the best case.”

“That’s not who I’m looking for,” answered Silver. “Hm.” Madame Minchenko drummed her long, age-sculptured fingers on the console, unlatched and tilted back the co-pilot’s seat, and stared thoughtfully at the cabin roof. “No, I suppose not. Still—if GalacTech traffic control saw you land and sent out a jetcopter to investigate, they should have been here before now. Perhaps they missed your landing after all.”

“Perhaps they’re just not very organized,” suggested Silver, “and they’ll be along any minute.”

Madame Minchenko sighed. “All too likely.” She regarded Silver, pursing her lips. “And what are you supposed to do in that case?”

“I have a weapon.” Silver touched the laser-solderer, lying seductively on the console before the pilot-commander’s seat in which she sprawled. “But I’d rather not shoot anybody else. Not if I can help it.”

“Anybody else?” There was a shade more respect in Madame Minchenko’s voice.

Shooting people was such a stupid activity, why should everybody—anybody!—be so impressed? Silver wondered irritably. You would think she had done something truly great, like discover a new treatment for black stem-rot. Her mouth tightened.

Then her lips parted, and she leaned forward to stare into the monitor. “Oh, oh. Here comes a ground car.”

“Not our boys already, surely,” said Madame Minchenko in some unease. “Has something gone wrong, I wonder?”

“It’s not your land rover.” Silver fiddled with the resolution. The slanting sunlight poured through the dust, turning it into a glowing red smokescreen. “I think… it’s a GalacTech Security groundcar.”

“Oh, dear.” Madame Minchenko sat up straight. “Now what?”

“We don’t open the hatches, anyway. No matter what.”

In a few minutes the groundcar pulled up about fifty meters from the shuttle. An antenna rose from its roof and quivered demandingly. Silver switched on the comm—it was so irritating, not to have the full use of her lower arms—and called up a menu of the comm channels from the computer. The shuttle seemed to have access to an inordinate number of them. Security audio was 9999. She tuned them in.

“—by God! Hey, you in there—answer!”

“Yes, what do you want?” said Silver.

There was a spluttery pause. “Why didn’t you answer?”

“I didn’t know you were calling me,” Silver answered logically.

“Yeah, well—this freight shuttle is the property of GalacTech.”

“So am I. So what?”

“Eh…? Look, lady, this is Sergeant Fors of GalacTech Security. You have to disembark and turn this shuttle over to us.”

A voice in the background, not quite sufficiently muffled, inquired, “Hey, Bern—d’you think we’ll get the ten percent bonus for recovering stolen property on this one?”

“Dream on,” growled another voice. “Nobody’s gonna give us a quarter million.”

Madame Minchenko held up a hand, and leaned forward to cut in, quavering, “Young man, this is Ivy Minchenko. My husband, Dr. Minchenko, has commandeered this craft in order to respond to an urgent medical emergency. Not only is this his right, it’s his legally compelled duty—and you are required by GalacTech regulation to assist, not hinder him.”

A somewhat baffled growl greeted this. “I’m required to take this shuttle back. Those are my orders. Nobody told me anything about any medical emergency.”

“Well, I’m telling you!”

The background voice again, “… it’s just a couple of women. Come on!”

The sergeant: “Are you going to open the hatch, lady?”

Silver did not respond. Madame Minchenko raised an inquiring eyebrow, and Silver shook her head silently. Madame Minchenko sighed and nodded.

The sergeant repeated his demands, his voice fraying—he stopped just short, Silver felt, of degenerating into obscenities. After a minute or two he broke off. After a few more minutes the doors of the ground car winged up and the three men, now wearing breath masks, clambered out to stamp over and stare up at the hatches of the shuttle high over their heads. They returned to the groundcar, got in—it circled. Going away? Silver hoped against hope. No, it came up and parked again under the forward shuttle hatch. Two of the men rummaged in the back for tools, then climbed to the car’s roof.

“They’ve got some kind of cutting things,” said Silver in alarm. “They must be going to try to cut their way in.”

Banging reverberated through the shuttle. Madame Minchenko nodded toward the laser-solderer. “Is it time for that?” she asked fearfully.

Silver shook her head unhappily. “No. Not again. Besides, I can’t let them damage the ship either—it’s got to stay spaceworthy or we can’t get home.”

She had watched Ti… She inhaled deeply and reached for the shuttle controls. The foot pedals were hopelessly awkward to grope for, she would have to get along without them. Right engine, activate; left engine, activate—a purr ran through the ship. Brakes—there, surely. She pulled the lever gently to the “release” position. Nothing happened.

Then the shuttle lurched forward. Frightened at the abrupt motion, Silver hit the brake lever again and the ship rocked to a halt. She searched the outside monitors wildly. Where—?

The shuttle’s starboard airfoil had swept over the roof of the Security groundcar, missing it by half a meter. Silver realized with a guilty shudder that she should have checked its height before she began to move. She might have torn the wing right off, with ghastly chaining consequences to them all.

The Security guards were nowhere to be seen—no, there they were, scattered out onto the dry lake bed. One picked himself up out of the dirt and started back toward the groundcar. Now what? If she parked, or even rolled some distance and parked, they would only try again. It couldn’t take too many more attempts till they got smart and shot out the shuttle’s tires or otherwise immobilized it. A dangerously unstable stand-off.

Silver sucked on her lower lip. Then, leaning forward awkwardly in a seat never designed for quaddies, she released the brakes partway and powered up the port engine. The shuttle shuddered a few meters farther forward, skidding and yawing. Behind them, the monitor showed the groundcar half obscured by orange dust kicked by the exhaust, its image wavering in the heat of it.

She set the brakes as hard as they would go and powered up the port engine yet more. Its purr became a whine—she dared not bring it to the howling pitch Ti had used during landing, who knew what would happen then?

The groundcar’s plastic canopy cracked in a crazed starburst and began to sag. If Leo had been right in his description of that hydrocarbon fuel they used downside here for their vehicles, in just a second more she ought to get…

A yellow fireball engulfed the groundcar, momentarily brighter than the setting sun. Pieces flew off in all directions, arcing and bouncing fantastically in the gravity field. A glance at her monitors showed Silver the Security men now all running in the other direction.

Silver powered down the port engine, released the brakes, and let the shuttle roll forward across the hard-baked mud. Fortunately, the old lake bed was quite uniform, so she didn’t have to worry about the fine points of shuttle operation such as steering.

One of the Security men ran after them for a minute or two, waving his arms, but he fell behind quickly. She let the shuttle roll on for a couple of kilometers, braked again, and shut the engines off.

“Well,” she sighed, “that takes care of them.”

“It certainly does,” said Madame Minchenko faintly, adjusting the monitor magnification for a last glance behind. A column of black smoke and a dying orange glow in the distant gathering dusk marked their former parking place.

“I hope all their breath masks were well filled,” Silver added.

“Oh, dear,” said Madame Minchenko. “Perhaps we ought to go back and… do something. Surely they’ll have the sense to stay with their car and wait for help, though, and not try to walk off into the desert. The company safety vids always emphasize that. ‘Stay with your vehicle and wait for Search and Rescue.’ “

“Aren’t they supposed to be Search and Rescue?” Silver studied the tiny images in the monitor. “Not much vehicle left. But they all three seem to be staying there. Well…” she shook her head. “It’s too dangerous for us to try and pick them up. But when Ti and the doctor get back with Tony, maybe the security guards could have your land rover to go home in. If, um, nobody else gets here first.”

“Oh,” said Madame Minchenko, “that’s true. Good idea. I feel much better.” She peered reflectively into the monitor. “Poor fellows.”

Ice.

Leo watched from the sealed control booth overlooking the Habitat freight bay as four worksuited quaddies eased the intact vortex mirror taken from the D-620’s second Necklin rod through the hatch from Outside. The mirror was an awkward object to handle, in effect an enormous shallow titanium funnel, three meters in diameter and a centimeter thick at its broad lip, mathematically curved and thickening to about two centimeters at the central, closed dip. A lovely curve, but definitely non-standard, a fact Leo’s re-fabrication ploy must needs cope with.

The undamaged mirror was jockeyed into place, nested into a squiggle of freezer coils. The spacesuited quaddies exited. From the control booth, Leo sealed the Outside hatch and set the air to pump back into the loading bay. In his anxiety Leo literally popped out of the control booth, with a whoosh of air from the remaining pressure differential, and had to work his jaw to clear his ears.

The only freezer coils big enough to be adequate to the task had been found by Bobbi in a moment of inspiration, once more in Nutrition. The quaddie girl running the department had moaned when she saw Leo and his work gang approach again. They had ruthlessly ripped the guts out of her biggest freezer compartment and carried them off to their work space, in the largest available docking module now installed as part of the D-620. Less than a quarter of the final Habitat re-assembly was left to go, Leo estimated, despite the fact that he’d pulled a dozen of the best workers onto this project.

In a few minutes three of his quaddies joined Leo in the freight bay. Leo checked them over. They were bundled up in extra T-shirts and shorts and long-sleeved coveralls left by the evicted downsiders, with the legs wrapped tight to their lower arms and secured by elastic bands. They had scrounged enough gloves to go around; good, Leo had been worried about frostbite with all those exposed fingers. His breath smoked in the chilled air.

“All right, Pramod, we’re ready to roll. Bring up the water hoses.”

Pramod unrolled several lengths of tubing and gave them to the waiting quaddies; another quaddie ran a final check of their connections to the nearest water spigot. Leo switched on the freezer coils and took a hose.

“All right, kids, watch me and I’ll show you the trick of it. You must bleed the water slowly onto the cold surfaces, avoiding splash into the air; at the same time you must keep it going constantly enough so that your hoses don’t freeze up. If you feel your fingers going numb, take a short break in the next chamber. We don’t need any injuries out of this.”

Leo turned to the backside of the vortex mirror, nestled among but not touching the freezer coils. The mirror had been in the shade for the last several hours Outside, and was good and cold now. He thumbed his valve and let a silvery blob of water flow onto the mirror’s surface. It spread out in swift feathers of ice. He tried some drops on the coils; they froze even faster.

“All right, just like that. Start building up the ice mold around the mirror. Make it as solid as you can, no air pockets. Don’t forget to place the little tube to let the air evacuate from the die chamber, later.”

“How thick should it be?” asked Pramod, following suit with his hose and watching in fascination as the ice formed.

“At least one meter. At a minimum the mass of the ice must be equal to the mass of the metal. Since we’ve only got one shot at this, we’ll go for at least twice the mass of the metal. We aren’t going to be able to recover any of this water, unfortunately. I want to double-check our water reserves, because two meters thick would certainly be better, if we can spare it.”

“However did you think of this?” asked Pramod in an awed tone.

Leo snorted, as he realized Pramod had the impression that he was making this entire engineering procedure up out of his head in the heat of the moment. “I didn’t invent it. I read about it. It’s an old method they used to use for preliminary test designs, before fractal theory was perfected and computer simulations improved to today’s standards.”

“Oh.” Pramod sounded rather disappointed.

Leo grinned. “If you ever have to make a choice between learning and inspiration, boy, choose learning. It works more of the time.”

I hope. Critically, Leo drew back and watched his quaddies work. Pramod had two hoses, one in each set of hands, and was rapidly alternating between them, blob after blob of water flowing onto the coils and the mirror, the ice already starting to thicken visibly. So far he hadn’t lost a drop. Leo heaved a weary sigh of relief; it seemed he could safely delegate this part of the task. He gave Pramod a high sign, and left the bay to pursue a part of the job he dared not delegate to anyone else.

Leo got lost twice, threading his way through the Habitat to Toxic Stores, and he’d designed the reconfiguration himself. It was no wonder he passed so many bewildered-looking quaddies on the way. Everyone seemed frantically busy; on the principle of misery-loves-company, Leo could only approve.

Toxic Stores was a chill module sharing no connections whatsoever with the rest of the Habitat but a triple-chambered and always-closed airlock of thick steel. Leo entered to meet one of his own welding and joining gang quaddies still assigned to Habitat reconfiguration on his way out.

“How’s it going, Agba?” Leo asked him.

“Pretty good.” Agba looked tired. His tan face and skin were marked with red lines, telltales of recent and prolonged time in his worksuit. “Those stupid frozen clamps were really slowing us up, but we’re just about to the end of them. How’s your thing going?”

“All right so far. I came in to prepare the explosive, we’re that far along. Do you remember where the devil in all this—” the module’s curved walls were packed with supplies, “we keep the slurry explosive?”

“It was over there,” Agba pointed.

“Good—” Leo’s stomach shrank suddenly. “What do you mean, was?” He only means it’s been moved, Leo suggested hopefully to himself.

“Well, we’ve been using it up at a pretty good clip, blowing open clamps.”

“Blowing them open? I thought you were cutting them off.”

“We were, but then Tabbi figured out how to pack a small charge that cracked them apart on the line of the vacuum fuse. About half the time they’re reusable. The other half they’re no more ruined than if we’d cut “em.” Agba looked quite proud of himself.

“You haven’t used it all for that, surely!”

“Well, there was a little spillage. Outside, of course,” Agba, misapprehending, added in response to Leo’s horrified look. He held out a sealed half-liter flask to Leo’s inspection. “This is the last of it. I figure it will just about finish the job.”

“Nng!” Leo’s snatching hands closed around the bottle and clutched it to his stomach like a man smothering a grenade. “I need that! I have to have it!” I have to have ten times that much! his thought howled silently.

“Oh,” said Agba. “Sorry.” He gave Leo a look of limpid innocence. “Does this mean we have to go back to cutting clamps?”

“Yes,” squeaked Leo. “Go,” he added. Yes, before he exploded himself.

Agba, with an uncertain smile, ducked back out the airlock. It sealed, leaving Leo alone a moment to hyperventilate in peace.

Think, man, think, Leo told himself. Don’t panic. There was something, some elusive fact or factor in the back of his mind, trying to tell him this wasn’t the end, but he could not at present recall… Unfortunately, a careful mental review of his calculations, keeping track on his fingers (oh, to be a quaddie!) only confirmed his initial fear.

The explosive fabrication of the titanium blank into the complex shape of the vortex mirror required, besides an assortment of spacers, rings, and clamps, three main parts; the ice die, the metal blank, and the explosive to marry the two. Shotgun wedding indeed. And what is the most important leg of a three-legged stool? The one that is missing, of course. And he’d thought the slurry explosive was going to be the easy part…

Forlorn, Leo began systematically going around the Toxic Stores module, checking its contents. An extra flask of slurry explosive might have been misplaced somewhere. Alas, the quaddies were all too conscientious in their inventory control. Each bin contained only what its label proclaimed, no more, no less. Agba had even updated the label on the bin just now; Contents, Slurry Explosive Type B-2, one-half liter flasks. Quantity, 0.

About this time Leo stumbled, literally, over a barrel of gasoline. No, some six barrels of the damn stuff, which had somehow washed up here, now strapped firmly to the walls. God knew where the rest of the hundred tons had gone. Leo wished it all in Hell, where it might at least be of some conceivable use. He would gladly trade the whole hundred tons of it for four aspirins. A hundred tons of gasoline, of which—

Leo blinked, and let out an “aaah” of exultation.

Of which a liter or so, mixed with tetranitro methane, would make an even more powerful explosive.

He would have to look it up, to be sure—he would have to look up the exact proportions in any case—but he was certain he had remembered aright. Learning and inspiration, that was the best combination of all. Tetranitro methane was used as an emergency oxygen source in several Habitat and pusher systems. It yielded more O2 per cc than liquid oxygen, without the temperature and pressure problems of storage, in a highly refined version of the early tetranitro methane candles which, when burned, gave off oxygen. Now—oh, God—if only the TNM hadn’t all been used by somebody, to—to blow up balloons for quaddie children or some damn thing—they had been losing air during the Habitat reconfiguration… Pausing only to put the flask back in its bin and arrange a sign on the barrels reading, in large red print, THIS IS LEO GRAF’S GASOLINE. IF ANYONE ELSE TOUCHES IT HE WILL BREAK ALL THEIR ARMS, he raced out of the Toxic Stores module and away to find the nearest working library computer terminal.