The Engines Of God

6 On board Alpha. Sunday, June 6; 1830 hours

Hutch was glad to get back to the Winckelmann. It was an ungainly, modular vehicle, little more than a set of rings (three on this voyage) connected to a central spine. She activated its lights as she approached. They illuminated the shuttle bay and silhouetted arrays of sensors and maintenance pods and antennas. The ship was warm and familiar, a utilitarian and undeniably human design floating against a starry backdrop rendered suddenly unsettling.

The moods of deep space didn't usually affect her as they did many others who traveled between the worlds. But tonight, ah tonight: the ship looked good. She'd have liked company, somebody to talk to, someone to fill up the spaces in the vessel. But she was nevertheless relieved to be home, where she could lock doors and do a simmy.

The Academy seal, a scroll and lamp framing the blue earth of the United World, was emblazoned prominently on the A ring, near the bridge.

The moon and the planet floated in a black, starless sky. Quraqua lay on the edge of the Void, the great rift that yawned between the Orion and Sagittarius Arms. The opposite shore was six thousand light-years away, visible only as a dim glow. Hutch wondered about the effect on a developing species of a sky half-crowded with stars and half-empty.

Alpha entered B ring, and settled into its cradle. The big doors swung satisfactorily shut on the night. She pulled off her Flickinger harness and stowed it in the compartment behind her seat. Five minutes later, she was on the bridge.

The message board blinked. There was a transmission in the holding tray from the Temple site, routine precedence. Too soon for Richard to have arrived. Time enough to look at it later. She went to her quarters, removed her work clothes, and stepped into the shower. The spray felt good.

Afterward, still dripping, she ordered steak. Her cabin was decorated with pictures of old friends, of herself and Richard on Pinnacle, of Alpha floating nose to nose with the Great Hexagon Monument near Arcturus, of a group of planetologists whom she'd joined for a beach party at Bethesda (and who had hoisted her on their shoulders for the photo). The air was sweet with the breath of green plants, lemon thyme and bayberry and honeysuckle.

The demon moon rolled across her view. Oz, on the far side, was not visible. Annoyed at her own disquiet, she closed the panel.

Richard had given her a medallion years earlier, a lovely piece of platinum, a copy of a talisman he'd brought back from Quraqua. This was in the days before Oz had been found. A winged beast and a six-pointed star were engraved on one side, and a gracefully curved arch on the other. Arcane symbols lined the rim. The beast and the star designate love, Richard had told her, and the arch is prosperity. Both will be yours as long as you wear the medallion.

Tonight, it was soothing. She looped it over her shoulders. Local magic.

She dressed and, when the dinner bell rang, strolled by the galley to pick up her steak. She added a bottle of wine, and took everything to the bridge.

The message board was still blinking.

She sliced off a piece of meat, tasted it, and opened the bottle. It was a Chablis. Then she keyed the message, and got a trim, blond female with spectacular good looks. «Winckelmann» she said, "my name is Allegri. I'll be coordinating the evacuation. We have fourteen people to take off. Plus Dr. Wald, who is enroute here now. We want to begin departures in forty-eight hours.

"I know that's later than the original plan, but we've still got work to do. For your information, Kosmik will begin operations at ten A.M. our time Friday. Temple time. This transmission contains time equivalents. We want to be out with twenty-four hours to spare. We also have artifacts to move, and we should start with those as soon as possible. Please contact me when you can."

The screen blanked.

Hutch pushed back in her chair. People in these remote places usually took the time to say hello. She wondered whether Allegri had been underwater too long.

She put Quraqua on the main display, went to mag 32.

Sunlight flooded the cloud cover, illuminating a world of mud-colored prairies, vast green forests, sprawling deserts, and winding mountain chains. Neither of its oceans was visible. There were two, both shallow, and not connected. It was generally a parched world, a condition that Kosmik hoped to cure during the first phase of its terraforming operation, which it had dubbed Project Hope.

The southern ocean surrounded the icecap, creating a circular body of water averaging about five hundred kilometers in width. Beyond, several finger-shaped seas pushed north. The longest of these was Yakata, a local term meaning Recreational Center for the Gods. It penetrated about three thousand kilometers into the land mass. At its northernmost extremity, just offshore, lay the Temple of the Winds.

She'd read somewhere that Quraqua was thought to be entering an ice age. Whether true or not, both caps were quite healthy. When they went, they would make a substantial splash. And, if the experts were right, Quraqua would get instant oceans.

Ten o'clock Friday morning, Temple time. When was that? She called up the data Allegri had sent.

Quraqua's day was twenty hours, thirty-two minutes and eighteen seconds long. Everyone understood the psychological importance of using the familiar twenty-four hour clock, but adjustments were necessary whenever humans set down for an extended stay on a new world. On Quraqua, timepieces were set to run until 10:16:09, A.M. and P.M. Then they leaped forward to noon and midnight. This method eliminated time from both sleeping and waking cycles.

Coincidentally, it was now Sunday at the Temple of the Winds, just as it was on Wink. Terraforming would begin in something over ninety hours. Henry Jacobi wanted to complete the evacuation with a one-day safety margin. And they had two shuttles to work with. It would be easy.

But she was uncomfortable. It did not look as though getting clear was at the top of Jacobi's agenda. She directed the navigational computer to lift Wink out of lunar orbit and make for Quraqua. She entered both deadlines into her personal chronometer, and set the ship's clocks to correspond to Temple time.

The navigation display warned her that the ship would leave orbit in thirty-six minutes.

Hutch finished her dinner, and swept the leavings into the vacuum tube. Then she switched on a comedy and pushed back to watch. But by the time the boosters fired, and the ship began to move, she was asleep.

She woke to a chime. Incoming transmission.

The lights were dim. She'd slept seven hours.

Richard appeared on the monitor. "Hello," he said. "How are we doing?"

"Okay."

He looked troubled, in the way that he did when he was about to tell her something he knew she wouldn't like. "Listen, Hutch, they're in a bad way here. There are several sites beneath the Temple. The one we're all interested in is down deep, and they're just now getting into it. We need to use all the time we have available. The shuttle that they've got here will accommodate three people plus the pilot. Figure out a schedule to get everyone out. But leave us the maximum working time."

Hutch let her exasperation show. "Richard, that's crazy."

"Probably. But they could be very close. They're almost into the Lower Temple. Hutch, it dates from 9000 B.C., the same era as the construction on the moon. We need to get a look at it. We can't just leave it here to be destroyed."

Hutch disagreed. "I think our first priority is to get out before the water rises."

"We will, Hutch. But meantime we have to make every day count."

"God damn it."

Richard smiled patiently. "Hutch, we won't take any chances. You have my word. But I need you to help me. Okay?"

And she thought: / should be grateful he's not refusing to leave the surface, and daring Kosmik to drown him. His inherent belief in the decency of other people had led him astray before. "I'll see what I can do," she said. "Richard,

who's running the Kosmik operation here? Do you know?" "The director's name is Melanie Truscott. I don't know anything about her. She's not very popular with Henry." "I don't suppose she would be. Where's her headquarters?" "Just a minute." He turned aside, spoke to someone.

"They've got an orbiter. It answers to Kosmik Station."

Suspicion filled his eyes. "Why do you ask?" "Curiosity. I'll be down in a few hours." "Hutch," he said, "don't get involved in this. Okay?" "I am involved, Richard."

A wispy ring circled Quraqua. It was visible only when sunlight struck it at a given angle. Then it glowed with the transient beauty of a rainbow. The ring was in fact composed primarily of ice, and it was not a natural feature. Its components had been brought in—were still gliding in—from the rings of the gas giant Bellatrix V. Several Kosmik tugs had gone out there, extracted chunks of ice, and launched them toward Quraqua. These were "snowballs." They were intercepted, herded by other tugs, and placed in orbit, where they would be used to provide additional water for the planet. At zero hour, Kosmik would melt the caps, and slice the snowballs into confetti, and start them down. Estimates indicated it would rain on Quraqua for six years. Terrestrial forms would be seeded, and if all went well, a new ecology would take hold. Within five decades the first human set-tiers could claim a world that would be, if not a garden, at least manageable. Wink's sensors counted more than a thousand of the icy bodies already in orbit, and two more approaching.

Hutch had been around bureaucracies enough to know that the fifty-year figure was optimistic. She suspected there'd be no one here for a century. And she thought of a remark attributed to Caseway: "It is now a race between our greenhouse on Earth and the greenhouse on Quraqua."

Wink had entered orbit.

The world looked gray and unpromising.

Who would have believed that the second Earth would be so hard to find? That in all those light-years there would be so little? Pinnacle's gravity was too extreme, Nok was already home to an intelligent race from whom humans kept their existence a closely guarded secret. And one other habitable world she'd heard about circled an unstable star. Other than those, there had been nothing.

The search would go on. Meanwhile, this cold, bitter place was all they had.

Kosmik Station was a bright star in the southern skies. It was a scaled-down version of IMAC, the terrestrial space station, twin wheels rotating in opposite directions, joined by a network of struts, the whole connected to a thick hub.

Its lights were pale in the planetary glow. A utility vehicle drifted toward it.

She ran Melanie Truscott's name through the computer.

b. Dayton, Ohio. December 11, 2161

Married Hart Brinker, then account executive with banking firm Caswell & Simms, 2183. Marriage not renewed, 2188. No issue.

B.S., Astronomy, Wesleyan, 2182; M.S. and Ph.D., Plan-etary Engineering, University of Virginia, 2184 and 2186 respectively.

Instructor, UV, 2185-88

Lobbyist for various environmental causes, 2188-92

Northwestern Regional Commissioner, Dept. of the Interior, North American Union, 2192-93

Nuclear Power Liaison to UW, 2193-95

2195-97: Gained reputation as chief planner for the {partially] successful North African and Amazon basin reclamation projects.

Consultant to numerous environmental causes, and to Kosmik, 2197-99.

Has written extensively on greenhouse, and changing climatic conditions in the oceans. Longtime advocate of population reduction by government decree.

Arrested on four occasions for protesting wetland and endangered species policies.

The remarks section revealed that Truscott was a member of numerous professional organizations. Still active with the International Forest Reclamation Project, the Earth Foundation, and Interworld.

Once intervened in an attack by a gang of toughs on an elderly man in Newark. Was knifed in the process. Took a gun from one gang member and shot him dead.

During the Denver earthquake of 88, she'd directed traffic out of a collapsing theater.

No shy flower here.

Hutch brought up Truscott's image: she was tall, with a high forehead, and laser eyes. Dark brown hair and lush complexion. She might still be described as attractive, but she had somewhere acquired a hard edge. Accustomed to command. Nevertheless she looked like a woman who knew how to have a good time. More significant, Hutch could see no give in her.

She sighed and opened a channel to the orbiter. The screen cleared to the Kosmik emblem, the torch of knowledge within a planetary ring. Then a beefy, bearded man gazed at her. "Kosmik Station," he said. "What do you want, WinckelmannT'

He was big-bellied, gruff. The sleeves of a loud green shirt were rolled to his forearms. His eyes were small and hard, and they locked on her. He radiated boredom.

"I thought you might like to know I'm in the area." She kept her voice level. "If you have ships operating nearby, I'd appreciate a schedule."

He appraised her with cool disdain. "I'll see to it."

"I have commencement of blasting Friday, ten hundred hours Temple time." She used the word «blasting» sweetly, suspecting it would irritate the beefy man, for whom the correct terminology was surgery. "Confirm, please."

"That is correct, Winckelmann. There has been no change." He glanced aside, and nodded. "The director wants to speak with you. I'm going to patch you through."

Hutch mustered her most amicable smile. "Nice talking to you."

His expression hardened. The man lived very close to the surface. No deep contemplative waters.

His image gave way to a Melanie Truscott who looked somewhat older than the pictures Hutchins had seen. This Truscott was not so well-pressed, not quite so imperial. "Glad you're here, Winckelmann." She smiled pleasantly, but it was a smile that came down from a considerable height. "You're—?"

"— Priscilla Hutchins. Ship's captain."

"Good to meet you, Priscilla." The older woman's tone was casual. "Do you have any objection if I record the conversation?"

That meant this was going to be CYA. Get on the record in case there are court proceedings later. "No," she said. "That's fine."

"Thank you. We've been expecting you. Do you need assistance getting your people off?"

"Thanks. There are only a handful, and we have two shuttles."

"Very good. You should be aware that the initial phase of Project Hope involves nuking the icecaps." She looked pointedly at Hutch. "The Academy team still seems to have most of their equipment at the site."

"That could be. I haven't been down there yet."

"Yes." Her voice took on a confidential tone. As if there were foolishness abroad that required immediate attention by the two of them. "I've spoken with Dr. Jacobi. He is aware that destruction at the Temple site will be total." She paused. "The Yakata is open water all the way to the cap. That entire coastline will be rearranged. You understand what I'm saying?"

"I understand." Hutch did not need to inject concern into her voice. But she let the woman see she was doubtful. "What you need to be aware of is that they are close to a major discovery down there. There's a possibility I may not be able to get them all off in time."

Truscott's eyes momentarily lost their focus. "Priscilla, they are always close to a major discovery. Always. You know how long they've been there?"

"Almost thirty years," said Hutch.

"They've had plenty of time."

"Not really." Hutch tried to keep it light. Avoid being confrontational. "Not when you're trying to excavate an entire world. The Quraquat have three hundred centuries of history behind them. That's a lot of digging."

"Whatever." Truscott dismissed the discussion with a wave. "It doesn't matter. What is important is that I have no authority to postpone the start of the project. The Academy has agreed to evacuate; we've given them appropriate advance notification of operations. I am offering assistance, if you wish. And I will expect you to have your people safely away."

"Dr. Truscott, they may have a key to the Monument-Makers."

The director looked annoyed now. "Please understand," she said. "I have no discretion here." She found Hutch's eyes and held them. "Do what you have to. But get them off."

Ship's Log Johonn Winckelmonn

Monday, June 7

Melanie Truscott is overbearing, and takes herself quite seriously. She shows no flexibility about the timing of the evacuation. Nevertheless, I am hopeful that she will build an emergency delay into the operation—if she has not already done so. I have described our conversation to Dr. Wold, warning him that it is my opinion that the Friday deadline should be treated with the utmost respect.

PH

Kosmik Station. Monday, June 7; 1050 hours. Melanie Truscott would have liked to walk on real ground under a real sky. Leave the cramped spaces and gleaming walls and synth meals behind and stride off the station into the night. For God's sake, she was sympathetic, but where did the Academy get these people who thought the entire world should stand aside while they dug up pots and idols?

She stared at the blank screen. When Harvey broke in to inform her that he was talking to the pilot of the Academy ship, she had been paging through the most recent queries and demands for access to the New Earth: Islamic militants, white supremacists, Chinese nationalists, black separatists, One-Worlders, New Hellenes, a vast assortment of ethnic groups, tribes, oppressed peoples. Corporate interests. People with ideas for social experiments. Norman Caseway, who had forwarded the material, had his own plans. She was less opti-mistic than he. Actual settlement was far in the future. She would be long gone before it happened, as would Norman, and most of the others who had crusaded for the Project. Who knew how it would turn out?

She wondered whether the world's problems might be solved by access to the stars. Or simply exported.

"What do you think, Melanie?"

Harvey Sill stood in the doorway. He was the station chief, the beefy man with whom Hutch had spoken. Truscott had worked with Harvey on and off for years. She liked him; he was an able administrator, and he was a good judge of people. And he was that most valuable of all subordinates: a competent man who was not afraid to express his opinion.

Melanie rocked back in her chair. "I'm not comfortable."

Harvey sat on the table. "They're going to be a problem right to the end."

"There's something you should see, Harv." She called up a two-week-old transmission.

Norman Case way's congenial features appeared. He was seated at his desk in front of the organizational banner. "Melanie," he said, "I had a visit from Richard Wald recently. He tried hard to get a delay on Hope. Yesterday, I heard he had left for Quraqua. I don't know what he has in mind, but he may defy the deadline. He seems capable of doing it." Caseway looked unhappy. "I hope I'm wrong. But there is a possibility he will announce to us, and to the world, that he's going to stay at the Temple. And challenge us to proceed."

"He can't do that," said Harvey.

"If so," continued the recording, "we'll have to be prepared to respond.

"This is not an easy call. If such an announcement is made, we'll handle the public relations end of it here. You will not commence operations until you are certain everyone is off Quraqua. I know that creates coordination problems for you, but I do not want anybody killed. If it happens, if Wald states his intention to stay beyond the deadline, you will inform him you have no authority to act at discretion, which is true; and tell him further that Project Hope will proceed on schedule, and that you expect him to leave in accordance with the court order and the terms negotiated with the Academy. Then you will notify me. Please acknowledge receipt of these instructions. And by the way, Melanie, I'm glad it's you who's out there."

"Could be worse," said Harvey, sliding into a chair. "He might have told you to pull the switch no matter what."

"I'm not sure I wouldn't have preferred that." She had been here three years, and the archeologists had used one delaying tactic after another. "It's the right decision," she admitted. "But the sons of bitches are going to put it to us again." She got up, walked toward the viewport. "I just can't believe this keeps happening to us."

Melanie Truscott, Diary

The whole history of «negotiations» between the Academy and Kosmik has been a chain of demands, lies, threats, and finally the lawsuit that forced the Academy off Quraqua before they were ready to go.

Nevertheless, if I could, I would grant their request and give them another month or two—it really wouldn't create insurmountable problems for us—but the legal decisions have come in, and I would be, in effect, setting the court's decision aside and opening the door for more litigation.

So I will follow my orders to the letter.

How does it happen that the most intractable types always rise to the top? No give at all.

The young woman I spoke with today, on the Academy evacuation vessel, seemed reasonable enough. She and I could easily have worked out an agreement—I believe—avoided a lot of rancor, and saved a lot of money. And maybe even found the way to the Monument-Makers. But it won't happen.

June 7, 2202

7 On board Alpha. Monday; 2205 hours, Temple time. (Eleven minutes to midnight.)

The shuttle fell away from Winckelmann, dropping into a leisurely pursuit of the setting sun. The cloud cover was streaked with pink and purple; storms troubled a narrow belt just north of the equator. Hutch turned control over to Navigation, and tried keying into Kosmik communications. They were scrambled, another measure of the depth to which relations had deteriorated.

From the Temple site, she could pick up the common channel, listen to them calling one another, directing work, asking for assistance. Occasionally, they vented their frustration. / say we stay put and finish the job. A female voice. Hutch wondered whether remarks like that were being deliberately broadcast for the benefit of Truscott's people, who would also be listening in. No wonder the woman was getting nervous.

Atmosphere began to grab at the shuttle. Wisps of cloud streaked past. Navigation cut forward speed. She glided into twilight, passing high above blue mountains, descending into fading light. A wide river wandered into the gloom. The Oz moon, a witch's crescent, rode behind her.

She saw occasional reflections, water perhaps, or snow, sparkling in the starlight. Her scanners revealed an uneven sterile landscape, broken by occasional lakes and lava-beds.

A major ruin lay at Kabal, by a river junction. She went to manual, and took the shuttle to ground level. Her navigation lights flashed across half-buried stone walls. There was nothing else—no wharf, no boats lying inshore, no buildings. No hint of a track through the wilderness to mark the inhabitants' route to the next town. Kabal was celebrated because it was among the most recently abandoned of Quraquat cities.

They had been here when Columbus sailed, the remnants of a once-glittering, if loosely connected, global culture. She wondered what their last moments had been like, clinging to their town against the encroaching wilderness. Did they know they were on the edge of extinction?

She looked for a clear1 space, found it in the middle of the ruin, and landed. The treads pressed down on tall grass. She started the recycle process, intending to get out and look around. But something whipped through the stalks. It was out near the limit of her lights, and too quick to follow. She turned on the spots: nothing but tall dry grass gradually straightening.

Hell with that.

She aborted, and moments later was back in the air, heading southwest.

Snow fell on the plain. Woody plants began to appear. Their branches were thick and short, covered with green spines and long needles. The flat country gave way to a confusion of rolling hills, populated by grotesque growths connected by ropy, purple webs. The local variant of trees, she thought, until one of them moved.

Further south, she flew over thick-boiled gnarled hardwoods. They were enormous, bigger even than California's redwoods, and they stood well apart from each other.

The air temperature began to drop, and she cruised above a snowstorm. Mountains rose through the clouds, broad rocky summits wrapped in white. Hutch had known a few climbing enthusiasts. These would be an interesting challenge.

She went higher, across the top of the world, through yet another storm. There was open water beyond, a sea, dark and reflective, veiled in light mist, glass-smooth. The peaks curved along the coastline. She had arrived at the northern end of the Yakata. Where the gods play.

She opened a channel to the Temple. "This is Hutchins on Alpha. Anybody there?"

"Hello, Alpha." She recognized Allegri's voice. "Good to see you. You are sixty kilometers east of the Temple. Just follow the coast." Pause. "Switching to video." Hutch activated the screen, and looked at Allegri. It was hard not to be envious of those blue eyes and perfect features. But she appeared a little too socially oriented for this line of work.

This was not the sort of person who would stand up gladly to the rigors of modern archeology.

"You're about fifteen minutes out. You want me to bring you in?"

"Negative. Do you have a first name?"

"Janet."

"Glad to meet you, Janet. My friends call me 'Hutch. »

Allegri nodded. "Okay, Hutch."

"What's the drill? Do you use an on-shore hangar? What am I looking for?"

"We have a floatpier. Watch for three stone towers in the water, about a hundred meters offshore. The floatpier's just west of them. Our shuttle will be there. Put down beside it, and we'll do the rest. It's the middle of the night here. You want breakfast ready?"

"No, thanks."

"Suit yourself. See you when you get in." She reached up, above the screen, and the monitor blanked.

Hutch glided over snow-covered boulder-strewn beaches, over long uncurling breakers and rocky barrier islands. She flew past Mt. Tenebro, at whose base lay a six-thousand-year-old city, most of it now under the sand or in the sea. Its minarets and crystal towers and floating gardens had been recreated in a series of paintings by Vertilian, one of which now hung prominently in the main lobby at the Academy's Visitor Center. She trained the scopes on it, but could see nothing except lines of excavation ditches.

She promised herself that when time permitted, she'd come back for a closer look.

Minutes later, the three towers came into view. They were massive, not mere pillars (as she had expected), but black stone fortresses rising about twenty meters above the waves. The tide rolled over the remnants of a fourth. They were circular, somewhat tapered, wide enough that twenty people could have sat comfortably atop each. A stiff wind blew snow off their crests.

Hutch unmasked the external mikes, and listened to the rhythmic boom of the surf and the desolate moan of the wind off the sea. She eased close to one of the structures. Something screeched, leaped clear, and fluttered away. Lines of symbols and pictographs and geometric designs circled the towers. Most appeared to be abstractions, but she could see representations of birds and squidlike creatures and other beasts. In a niche just above the water, a pair of reptile legs were broken off at the knees. There must have been a shaft or stairway within. Her lights penetrated two embrasures and she caught a glimpse of stone walls. A Quraquat female with wings and a weapon, a sword probably, stood atop one crest. An arm was missing. The remaining hand shielded its eyes. She knew the Quraquat had not been winged creatures, smiled at the concept of a flying gator, and wondered whether all intelligences dreamt of angels.

At the water line, the towers were worn smooth by the sea. Wide wakes trailed toward shore, as if the hoary sentinels were on the move.

The floatpier lay a short distance beyond. It was U-shaped, and big enough to accommodate several vehicles. The Temple shuttle lay on the shoreward side. Alpha's lights skimmed across its blue-gold lines.

She drifted in, and slipped into the water. Moonlight fell on the coastal peaks. She opened a channel to the Temple. "I'm down," she said.

The shuttle rocked. "Welcome to the Temple of the Winds, Hutch. Frank's on his way."

The outside temperature was 30° below, Celsius. She activated her Flickinger field, opened up, climbed out. The floatpier rolled with the tide, but it had good footing. It was wide, maybe three meters, equipped with thermal lines to keep ice from forming. And it had a handrail. The sea was choppy, and spray flew, but the field kept her dry.

Alpha's lights cast a misty glow across the two shuttles and the pier. Beyond, the towers were murky shadows. Lines of waves broke against the shoreline.

"Look out you don't fall in." Carson's voice came out of her earphones. But she didn't see him.

"Where are you?"

"Look to your left."

Lights were rising out of the water. Carson sat inside a bubble housing. It surfaced near Alpha's prow, followed by a long gray hull. Steam drifted off the deck, and the sea washed over it. The submersible rolled, righted itself, and drew alongside the pier. The bubble opened. Carson paused, tuned his move, and strode onto the planks with a grace born of long experience. "Temple Limo Service," he said lightly. "Stops at 8000 B.C., Henry's Hotel, the Knothic Towers, the Yakatan Empire, and points south. What's your pleasure?" The engines gurgled, and the boat rocked.

"The hotel sounds good." The vessel was low in the water.

Its cargo hatch, located on the afterdeck, swung open. Barrel-shaped containers lined the interior. Carson removed one of the containers, lifting it with surprising ease, and muscled it onto the pier. "I've got six of these," he said. "Can we put them in Alpha! Thought I'd save a trip."

"Sure." She watched him go back for a second barrel. Each of the containers was almost as big as he was. "Don't break anything," she said. They were big and awkward, but light. She starting moving them off the dock and into the shuttle's storage bay.

"Most of it's foam," said Carson. "And artifacts."

She felt cozy and safe, wrapped in the warm, dry cocoon of the energy field. The wind sucked at her, and mournful cries floated over the water. "Chipwillows," said Carson. "Oversized, ungainly carrion-eaters. They raid the beach every morning."

"Birds?"

"Not exactly. More like bats. They like to sing."

"Sounds like something lost."

"They make the sound by rubbing their wings together."

She drank in the night. It was good, after all these weeks, to be out in the open.

"What's it been like, Frank? Closing down, I mean?"

He moved next to her and leaned on the handrail. "We do what we have to. It would have helped if we'd known six months ago we were going to get thrown out. We could have done things differently. But the word we kept getting was that the Academy was going to win. 'Don't worry, they said."

"It's a pity."

"Yeah. It is that." The pier rode over a wave. The comber broke, rolled toward the beach, and lost its energy against the outgoing tide. "I'm ready to go home. But not like this." He looked discouraged. "We've put a lot of work in here. A fair amount of it will go for nothing."

Something luminous swam past, approached the sub, and sank.

"What will you do next? Where will you go now?"

"They've offered me a division director's job at the Academy. In Personnel."

"Congratulations," she said softly.

He looked embarrassed. "Most of the people here are disappointed in me."

"Why?"

"They think it's a sell-out."

Hutch understood. Only the people who couldn't make it in the field, or who were less than serious professionals, went into administration. "How do you feel?"

"I think you should do what you want. I'd like regular hours for a change. A clean, air-conditioned office. A chance to meet new people. Maybe watch the Sentinels on Sunday." He laughed. "That shouldn't be asking too much. After all these years."

She wondered whether he had a family to go home to. "I wouldn't think so," she said.

The western sky was starless. The Void. She looked into it for a few moments.

He followed her gaze. "Spooky, isn't it?"

Yes. Somehow, it looked more arresting from a planetary surface than it did from space. She had noticed the same phenomenon from Nok and Pinnacle, which also floated on the edge of the galactic arm. She could just pick out the dim smear of light from stars on the other side. "According to the Quraquat," Carson said, "that's Kwonda, the home of the blessed, the haven for all who have fought the good fight. On nights when the wind is still, you can hear them singing. Kwonda, by the way, means 'Distant Laughter. »

The pier rose and dipped. "That was a big one," said Hutch. "How old is the Temple of the Winds?"

"The main temple, what we call the Upper Temple, was built somewhere around the thirteenth—" He stopped. "Difficult to translate time. Around 250 B.C., our calendar. Those" — he indicated the towers—"are not the Temple of the Winds. You know that, right?"

"No, I didn't."

"They're the Knothic Towers. Sacred ground, by the way. Built approximately 8000 B.C. They were used for worship, and were maintained as a historical site, one way and another, for seven thousand years."

"So where's the Temple of the Winds?"

He looked at the water. "Believe it or not," he said, "The Temple of the Winds is in the drink." He tied down the last of the containers. "And we should probably get moving. Where are your bags?"

"Only one." She got it out of the Alpha, and allowed him to take it.

"This area used to be a crossroad between empires," he said. "It must always have been of strategic importance. And we know settlements thrived here almost right up until the species died out. At the end," he continued, "the Quraquat had no idea why the Towers had been built, or what they'd meant."

"That's very sad," she said. "To lose your heritage."

"I would think so."

"Are we sure the Quraquat are really extinct?"

"Oh, yes. There was a long-running debate over that for several years. It seemed unlikely that we could have missed them by so short a time. Ergo, they had to be here somewhere. Watch your step." He planted a foot on the deck of the submarine as if that would steady it, and offered his arm. "There was always at least one team looking for survivors. We got so many false alarms it got to be a joke. Quraquat seen here, seen there. Seen everywhere. But never any living natives." He shrugged. "They're gone."

They lowered themselves into the cockpit and drew the bubble down. The interior lights dimmed. The sea rose around them. "The Towers are by no means the oldest structures here. This was a holy place long before they were built. There's a military chapel and outpost in the Lower Temple which predate them by millennia. We're excavating it now. In fact, the artifact that brought Richard Wald out here is from the Lower Temple. And there's a lot more that we haven't got close to yet. We know, for example, that there's an old electric power plant down there."

"You're kidding."

"That's what it looks like. It goes back somewhere in the range of nineteen thousand years. There's not much of it left, of course, and we don't get very good pictures. But I don't think there's any question."

The water was dark. The sub's navigation lamps punched into the general gloom. Lines of yellow light appeared. "They connect the Temple with Seapoint," Carson explained. "The base."

He turned toward the track, and within minutes, they had arrived over a complex of domes and spheres. They were brightly illuminated, but many of the windows were dark. Seapoint looked inactive.

Carson took them beneath a shell-shaped structure, and undersea doors opened. They ascended, and surfaced in a lighted bay.

Janet Allegri was waiting with fresh coffee. Hutch disembarked. Carson handed her overnight down and Hutch slung it over one shoulder. She noticed that the walls were lined with containers similar to the ones they'd unloaded. "Is this the cargo?" she asked.

"This is some of it," said Janet, passing them cups. "Now, if you like, I'll show you to your quarters."

"I'd appreciate that." Turning to Carson, she said, "Thanks for the ride, Frank."

Carson nodded. "Anytime." And, with a meaningful glance, he added, "You'll want to get a good night's sleep."

Janet and Hutch exited into a short passageway, mounted a flight of stairs, and emerged in a plant-filled chamber furnished with chairs and tables. The lights were dim. Two large windows looked out into the sea, and there was a glow in an artificial fireplace. A half-finished jigsaw puzzle occupied one of the tables. "The community room," Janet said. "If you come here in the morning, we'll introduce you around, and see that you get breakfast."

"You have people working now, right?"

"Yes," Janet said. "We've been operating round the clock since we were ordered off. We used to run a fairly leisurely show. No more."

"What specifically are you looking for?"

"Casumel Linear C," Janet replied. "We want to read the inscription." Her liquid eyes watched Hutch. "There's a military post buried beneath the Lower Temple. The race that operated the post spoke Linear C."

"Frank told us about that. You're hoping to find a Rosetta stone."

Several passageways opened off the community room. They exited through one into a tube. The walls were transparent, and the visual effect, enhanced by strategically placed outside lighting, and luminous fish, was striking. Seapoint was a lovely place, although it had a claustrophobic aspect.

"A Rosetta stone is probably too much to ask for," Janet said. "Some more samples might be enough."

"How much success are you having?"

"Some. We've found a couple of inscriptions. What we really need to do is penetrate the lower sections. But there are engineering problems. We have to cut under the Upper Temple. It's shaky, and it wouldn't take much to bring everything down. So it's slow going. Moreover, the sea bottom is filled with silt. The tides throw it back into the excavations as quickly as we can remove it." She looked tired. "The answers are here, Hutch. But we won't have the time to get at them."

They crossed into a dome. Janet opened a door, turned on the lights, and revealed a pleasant, and reasonably spacious, apartment. "VIP quarters," she said. "Breakfast is at seven. If you want to sleep late, that's fine. The duty officer's available on the link."

"Thank you."

"There's a dispenser in the community room if you get hungry. Is there anything you need?"

"I think I'm fine."

"Okay. My first name activates my private channel. Don't hesitate to call if you need anything." She hesitated in the doorway. "We're glad to have you aboard, Hutch. This place has become something of a strain. I think we need some new people." She smiled. "Good night."

Hutch closed the door behind her, and tossed her bag onto a divan. Curtains covered one wall. She opened them and looked into the living sea. Small fish, startled by the sudden movement, darted away. A pseudo-turtle swam slowly past; and a diaphanous creature with large disc eyes, drawn by the light, poked at the plastene. "Hello," she said, knocking at the barrier. There was a control for outside illumination. She reduced the intensity, but did not turn it off.

She unpacked and showered and took a book to bed, but was too tired to read.

There were a host of sounds at Seapoint. In the dark, the walls creaked and groaned, things bumped against the hull, electrical systems came on and went off throughout the night. It occurred to Hutch, as she drifted off, that this entire complex would shortly become part of the wreckage at the Temple of the Winds.

She woke shortly after six, feeling uneasy. The windows and the sea were illuminated by wide shafts of sunlight.

Time to get to work. She dressed rapidly, as if she were running behind schedule, and went to the community room. Despite Janet's assurances, it was empty. She ate a leisurely breakfast and, when she'd finished, opened a channel to the duty officer. Janet was still on duty. "Don't you ever sleep?" Hutch asked.

"Good morning, Hutch. I get plenty of sleep; I just don't get to my room much. How was your night?"

"Fine. Real good. What do you have for me?"

"Nothing for the moment. You are going to be busy, because we have a lot of artifacts to move up, as well as people. Frank will be helping with the Temple shuttle, by the way. But we haven't quite got things organized yet. I'd say your morning's free. We'll call you when we need you."

It would be nice to see the Knothic Towers in the sunlight.

"Okay," she said. She thought about asking whether the sub was available, but decided against any action that would brand her early on as a nuisance. Instead, she retrieved her harness, and found an exit pool. She checked her air supply. It was ample. She looped her commlink around her throat, and activated the field. Then she slipped into the water, opened the outer doors, and swam out of the dome.

Thirty minutes later, she surfaced a half-kilometer from the floatpier. It was a glorious morning. The sun blazed over silver peaks, broad white beaches, and blue sea. Long breakers rumbled against black rocks. Creatures that bore a close resemblance to pelicans patrolled the surface, occasionally dipping into the water for a squirming meal.

And the Towers: they rose out of the boiling sea in magnificent defiance. The last stronghold. They were as black by day as they had been by night.

Hutch was a good swimmer, and she set off toward the floatpier with a steady stroke. The tide was running against her, but not so swiftly that she couldn't make headway. She settled into her rhythm. The pelicans wheeled and flapped. Pity it was so cold; she'd have liked to dispense with the energy field. A swim during which you stayed perfectly dry lacked a little something.

Minutes later, she climbed out onto the planks with a sense of exhilaration, and took a deep breath from her bottled air.

The field clung to her, soft and warm.

The sea was calm. She sat down on the pier.

The lower sections of the Towers were polished by the constant wave action. Like the Temple, they too had been on dry land in the recent past, sacred markers at a crossroads on highways connecting empires. A place for travelers to stop and contemplate the majesty and kindness of the gods. Atop the nearest, she saw movement. Something with white feathers stretched and fluttered.

Hutch had consulted maps before coming out, and knew where to look for the old imperial road, which was now only a steep defile northbound through the mountains that lined the shore.

The strategic value of the intersection had been guarded by a fort, as well as by the gods. By a succession of forts, actually, over the millennia. The forts now lay beneath the Temple. And the Temple lay beneath the sea.

She wondered what might have prompted a meeting between the relatively dormant Quraquat and the star travelers?

On the beach, something caught her eye. Movement. Something like a man.

It walked upright toward the water's edge. Two more followed. They were hard to see clearly against the sand, and only when they passed in front of a cluster of rocks could she make out their white fur and sloped, horned heads. Well down the beach, another of the creatures stooped over a tidal pool.

She couldn't see their eyes, but they had large floppy ears, and the one by the tidal pool carried a stick. Others were descending from the pass which had once been the northern road. Several were half-grown.

They fanned out along the beach, the adults keeping the young firmly in tow. Three or four took up stations well apart, and looked out to sea. Then, as if someone had given a signal, the cubs charged across the sand, whooping and cackling and pursuing each other. Some stopped to poke at objects lying on the beach; others bolted into the waves.

Behind her, Alpha rose on the tide, and the Temple shuttle nosed gently into the pier.

The creatures on the beach seemed to be having a pretty good time. Hutch became gradually aware of a thin piping sound, a high-pitched trill almost lost in the brisk wind and the roar of the morning. It was birdlike, and she looked overhead for its source but saw only bright sky and a few snowflakes.

One of the animals stood quietly by the water's edge. It seemed to be looking directly at her. Hutch stared back. When finally she grew uncomfortable under its gaze, she drew her knees up tight. It raised both forelimbs in what was unmistakably a greeting.

The warmth of the gesture startled her, as if she'd met an acquaintance in a distant place. She waved back.

It turned away, scooped a wriggling sea creature out of the surf, dunked it in a wave, and dropped it into its wide mouth. It looked again toward Hutch, with evident satisfaction, and threw several handfuls of water into the air.

She splashed a little water on herself. But I draw the line at the quick lunch.

A screech shattered the general tranquility. It echoed off the cliffs. The creatures froze. Then a general rush began. Inland, toward the pass. Several herded cubs before them. One adult went down. Hutch couldn't see what was happening to it; but it was struggling in shallow water, yelping pitiably, its limbs jerking and twitching.

Hutch raised a hand to block off the sun's glare. And sensed a presence near her left shoulder.

An eye.

Green and expressionless. It was mounted on a stalk.

Her heart froze. She could not breathe and she could not move. She wanted to throw herself into the sea, hide from this thing that had risen beside her.

The eye watched her. It was the color of the sea. A section was missing out of the iris, rather like a piece out of a pie. As Hutch tried to get her emotions under control, the piece widened, and the iris narrowed. Slowly, a nictitating membrane closed over it, then opened again.

A second stalk-mounted eye appeared beside the first, somewhat higher. And another beyond those. The stalks moved like long grass in an uncertain breeze.

During those long, dazed moments, she caught only aspects of the thing that had approached her. Four eyes. A broad flat insect head, to which the eyes were attached. A hairy thorax. Segments. The creature was gray-green and chitinous. Hutch saw mandibles and tentacles and jaws.

The thing stood on the water, stood upright on a set of stick legs. The shuttles and the pier rose and fell in the light chop, but the creature remained motionless. It seemed almost disconnected from the physical world.

Hutch fought down her panic. And in a voice surprisingly level, she spoke into her throat mike: "This is Hutchins. Anybody there?"

"Hutch, what's wrong?" It was Janet.

"Janet," she said, softly, as if the creature might hear through the Flickinger field, "I'm looking at a big bug."

"How big?"

"Big. Three meters." Pause for breath. "Mantis. Squid. Don't know—"

"Are you outsidel" Janet's tone turned vaguely accusing.

"Yes." Whispered.

"Where outside?" There was a hint of anger in the voice before it regained its professional calm.

"The floatpier."

"Okay. It's not dangerous. But don't move. Okay? Not a muscle. I'm on my way."

"You?"

"You want to hang on while I look around for help?"

Thick fluid leaked out of the bug's mouth.

"No," she said.

The goddam thing sure looked dangerous.

Hutch was acutely aware of the piercing screams from the beach. She had an iron grip on the guardrail, and could not have let go under any conceivable circumstance. Limbs flexed; three of the eyes swiveled away, came back.

The Flickinger field wouldn't be much help here, no more likely to protect her against the razor thrust of those jaws than an old pressure suit would. "You may want to hurry," she said into the mike, detesting the whimper in her voice.

"It's only a strider. I'll be there in a minute. You're doing fine."

If it wasn't dangerous, why did she have to keep still?

With her eyes, Hutch measured the distance to the Alpha cockpit. About fifteen meters. She could open the hatch from here by voice control. And she thought she could sprint the distance and get into the spacecraft before the thing could react. But the hatch would need about fifteen seconds to close. Would the beast give her that kind of time?

The thing touched some deep primal nerve. She would have been frightened of it had it been only a few centimeters tall. "Alpha, open cockpit."

She heard the pop of the hatch.

Three of the eyes turned toward the sound.

"Hutch." Janet again. Her voice flat. "Don't do anything. Wait for me. Just stay put and don't move. Okay?"

The creature watched the shuttle.

The shrieks from the beach had stopped. She wasn't sure when, but she didn't dare look away to see what was happening. She was breathing again. Barely. She braced one foot so she could get up.

She literally saw a quickening of interest in the eyes.

The jaws twitched. A tentacle unrolled.

She wanted to look away. But she could not disengage.

Janet, where are you! In her mind, she traced the steps. The duty officer had probably been at her station, which was less than a minute from the sub bay. Stop to pick up a pulser. Where did they keep the pulsers? The voyage last night from the pier to Seapoint had taken between eight and ten minutes. But Carson had been in no hurry. Surely the sub could make the trip in five or less. Say seven minutes altogether.

The wind blew, and one of the pelicans flew past.

How many pictures do you get with four eyes capable of looking in different directions? What is it seeing!

Why had she come away without a weapon? She knew the drill. But she had never been attacked, anywhere. Dumb.

One of the eyes rose. Gazed over her shoulder at something behind her.

"Right with you." Janet's voice again. "We're in good shape." She heard the whine of the sub, and the hiss of an air exchanger.

The creature was inside the U, separated from the open sea by the dock. It would be difficult to bring the sub to bear against it directly. But that shouldn't matter. Hutch waited for the crackle of a pulser.

Instead the sub banged into the pier. The stalk-eyes turned away from Hutch. "Okay." Janet's tone changed, acquired the weight of command. "Get away from it. Into the shuttle. Move."

Hutch broke and ran. In the same moment, she saw Janet leap from the cockpit of the sub, swinging a wrench. The creature turned to face her. Tentacles whipped, jaws opened, and the eyes drew back. Janet, lovely, blond, drawing-room Janet, stepped inside the writhing tangle and brought the wrench down squarely on the thing's head. Green syrup exploded from the skull, and it staggered. They went down together and fell into the water. The struggling mass slipped beneath the surface.

Hutch gasped and raced back to help. The water thrashed. They came up. Janet grabbed the pier, and nailed it again across one mandible. The thing collapsed into a pile of broken sticks, and drifted away on the current.

Hutch went down on her knees and held Janet while she caught her breath. When she did, she demanded whether Hutch was okay.

Hutch was humiliated. "Why didn't you bring a weapon?" she demanded.

"I did. Brought the first one I could find."

Now it was Hutch's turn to be angry. "Don't you people have any pulsersl"

Janet grinned. She was bruised and still breathing hard. Her hair hung down in her face and she was bleeding from a couple of cuts. But to Hutch she looked damned good. "Somewhere. But I thought you'd want me out here quick."

Hutch tried to check her for damage, but Janet insisted she was okay. The cuts looked minor.

"Thanks," said Hutch.

Janet put an arm around her shoulder. Their energy fields flashed. "You get one on the house," she said. "But don't do it again. Okay?"

"Was it really dangerous?" asked Hutch. "I mean, all it did was stand there."

The battle ashore had also ended. Several of the furry creatures watched the sea from a rocky shelf well out of harm's way. "These things snack on the beach monkeys," she said, indicating the creatures. "I guess this one didn't quite know what to make of you."

Kosmik Ground Control South. Tuesday; 0900 Temple Time.

Living worlds were exceedingly rare. The reason seemed to be that Jovian planets were also quite rare. In the solar system, Jupiter's comet-deflecting capabilities had reduced the number of major terrestrial impacts to a quarter percent of what could otherwise have been expected. And made life possible on Earth.

Quraqua, with its functioning ecosystem, its near-terrestrial gravity, its abundance of water, its lack of an owner, was a godsend to the harried human race. It was inevitable that the first full-scale terraforming effort would take place here. This was the Second Chance, an opportunity to apply lessons learned painfully on Earth. It would be home to a new race of humans.

Idealists had created an abundance of plans to ensure that the children of Quraqua would treat this world, and each other, with respect. There would be no nationalism exported to the stars, no industrial exploitation. Poverty and ignorance would not be permitted to take root. The various races and faiths would live in harmony, and the ideologies that had fostered divisiveness in the bad old days would find rocky soil.

lan Helm, like a multitude of others, would believe it when he saw it.

Quraqua might work, but it would be on its own terms. It would never be the Utopia its proponents promised. He knew that. The fact that so many of the people making the Project's decisions apparently did not led him to question either their competence or their integrity.

Project Hope had not reached the brink of this first phase of its existence easily. Environmentalists had decried the diversion of funds from desperately needed efforts at home; the People of Christ had denounced any notions of moving off-world as not in accord with God's plan and therefore sacrilegious; nationalist and racial activists demanded exclusive rights to the new world. Moralists railed against the annihilation of entire species that would inevitably result from terraforming. There were serious doubts that the political will, or the money, would be available over the long term to ensure even a chance of success.

Still, Helm was prepared to concede that he had no better idea. Deforestation, pollution, urbanization, had all progressed so far now that various points of no return had been passed. There was reason to believe that if every human being disappeared tomorrow, the Earth would still require millennia to return to what it had been.

There was a positive side to all this: Helm had built a lucrative, and satisfying, career out of his specialty. He was a planetary engineer, had got his degree in the late sixties, when only astronomers were thinking seriously about the stars. He had done his graduate work on the Venusian problem, where estimates for creating a habitable world ranged into the centuries. (Mars, of course, was out of the question, since there was no way to overcome its crippling light gravity.)

Nok was a second candidate. But it was inhabited. And while there was a movement that favored settlement and exploitation of that garden planet, nonintervention would continue for the foreseeable future.

One more reason why Project Hope had to be made to succeed.

Almost forty percent of Quraqua's water was frozen at the poles. The initial phase of Project Hope was directed at releasing that water. The oceans would fill, new rivers would spread across the land, and, with proper management, climate modification would begin.

Helm often reflected on the fact that other men had controlled more sheer firepower than he, but none had ever used it. No one had ever made a bigger bang than lan Helm would deliver when, in three days, he activated his arsenal of nuclear weapons, and on-site and orbiting particle beam projectors. Even Harding, at the other pole, would be outclassed. This was true even though the reconfiguration systems were allocated equally. But the ice sheets in the south were unstable atop their narrow strips of land, and the ocean floor was saturated with volcanoes. Helm believed he could coax some of the volcanoes to contribute their own energy to the effort.

The caps were to be melted simultaneously. No one was sure what might happen to rotation if weight were suddenly removed from one pole and not from the other.

Helm returned to his headquarters from a field survey at about the same time Janet Allegri was taking a wrench to the strider. He was satisfied with his preparations, sanguine that the ice sheets would melt on signal.

He drifted in aboard his CAT, circling the half-dozen red-

stained shacks and landing pads that made up Southern Hope. The snowfields rolled out flat in all directions. The sky was hard and clear, the sun beginning to sink toward the end of its months-long day.

He descended onto his pad, climbed out, and cycled through the airlock into the operations hut.

Mark Casey sat alone among the displays and communications equipment, talking to his commlink. He raised a hand in his boss's general direction and kept talking.

Helm sat down at his desk to check his In box. He could overhear enough of Casey's conversation to know that his Ops officer wasn't happy.

Casey was a tall, narrow, spike of a man, hard and sharp, given neither to superfluous gesture or talk. His thin hair was combed over his scalp, and he wore a manicured beard. His eyes found Helm, and signaled that the world was full of incompetents. "Another dead core," he said, after he'd signed off. "How was your trip?"

"Okay. We'll be ready."

"Good. Everybody's checked in." Casey scratched a spot over his right eyebrow with an index finger. "If we keep burning up cores, though, we'll have a problem. We have one spare left."

"Cheap goddam stuff," said Helm. "Somebody in Procurement's making a buck."

Casey shrugged. "It's forty-five below out there. Amazes me anything works."

An electronic chart of the icecap was mounted across the wall opposite the airlock. Colored lamps marked nuke sites, red where weapons had been placed inside volcanoes, white where placed within the ice sheets themselves, and green for those locations where teams were still working. There were five green lights. "Anything else I should know about, Mark?"

"Jensen called in just before you came. They've been having equipment problems too, and she says she's running behind. About eight hours. It's not on your board yet."

Helm didn't like that. His intention was to be set up and ready to go with thirty hours to spare. That would allow time for things to go wrong and still leave a decent safety margin to extract the teams. Jensen directed the 27 group, which was tasked with sinking a nuke into the ice on the far side of the pack. Eight goddam hours. Well, he could live with it. But if it got worse, he would have her head.

He thumbed through his traffic. One message caught his attention:

TO: DIRECTOR, NORTHCOM DIRECTOR, SOUTHCOM CHIEF PILOT

FROM: DIRECTOR, PROJECT HOPE SUBJECT: ADMINISTRATIVE PROCEDURES WE ARE INVOLVED IN AN ENDEAVOR THAT IS BOTH UNPRECEDENTED AND COMPLEX. STATUS REPORTS WILL NOW BE UPGRADED AS PROVIDED IN MANUAL SECTION 447112.3(B). REQUESTS FOR SPECIAL ASSISTANCE WILL BE CHANNELED THROUGH OPCOM AS PROVIDED. WE STAND READY TO HELP WHERE NEEDED. IN ADDITION, ALT. DETONATION PROCEDURES ARE TO BE DESIGNED TO PERMIT INTERVENTION UNTIL THE VERY LAST INSTANT. ACK.

TRUSCOTT

Helm read it through several times. "You see this, Mark?

'The very last instant'?"

Casey nodded. "I've already sent the acknowledgment." "She knows we built that in as a matter of course. What the hell is this all about?" "Got no idea. I just work here. CYA, probably." "Something's happened." Helm's eyes narrowed. "Get her on the circuit, Mark."

Melanie Truscott's image blinked on. She was in her quarters, seated on a couch, a notepad open on her lap, papers scattered across the cushions. "lan," she said, "what can I do for you?"

Helm didn't like Truscott's regal manner. The woman loved to flaunt her position. It was in her smile, in her authoritarian tone, in her refusal to consult him before formulating policy or issuing directives. "We're ready to cancel at a moment's notice," he said.

"I know." She closed the notebook.

"What's going on? Is somebody putting pressure on us?"

"Corporate is concerned that one or more of Jacobi's people may refuse to leave by the deadline. They want to make sure nobody gets killed."

Helm's temper flared. "That's a goddam joke, Melanie. They might try to bluff, but you can be damn sure none of them wants to be there when that wall of ice and water rolls over the site."

"That's not all." Truscott looked worried. "I talked to their pilot. She says something big is happening, and it sounds as if they may be cutting it too close. We've picked up some of their traffic which implies the same thing."

"Then send them a warning. Remind them what's at stake. But for God's sake, don't back off now. Do that, and we'll never be rid of them. Listen, Melanie, we can't just go on forever like this. The climate here is hard on equipment, and the goddam stuff isn't much good to start with. We put a hold on this operation, even for a couple of days, and I won't guarantee everything's going to fire in sequence." Casey raised an eye, but Helm ignored him.

"Can't help that." Truscott rearranged herself, signaled that the interview was over. "We'll comply with our instructions."

When she was gone, Casey grinned. "That stuff isn't top of the line, but it's not really coming apart."

"A little exaggeration is good for the soul. You know what's wrong with her, Mark? She doesn't know the difference between what management tells her to do, and what they want her to do. Caseway's covering his ass, just in case. But he wants the job done. If this thing doesn't go on schedule, Truscott's not going to look so good. And neither am I."

"So what are you going to do?"

Helm stared out the window. The sky and the ice pack were the same color. "I don't know. Maybe I'll make her a good manager in spite of herself."

Truscott knew Helm was right. The son of a bitch wasn't worth the powder to blow him to hell. But he was right. She had known it herself, had always known it. They won't move voluntarily. They will have to be pushed off.

Damn.

She punched Harvey's button. "When you have a minute," she said.

ARCHIVE

PROJECT HOPE

Phase One Projections

We estimate that nine hundred million tons of ice will be melted at either end of the globe within the first sixty seconds after initial detonation. Reaction to heat generated by nuclear devices will continue at a high level in the south for an indeterminate period, based on our ability to ignite the subsea volcanoes. Best-guess projections are as follows:

(1) Earthquakes up to 16.3 on the Grovener Scale along all major fault lines within 50 degrees of both poles;

(2) Tsunamis throughout the Southern Sea. These will be giant waves, unlike anything seen on Earth during recorded history. In effect, large areas of the sea will simply leave the basin and inundate the land masses, penetrating thousands of kilometers.

(3) Rainfall, even if not abetted by the insertion of snowballs, will continue for the better part of a year. It will remain at a high level for ten to fifteen years, before stabilizing at a global mean approximately 35 % higher than the current standard.

It needs to be noted, however, that the presence of volcanoes in the south polar area, joined with our lack of experience in operations of this scale, and the variables listed in Appendix (1), have created a situation which is extremely unpredictable.

(lan Helm)

8 On board DVT Jack Kraus. Tuesday; 1422 hours

The snowball tumbled slowly through the sunlight, growing in his screens. Lopsided and battered, it dwarfed his tug. One end looked as if a large piece had been knocked off. Big son of a bitch, this one. Navigation matched its movement, brought him in over scored white terrain. It stabilized, and the scan program activated. Jake Hoffer slowed his approach, his descent, and chose the contact point. About midway along the axis of rotation. There. A sheet of flat, unseamed ice.

He watched the readings on his status board. He was, in effect, landing on a plateau whose sides dropped away forever. Quraqua rolled across the sky. The moon rose while he watched, and the sun dropped swiftly toward the cliff-edge "horizon." The effect inevitably induced a mild vertigo. He buttoned up the cockpit, sealing off the view, and watched on the monitors. The numbers flickered past, and ready lamps went on at a hundred meters. Moments later, the Jack Kraus touched down with a mild jar. The spikes bit satisfyingly into the ice.

Lamps switched to amber.

The realignment program took hold. Sensors computed mass distribution and rotational configuration, and evaluated course and velocity. The first round of thrusters fired.

Four hours later, he was riding the snowball into its temporary orbit around Quraqua.

Within a few weeks, he and the other tug pilot, Merry Cooper, would begin the real bear of this operation: starting the two-hundred-plus pieces of orbiting ice down to the planetary surface, aiming them just as he was doing now, by digging in and dragging them toward their targets. Once that final descent had begun, they would use particle beams to slice them into rain. It pleased him to know that this massive iceberg would eventually fall as a gentle summer shower on a parched plain.

His commlink beeped. "Jake?"

He recognized Harvey Sill's gravelly voice. "You're five-by, Harvey."

Jake switched to visual. Sill was giving directions to someone off-camera. Usually, the station chief's post in the command center was quiet. But today there were voices and technicians and activity. Getting close.

Sill scratched his temple. "Jake, are you locked onto two-seventeen?"

'"Two-nineteen."

"Whatever. You got it?"

"Yes—"

"Okay. I want you to drop it."

Hoffer leaned forward, adjusted his gain. "Say again."

"I want you to put it into the Southern Sea. The Yakata."

That couldn't be right. "Harvey, that's where the Academy people are."

"I know. Insert it sixteen hundred kilometers south of the Temple site. Can you do that with reasonable accuracy?"

"I can." Hoffer was horrified. "But I don't want to."

Sill's expression did not change. "Do it anyway."

"Harvey, it'll kill them. What have you guys done over there, lost your minds?"

"For God's sake, Hoffer, it's only one unit. Nobody's going to get hurt. And we'll see that they get plenty of advance warning."

"You want me to cut it up?"

"Negative. Insert it as is."

Jake was breathing hard. "Suppose they don't get everybody out? Or can't? Son of a bitch, this thing's a mountain. You can't just drop it into the ocean."

"They're underwater, goddammit. They'll be safe enough."

"I doubt it."

"Have you got something smaller, then?"

"Sure. Damned near everything we have is smaller."

"Okay. Find something smaller and do it. Don't forget we'll lose a lot of it on the way down."

"Like hell. Most of this bastard would hit the water. Why are we doing this?"

Sill looked exceptionally irritated. "Look, Jake. Those people are playing mind games with us. Right now, it looks as if they'll stay past the deadline. We're sending them a message. Now please see to it."

Hoffer nodded. "Yeah. I guess so. When?"

"Now. How long will it take?"

"Hard to say. Maybe ten hours."

"All right. Keep me posted. And, Jake—?"

"Yes?"

"Get us a decent splash."

The Temple of the Winds lay half-buried in ocean bottom, a polygon with turrets and porticoes and massive columns. Walls met at odd angles and ran off in a confusion of directions. Staircases mounted to upper rooms that no longer existed. (The stairs were precisely the right size for humans.) Arcane symbols lined every available space. Arches and balustrades were scattered everywhere. A relatively intact hyperbolic roof dipped almost to the sea floor, giving the entire structure the appearance of a turtle shell. "All in all," Richard told Hutch as they approached on jets, "it's an architecture that suggests a groundling religion. It's cautious and practical, a faith that employs gods primarily to see to the rain and bless marriages. Their concerns were domestic and agricultural, probably, in contrast to the cosmology of the Knothic Towers. It would be interesting to have their history during this period, to trace them from the Towers to the Temple, and find out what happened."

They shut down their jets and drifted toward the front entrance. "The architecture looks as if it was designed by committee," said Hutch. "The styles clash."

"It wasn't built in a single effort," he said. "The Temple was originally a single building. A chapel on a military installation." They hovered before the immense colonnade that guarded the front entrance. "They added to it over the years, tore things down, changed their minds. The result was a web of chambers and corridors and balconies and shafts surrounding the central nave. Most of it has collapsed, although the nave itself is still standing. God knows how. It's dangerous, by the way. Roof could come down any time. Carson tells me they were on the verge of calling off work and bringing in some engineers to shore the place up."

Hutch surveyed the rock walls doubtfully. "Maybe it's just as well we're being forced out. Before somebody gets killed."

Richard looked at her with mock dismay. "I know you've been around long enough not to say anything like that to these people."

"It's okay," she said. "I'll try not to upset anybody."

The top was off the colonnade, and sunlight filtered down among the pillars. They stopped to look at the carvings. They were hard to make out through caked silt and general disintegration, but she saw something that resembled a sunrise. And either a tentacled sea-beast or a tree. The Temple of the Winds was, if anything, solid. Massive. Built for the ages. Its saddle-shaped design, had the structure remained on dry land, would have provided an aerodynamic aspect. Hutch wondered whether that accounted for its designation.

"Who named it?" she asked. She understood that native place names got used when they were available (and pronounceable). When they weren't, imagination and a sense of humor were seldom lacking.

"Actually," said Richard, "it's had a lot of names over the centuries. Outlook. The Wayside. The Southern Shield, which derived from a constellation. And probably some we don't know. 'Temple of the Winds' was one of the more recent. Eloise Hapwell discovered it, and she eventually made the choice. It's intended to suggest, by the way, the transience of life. A flickering candle on a windblown night."

"I've heard that before somewhere."

"The image is common to terrestrial cultures. And to some on Nok. It's a universal symbol, Hutch. That's why churches and temples are traditionally built from rock, to establish a counterpoint. To imply that they, at least, are solid and permanent, or that the faith is."

"It's oppressive," she said. "They're all obsessed with death, aren't they?" Mortality motifs were prominent with every culture she knew about, terrestrial or otherwise.

"All of the important things," Richard said, "will turn out to be universally shared. It's why there will be no true aliens."

She was silent for a time. "This is, what, two thousand years old?" She meant the colonnade.

"Somewhere in that time frame."

"Why were there two temples?"

"How do you mean?"

"The Knothic Towers. That was a place of worship too, wasn't it? Were they all part of the same complex?"

"We don't think so, Hutch. But we don't really know very much yet." He pointed toward a shadowy entrance. "That way."

She followed him inside. Trail markers glowed in the murky water, red and green, amber and blue. They switched on their wrist-lamps. "Did the Temple and the Towers both represent the same religion?"

"Yes. In the sense that they both recognized a universal deity."

"No pantheons here."

"No. But keep in mind, we don't see these people at their beginnings. The cultures we can look at had already grasped the essential unity of nature. No board of gods can survive that knowledge."

"If I understood Frank, there's an ancient power plant here somewhere."

"Somewhere is the word. They don't really know quite where. Henry has found bits and pieces of generators and control panels and conductors throughout the area. You probably know there was an intersection of major roads here for several thousand years. One road came down from the interior, and connected with a coastal highway right about where we are now."

"Yes," she said. "I've seen it."

"Before it was a highway, it was a river. It would have been lower then than it is today. Anyway, the river emptied into the sea, and the power plant must have been built somewhere along its banks. But that's a long time ago. Twenty-five thousand years. Maybe more." His voice changed subtly. She knew how Richard's mind worked, knew he was feeling the presence of ghosts, looking back the way they'd come, seeing the ancient watercourse, imagining a seaside city illuminated by electric lights. They had paused by an alcove. "Here," he said, "look at this." He held his lamp against the wall.

A stone face peered at her. It was as tall, from crocodilian crown to the base of its jaws, as Hutch. It stared past her, over her shoulder, as if watching someone leave.

The eyes were set in deep sockets beneath a ridged brow. Snout and mouth were broad; the skull was flat, wide, smooth. Tufts of fur were erect across the jaws. The aspect of the thing suggested sorrow, contemplation, perhaps regret.

"It fits right in," she said. "It's depressing."

"Hutch, that's the response of a tourist."

"Who is it? Do we know?"

He nodded. "God."

"That's not the same as the one in the Lower Temple."

"No. This is a male version. But it comes a thousand years later."

"Universal deities—"

"What?"

"— never seem to smile. Not in any culture. What's the point of having omnipotence if you don't enjoy it?"

He squeezed her shoulder. "You do have your own way of looking at things."

They descended to ground level, picking up a track of green lights. "What happened to the industrialized society?" she asked. "The one with the power plant?"

"It ran out of gas. Literally. They exhausted their fossil fuels. And developed no replacements."

"No atom."

"No. They probably never tried. It might be that you only get a narrow window to do it: you can't run your motors anymore, and you need a major, concerted effort. Maybe you need a big war at exactly the right moment." He grew thoughtful. "They never managed it on Nok either."

They were still in the central nave. The roof blocked off the light, and it was dark in spite of the trail markers. Occasionally, sea creatures touched them. "It's a terrible thing," said Richard, "to lose all this."

They paused periodically before engravings. Whole walls were covered with lines of symbols. "We think they're stories," he said. "Anyhow, it's all been holographed. Eventually we'll figure it out. And here's what we've been looking for."

A shaft opened at their feet. The green lamps dived in, accompanied by a pair of quivering tubes, each about as wide as a good-sized human thigh. "Extracting sand," said Richard.

He stepped off the edge. His weights carried him down. Hutch waited a few moments, then followed. "We are now entering the Lower Temple," he told her. "Welcome to 9000 B.C."

The shaft was cut through gray rock. "Richard," she asked, "do you think there's really a chance to find a Rosetta stone in here anywhere? It seems like a long shot to me."

"Not really. Remember, this was a crossroad. It's not hard to believe they would have carved a prayer, or epigram, or inspirational story, on a wall, and done it in several languages. In fact, Henry's convinced they would have done it. The real questions are whether any of it has survived, and whether we'll have time to recover it if it did."

Hutch could not yet see bottom. "The stone wall behind you," Richard continued, "is part of the outer palisade. We're outside the military post." A tunnel opened off the shaft. The green lights and the tubes snaked into it. "This is just above ground level during the military era." He swam toward the passageway. "They're pumping sediment out now. It's a constant struggle. The place fills up as fast as they pump."

She followed him in. Ahead, past his long form, she could see white lights and movement.

"George?" Richard was now speaking on the common channel. "Is that you?"

An enormous figure crouched over a black box. It stirred, and looked up. "Damn," he said. "I thought you were the relief shift. How you doing, Richard?"

She could hear the soft hum of machinery, and the slush of moving water.

"Hutch," Richard said, "this is George Hackett. Project engineer."

Hackett must have been close to seven feet tall. He was preoccupied with a device that was probably a pump, and tried to say hello without looking away from it. It was difficult to see him clearly in the uncertain light, but he sounded friendly.

"Where's your partner?" Richard asked.

Hackett pointed at the tubes, which trailed off into a side corridor. "At the other end," he said.

"We're directly over the military chapel," Richard told Hutch. "They're trying to clear the chambers below."

"What's in them?" she asked.

"We don't know yet," said George. "We don't know anything, except that they're located at the western limit of the palisade. They were probably a barracks. But they could also be part of the original chapel."

"I thought you'd already found that," said Hutch. "That's where the Tull tableau was, right?"

"We've got into part of it," said George. "There's more around here somewhere. There's a fair chance this is it."

The silt in the passageway was ankle-deep. They stood amid the clutter of electric cables, collection pouches, bars, picks, rocks.

"Why is the chapel important? Aside from finding samples of the Casumel series?"

George spoke to someone else on a private channel. The person at the other end of the tubes, Hutch assumed. Then, apparently satisfied, he turned toward her. The pressure in the tubes subsided. "This was an outpost of a major civilization, Hutch. But we don't know anything about these people. We don't know what was important to them, how they thought about themselves, what they would have thought about us. But chapels and temples tend to be places which reveal the highest values of the civilizations they represent."

"You can't be serious," said Hutch.

"I don't mean directly. But if you want to learn what counts to people, read their mythology. How do they explain the great questions?" He grinned, suddenly aware that he had become pedagogic. She thought his eyes lingered on her, but couldn't be sure.

"Hutch," said Richard, "Henry is up forward, in one of the anterooms. Where they found the Tull series. Would you like to see it?"

"I think I'll pass," she said. "I'm out of time."

"Okay. You know how to get back?"

"Sure." She watched Richard swim past George, and continue down the tunnel. Moments later, he rounded a bend and was gone.

Hutch listened to the faint hiss of her airpack. "How are we doing?" she asked.

George smiled. "Not so good."

"I expected to find most of the team down here. Where is everybody?"

"Frank and Linda are with Henry. The rest are at Seapoint. There's really not much we can do until we get things cleared out below. After that, we'll do a major hunt for more Casumel C samples. When Maggie—You know Maggie?"

"No."

"Maggie Tufu's our exophilologist. We've got several hundred samples of Casumel Linear C from around the area. But most of the samples are short, only a few words. When she tells us she's got enough to start reading it, that will be the signal to pull out." He sounded weary.

"You okay?"

"I'm fine." He glanced down at the tubes, which had collapsed. They were blue-black, flexible, painted with silver strips at intervals of about one meter. The strips were reflective.

He didn't seem to have anything to do except sit by the device. "I'm just collecting data from Tri's monitor," he said. "Tri holds the vacuum, and I sit here in case the Temple falls in on him. That's so we know right away." He turned toward her, and she got her first clear look at him.

George had good eyes, dark and whimsical. She could see that he enjoyed having her there. He was younger than she would have guessed: his brow was unfurrowed, and there was something inescapably innocent in his demeanor. He was handsome, in the way that most young men are handsome. But the smile, and the eyes, added an extra dimension. He would be worth cultivating, she decided.

"How unsafe is this place?" she asked.

The passageway was too small for him. He changed his position, trying to get comfortable. "Normally, we'd have taken time to buttress everything, but we're on the run. We're violating all kinds of regulations being in here at all. If something goes, somebody may get killed." He frowned. "And I'll be responsible."

"You?"

"Yes."

"Then close the place down."

"It's not that easy, Hutch. I probably should do that. But Henry is desperate."

Eddie Juliana had no time to waste. "Red tags first," he said. Hutch glanced around at stacks of cases, most of them empty; and at rows of artifacts: clay vessels, tools, machines, chunks of engraved stone. Some cases were sealed. These were labeled in red, yellow, and blue.

"Okay," she said, not certain what she was to do with the red tags.

Eddie moved around the storeroom with the energy of a rabbit in heat. He ducked behind crates, gave anxious directions to someone over his commlink, hurried in and out checking items on his inventory.

He stopped and gazed at Hutch. "You were planning on helping, right?"

Hutch sighed. "Tell me what you want done."

He was thin and narrow with red hair and a high-pitched voice. More than any of the others, he seemed driven by events. Hutch never saw him smile, never saw him relax. He struck her as one of those unfortunate people who see the downside of everything. He was young, and she could not imagine his taking a moment to enjoy himself. "Sub's waiting," he said. "There's a cart by the door, ready to go. Take it over. Carson'11 be there to unload. You come back. I need you here."

"Okay."

"You really did come in the Wink, right?"

"Yes."

"That's good. I didn't trust them not to change their minds, try to save a buck, and send a packet for the evacuation."

She looked around at the rows of artifacts. "Is this everything?"

"There are three more storerooms. All full."

"Okay," she said. "We've got plenty of space. But I'm not sure there's going to be time."

"You think I don't know that?" He stared morosely at a cylindrical lump of corrosion. "You know what that is?"

"No."

"It's a ten-thousand-year-old radio receiver." His fingers hovered over it, but did not touch it. "This is the case. Speaker here. Vacuum tubes back here, we think. It was a console." He swung toward her, and his brown, washed-out eyes grew hard. "It's priceless." His breast heaved, and he sounded very much like a man who was confronting ultimate stupidity. "These cases are filled with artifacts like this. They are carefully packed. Please be gentle with them."

Hutch did not bother to take offense. She drove the cart to the submarine bay, turned it over to Carson and a muscular graduate student whose name was Tommy Loughery, got Carson's opinion that Eddie was a basket case, and came back. "We have room on the sub for two more loads," she said.

"How much can your shuttle carry?"

"About two and a half times the capacity of the sub."

"And ours will carry about half that much." He looked around in dismay. "We're going to have to make a few trips. I'd hoped you'd have more capacity."

"Sorry."

Stacks of tablets piled on a tabletop caught her eye. They were filled with symbols, drawn with an artistic flair. "Can we read them?" she asked.

"No," he said.

"How old are they?"

"Six thousand years. They were good-luck talismans. Made by mixing animal fat with clay, and baking the result. As you can see, they last a long time."

Hutch would have liked to ask for a souvenir. But that was against the rules, and Eddie looked as if he took rules very seriously.

"And this?" She indicated a gray ceramic figurine depicting a two-legged barrel-shaped land animal that resembled a Buddha with fangs. It had large round eyes and flat ears pressed back on its skull like an elephant's. The body was badly chipped.

Eddie glared at her, angered that she could not see the need for haste. But it was also true that he loved to talk about his artifacts. "It's roughly eight hundred years old." The object was intricately executed. He held it out to her. It was heavy. "The owner was probably one of the last priests." A shadow crossed his pinched features. "Think about it: the Temple, or some form of it, had been there since time immemorial. But somewhere toward the end of the fourteenth century, they closed it up. Locked the doors, and turned out the lights. Can you imagine what that must have meant to that last group of priests?" The ventilators hummed in the background. Eddie studied the figurine. "This is not a sacred object. It had some personal significance. We found several of these in one of the apartments. This one was left near the main altar."

"Company for the dying god," suggested Hutch.

He nodded, and she realized at that moment that whatever else he might be, Eddie Juliana was a hopeless romantic.

Two hours later, she was in the air, enroute to Wink.

"Janet, are you there? This is Hutch."

"Negative, Hutch. Janet's asleep. This is Art Gibbs."

"Pleased to meet you, Art."

"What can I do for you?"

"Uh, nothing. I was just bored."

"Where are you now?"

"Chasing my ship. But I won't catch her for another few hours." Pause. "What do you do with this outfit, Art?"

"Dig, mostly. I'm sorry I missed you today. I hear you're a knockout."

Hutch smiled and switched to video. "Dispel all illusions," she said. "But it's nice to hear."

Art beamed at her. "The rumors are short of the mark," he said gallantly. Art Gibbs was in his fifties, hair gone, a roll of flab around his middle. He asked whether she had been to Quraqua before, what she had done that had so impressed Richard Wald, what her reactions were to the Temple of the Winds. Like the others, he seemed stricken by the impending evacuation.

"Maybe it'll survive," she said. "It's underwater. And the Knothic Towers look pretty solid."

"No chance. A few hours after they knock the icecap into the ocean, we'll get huge tidal waves here—"

She had lost the sun now, was gliding through the dark. Her left-hand window looked out on the Void. She caught a glimpse of the Kosmik space station, a lone brilliant star.

"Somebody else," continued Art, "will be along in a few thousand years to try again. Be an interesting puzzle, I'd think: hi-tech wreckage on a low-tech world."

"Art, have you been to Oz?"

"Yes."

"What did you think of it?"

"I don't think we'll ever know what it's about."

"Doesn't it strike you as odd that it got burned at the same time that the military post was destroyed?"

"It burned during the same era" he said gently. "Don't forget that the fort disappeared during an epoch of worldwide destruction."

"That's my point. I think. Doesn't it seem likely there's a connection?"

"I don't see how there could be." He stuck his tongue in the side of his cheek and frowned. "I really don't."

"Frank Carson mentioned the connection between the events at Oz and widespread destruction on Quraqua."

"What could it be? There's only a connection in very general terms, Hutch. The discontinuities occurred over long stretches of time. For all we know, so did the damage inflicted on Oz. But they didn't necessarily happen at the same time. Only during the same era. There's a difference, and I think we fall into a trap when we confuse the two." He paused. "Are you interested in the discontinuities?"

"Yes."

"Then I'll tell you something else. It's coincidence, of course."

"What is?"

"There's a poem that we have in translation. Wait a minute, let me find it."

Art walked off-screen. "Have you ever heard of the Scriveners?"

"No."

"They dominated this area between approximately 1400 B.C., and the collapse of the Eastern Empire, about four hundred years later."

"Scriveners?"

"So named because they kept records of everything. Detailed commercial accounts, inventories, medical records, vital statistics. They were quite advanced." He grinned. "In a bureaucratic way. They were a lot like us. They even seem to have had insurance policies. Now, their demise, the fall of the Eastern Empire, and the Second Discontinuity all seem to have occurred around 1000 B.C."

"Okay." Ten lines of text had appeared on Hutch's monitor.

"Judging from the commercial nature of the writings they left behind, the Scriveners appear to have been neither philosophical nor religious. The Temple was relegated to a historical curiosity during their period of ascendancy. But we did find a book of devotions in one of their cities. Valdipaa. Not far from here. Next stop on the trade route west. The verse on your screen is from the book."

In the streets of Hau-kai, we wait. Night comes, winter descends, The lights of the world grow cold. And, in this three-hundredth year From the ascendancy of Bilat, He will come who treads the dawn.

Tramples the sun beneath his feet, And judges the souls of men. He will stride across the rooftops, And he will fire the engines of God.

She read through it twice. "What are the engines of God?"

Art shrugged.

"Then what's the point?"

"Bilat. He was a hero. He was used for a time to mark the beginning of the Scrivener era. He seized power somewhere around 1350 B.C., our time. Hau-kai, by the way, was a kind of Jerusalem, a holy city, symbolic of the best that the faithful could hope for in this world."

Hutch reread the verse. "Three hundred years later would take them close to the Second Discontinuity." She exited from the screen, and brought Art back. "You're suggesting somebody predicted the event?"

"We've dated the book. It's one of the oldest we have. Can't read much of it. What we can read is mostly devotional."

"Who did the translation?"

"Maggie Tufu. Have you met her? Well, anyway, she converted the time references. The term that reads as men actually refers to all the inhabitants of the planet, male and female, past and present. And the verb that's rendered as judges seems to imply both judge and executioner." Art seemed simultaneously amused and perplexed. "And, yes—the prediction is right on the money."

"Prophecy's a tricky game," said Hutch. "It's common for religious groups to predict catastrophic events. Get enough predictions, and somebody's bound to hit it right."

Art nodded. "That would be my guess. But some people here have wondered whether the thing on the moon doesn't in some way mark this world for periodic destruction."

By 1900 hours, the Temple shuttle was loaded and ready to follow Alpha. Carson checked everything to ensure that the containers wouldn't shift, and watched the sub draw away. Eddie sat stiffly in its bubble with his arms folded, staring straight ahead.

Carson powered up, informed the watch officer he was on his way, and lifted off.

The sun had moved behind the peaks, and a cold wind blew across the gathering darkness. The tide was out, and wide stretches of sand glittered in the failing light. Waves broke around the Towers. Carson would be glad to be away, to get to D.C. and to walk in the sun without needing a Flickinger harness.

Still, he was angry. When he had first come here, six years ago, he had thought of the Temple, with its rock walls, as timeless. Long after he passed to a happier existence, it would be here, as it had been here for millennia. It was a symbol, for all of them, of stability. Of the idea that things that really matter live on.

He drew back the yoke. The shuttle sailed through the clouds.

Below, the Knothic Towers were already lost in twilight.

LIBRARY ENTRY

When, in the spring of 2187, Alexander LaPlante completed the first phase of the excavation of Sodom, he concluded that the city had been burned, a fate not uncommon in Biblical times. But he offered two additional opinions which created a storm of controversy:

(1) that the site was far older than had been expected, dating to approximately 5000 B.C.; and

(2) that a computerized reconstruction of the damage suggested the city had been shattered by something akin to modem weapons.

LaPlante's grant was cut off in 2189. A second expedition, led by Oliver Castle and Arian Adjani, examined both propositions. They confirmed the earlier date, but found no compelling evidence to support what had by then become known as the bomb thesis.

LaPlante lost his tenure at the University of Pennsylvania in 2195, and is now teaching at Radison University in London.

— Marjorie Gold

Dead Sea Excavations

Commonwealth, New York, 2199

9 Quraqua. Tuesday; 2148 hours. (Twenty-eight minutes before midnight.)

Both shuttles had unloaded their cargo on the Winckelmann, and were on their way back to the surface when the eleven-ton block of supercooled ice that was designated #171 in the Kosmik inventory crossed the equator into the southern hemisphere. With a whisper, it passed over moonlit tundra and pulpy forests, something not quite heard. Shining splinters fell away, and the arid landscape momentarily brightened.

Snow blew against Alpha's windscreen. Hutch (who had waited for Carson at Wink, and then followed him down) could see the sub and the Temple shuttle, haloed by their lights, docked at the floatpier. The shuttle's cargo door was open; Carson and Loughery were working to move a stack of containers off the pier into the spacecraft.

Janet Allegri blinked onto her overhead display. "Hello, Hutch," she said. Her hair was pressed down by an energy field. She was speaking from the sub. "We seem to have got a little behind with Plan A." They had intended to pile cases on the floatpier, and have two more complete shipments ready to go when the shuttles arrived. But not very much had made it topside.

"Weather been bad?"

"It's been wet. But the problem is people. Everybody's hunting artifacts."

Well to the south, lightning struck the ocean.

Hutch understood. Under extreme pressure, Henry was willing to risk the artifacts he already possessed—which were after all duly recorded on hologram—to increase his chances of finding what he was really looking for. "Coming down," she said.

She settled smoothly into the sea, and drifted into the magnetic couplers, which locked the shuttle against the pier. Carson was loading the last container, and his hold was still half-empty.

Loughery smiled shyly. He was loading a dolly into the sub. The snow slid down his energy envelope.

"How can I help?" she asked.

Janet came out of the sub. "Just in time," she said lightly. "We were running short of peasants."

The sea was calm, but the peaks along the shore, and the Towers, were lost in murk. Carson, who seemed to wear his feelings close to the surface, looked unhappy. "Good to see you," he said, cheering up. "Roll up your sleeves."

Moments later, they submerged and headed at high speed for Seapoint

If the skies had been clear, and if they'd been six minutes slower to leave, they would have seen a fireball glide si4ently out of the northeast. They would have seen it arc out to sea, and pass below the horizon. And anyone standing on the pier, even in the thick gloom, would have noticed a sudden brightening of the southern sky.

She had slept during most of the flight down from Wink, so she was ready to work. Since she was too small to be of much assistance lugging containers around, she asked Eddie whether there wasn't something she could do. He directed her to a storeroom where she found Tommy Loughery.

"Eddie asked me to get you started," he said. His black hair was in disarray, somewhat in the sloppy style common to graduate students in those times.

"Okay," she said. "What do I do?"

He pointed at a table loaded with artifacts. There were wedges, pieces of masonry, pottery. "Most of this just came down from Maggie's operation. They're all from the Lower Temple. And priceless. They get red-tagged. There'll be more later. All of this is high-priority, and should go up on the next shuttle. We need to pack it."

"Show me how," she said.

He produced a stock of plastic cloth and dragged over two of the barrel-shaped containers, which he loaded onto a motorized cart. He held an artifact up to the light, turned it so she could read the four digits on the red tag. "That's the catalog number," he said. "Record it on the packing list." Then he wrapped the artifact in plastic, taped it, and placed it in the container.

It was simple enough, and she proceeded to clear the table, while Tommy found other things to do. When she'd finished filling both containers, he returned.

"What next?"

"We seal them." He picked up a spray gun. It was fed by a short hose that connected to a pair of drums, labeled «A» and "B." He pulled the cart closer, and pointed the gun into one of the containers. "Stand back," he said. He pulled the trigger. A thick white stream slushed out and rolled over the packages.

"It's poly-6, a low volume, expanding rigid urethane," he explained. "Great packing material. It's biodegradable. And it sets quickly. As you can see." He snapped off the flow.

"You didn't put much in," said Hutch.

"Only needs about five percent of volume." He threw the gun aside, clamped the lid down and locked it.

"The merchandise is fragile. Won't it get crunched?"

"No. The poly-6 doesn't apply pressure. When it meets resistance, it stops." He handed her the gun. "Just leave the containers on the cart. When you're finished, call me and we'll take them over to the sub."

George Hackett removed the last of the petrified timbers, held his breath, and smiled with satisfaction when nothing happened. This was as deep as they'd penetrated into the Lower Temple. Beyond, a hole in the wall opened into a chamber that was three-quarters filled with silt. "We'll need to brace the roof, Tri," he said. "On both sides of the opening."

"Okay. Hang on. Braces coming."

While he waited, George thrust his lamp forward. This could be the inner sanctum of the military chapel, the chamber in which priests prepared to conduct services, where they perhaps stored their homilies and their sacred vessels.

"Can you see anything?" Tri called.

Yes. There was something, a piece of furniture probably, to his right, half-buried, just out of reach. It had been metal once. "Something," George said. "A washstand, maybe. Or a cabinet. Can't tell."

Tri moved forward with a pair of braces. "Let's get these up first," he said.

"Just a second." George inched into the space. He was acutely conscious of the weight of the Temple hanging over him. "I think it's a machine."

"In here? What kind of machine?"

"I don't know. But there is a housing. Wait." The hole was too narrow for him. He pulled back, scraped out silt and loose rock, and tried again.

"That's enough, George," said Tri. "Let's do it right."

He got his shoulders through the entrance, and pushed forward. "There's a metal framework here. With, uh—Hell, Tri, I don't know what to make of this." He carried a camera on his left forearm. "Maggie, are you there?" he asked through the commlink. "Can you see this?"

"Maggie's coming," said Andi, who was watch officer.

He struggled to get closer.

"What do you have, George?" It was Maggie. He knew she'd be straining to see the object on the big screen.

"Don't know." He was in now, and stood over the device. Metal bars and plates were connected to a system of springs and pulleys. Everything was heavily corroded.

"Shine the lamp to your left," Maggie said. "Look, there's a tray." There were small objects that looked like stones in the tray. "See if they're loose," she said.

He took one out, dabbed at it carefully, and held it close to the camera. There was a dark smudge on it.

Maggie was silent for several moments. Then her voice went very soft. "Goddammit, George, I think you've found us a printing press!"

"Well, good," said George.

"Yes." Her voice was ecstatic, and he heard her clap. "Show me the frame."

He did.

"Closer," she urged. And then: "It's got some sort of typesetting arrangement. It's filled with type."

"What language?" said Andi. "Can you tell?"

"Not yet. But we might be able to restore enough of it." He listened to her breathe. "It might be the jackpot."

"How do you mean?"

"Place like this would need multilingual prayer-cards. Or whatever. If there's a Rosetta stone here, this could be //. George, haul it out."

Henry was napping in the community room when his commlink chimed. He came immediately awake. Henry lived these days in constant fear of disaster. He knew he was violating safety procedures, risking his people, risking his career. Not good, but he knew that history was watching him. It was not a time for caution. "What is it, Andi?"

"Kosmik on the line. You want to listen? Or take the call?"

"I'm busy," he said. "You do the talking. If necessary, tell them you'll check with me and get back. And, Andi?"

"Yes?"

"Don't give them any trouble. Okay?" He shook the last of the sleep out of his brain, got up, and walked wearily downstairs to Operations.

Henry loved Quraqua. He loved its quiet mountain ranges, and its long wandering rivers; its vast silences and its abandoned cities. The ancient walls and towers rose out of deep forests, bordered great plains, embraced harbors. Many of the more recent ruins remained in good condition: one could not stroll through them without anticipating that the dusty fountains would one day flow again, the lights come on, and the avenues fill with traffic. Quraqua was a place, in Richard Wald's memorable phrase, "on the shore of time."

He had been here sixteen years, had married two of his wives here, one of them atop the Golden Stair at Eskiya. He had gone back to Earth only when necessary, to fight with the Second Floor about funding, or to take on those who wanted to rearrange his priorities. He was a blue-collar archeologist, an excavator, a detail man, tough, competent, good to work for. Not brilliant, in the way that Richard was brilliant. But solid. Methodical. If one could say that Richard Wald was curious about the inscription at Oz, it was equally arguable that Henry was driven by it. And not because of some deeper mystery behind the arcane symbols, but because he understood he was locked away from fundamental truth, essential to understanding this thing he loved so much.

Andi was waiting for him. As he arrived, she pressed Transmit. "This is the Temple. Go ahead, Kosmik."

The monitor glowed, and Harvey Sill's image appeared. "Dr. Jacobi, please. Director Truscott wishes to speak with him."

"Dr. Jacobi is not available. Director Truscott may speak with me if she wants. I'll be happy to relay her message. Or if you prefer, I can have Dr. Jacobi return the call."

"Oh, for God's sake." Melanie Truscott replaced Sill. "We don't have time for bureaucratic nonsense, young lady." She paused, and lifted her eyes above Andi, as if she were searching the room. "Henry, I know you're there. Please talk to me. We have an emergency."

Henry sighed, and walked around in front of the screen. "Hello, Melanie," he said wearily. "What seems to be the problem?"

"We've had an accident."

Henry glanced sharply at Andi, a gesture delivered primarily for Truscott's benefit. "What happened? Do you need help?"

"No. But you might be in some danger."

"What do you mean?"

"We lost control of one of the snowballs. An orbiting piece of ice. It fell into the Yakata three minutes ago."

He smothered his anger. "Where?"

"Roughly sixteen hundred kilometers south of you. It impacted at seventy-two point five south, one-fifteen point two west."

Andi brought up a map of the region, and marked the location.

Truscott's eyes fastened on Henry. "A tsunami has formed," she said.

"Melanie, you are a bitch."

"I'm sorry you think so, Henry. But I hardly think that's the issue." She looked guilty. She tried to stare him down, but the fire had gone out of her eyes.

"How big is the wave?"

"We don't have a measurement yet."

"Please let me know when you do."

"I will. And, Henry—I'm sorry about this. If we can help—"

"Yes. Of course. Temple out." He broke the link. "We'll need to evacuate the Temple. How fast do tidal waves travel?"

Andi was already consulting the data banks:

TSUNAMI. (SEA WAVE, SEISMIC WAVE, TIDAL WAVE.) AN OCEAN WAVE RESULTING PROM AN UNDERSEA EARTHQUAKE, VOLCANIC ERUPTION, OR OTHER SUBMARINE DISTURBANCE. THE TSUNAMI MAY REACH OVERWHELMING DIMENSIONS, AND HAS BEEN KNOWN TO TRAVEL ENTIRELY AROUND THE EARTH. (Cf., THE ARGENTINEAN PLATE SLIPPAGE, 2011.) IT PROCEEDS AS AN ORDINARY GRAVITY WAVE. THE WATER FORMING TSUNAMIS TENDS TO BUNCH UP BEHIND THE WAVE WHILE IT IS TRAVELING THROUGH DEEP WATER. ON APPROACHING SHALLOW AREAS, VELOCITY DECREASES, BUT THE WAVE WILL INCREASE SHARPLY IN HEIGHT. LOW-LYING AREAS MAY BE ENGULFED. TSUNAMIS DO NOT RESULT IN ANY WAY FROM TIDAL ACTION. THE POPULAR TERM "TIDAL WAVE" IS A MISNOMER.

She scanned ahead.

VELOCITY OF THE WAVE EQUALS THE SQUARE ROOT OF GRAVITATIONAL ACCELERATION TIMES THE DEPTH OF THE WATER.

"Do we have the sea depths south of here?" Henry asked.

Andi shook her head. "I don't think they've been measured very exactly." Her fingers danced across the keyboard. "Best guess is that it will be traveling at five or six hundred kilometers per hour. But it's only a guess."

"Son of a bitch." She listened to Henry's harsh breathing.

Hutch was riding her cart, carrying six containers toward the sub bay when Henry broke in on the common channel. "We've got an emergency," he said softly.

She turned a comer and saw Eddie Juliana coming out of one of the storerooms. He was scribbling on a lightpad.

Henry outlined the situation briefly. Hutch thought it was probably a false alarm, a maneuver in a war of nerves. But Eddie was staring at her, eyes wide.

"We don't know yet how fast it's coming," Henry continued, "or where it is, or how big it is. But it could be here in a couple of hours. Everyone is to leave the Temple. Return immediately to Seapoint."

"My God," said Eddie, "we'll lose it all."

George broke in: "Henry, we're in the middle of something."

"Now, George. I want everybody back here within thirty minutes. Please acknowledge to Andi. Don't worry about securing equipment. Frank, what's the status on the sub?"

Carson was enraged. "It's loaded. We were just getting ready to head for the pier."

"Forget it. Is-Tommy with you?"

"Yes."

Eddie climbed onto the cart. "Get going," he said to Hutch.

"Tommy." Henry sounded calm. "Take the sub and head straight out to sea. Go as far as you can."

"Why not leave it where it is?" asked Carson.

"Because it's safer in deep water. We don't know what'll happen here. Frank, I need you and Hutch to find the wave. I want to know where it is, how big it is, and how fast it's coming."

Carson acknowledged.

"One more thing. It's going to be hard to see. Tidal waves are small when they're in deep water. Maybe only a meter or two high. But it's long. There might be a kilometer or two between the crest and the trough."

Hutch and Eddie rolled into the sub bay.

"I'm not sure what constitutes safe cover for something like this," Henry continued. "If we have time, I'm going to get everybody ashore, out of the way of this goddam thing."

"Then you'll need the sub," Carson said.

"It'll take too long. We'd need time to unload it, and then a couple of trips to get everyone out. And then another three quarters of an hour to get to high ground. No, we'll use the jetpacks if there's time. You find out what the situation is. Where is it? How bad? When will it get here?"

"Don't forget," Andi added, "to get both shuttles away from the dock."

Eddie jumped off the side of the cart as Carson closed the cargo hatch. "What are you doing?" he asked.

Carson blinked at the question. "Getting underway."

"You've got room for more." He was trying to direct Hutch to pull closer to the sub.

"Forget it, Ed."

"Anyway," added Hutch, "the sub's going out to meet a tidal wave. Last thing you want is a lot of ballast. It's probably already overloaded."

That brought a worried reaction from Tommy. "Maybe we should unload some of this stuff."

"Listen," said Eddie, "this place might get wrecked. We've got to save what we can."

"Seapoint'll be fine," said Carson, but he threw a worried glance toward Hutch. "Let's get going."

Before they were clear of the base, Hutch had used her remote to start Alpha inland. Five minutes later, she and Carson rode the Temple shuttle into a dripping sky.

Below, Tommy, frightened and alone, headed out to sea.

George, deep in the Lower Temple, was also reluctant to adjust his priorities. "Henry," he pleaded, "we can have it out of here in an hour."

Maggie, wherever she was, joined in: "Henry, this is critical. We can't take a chance on losing it."

They were on the common channel. Hutch had been distracted, hadn't heard enough to know what it was. "We may not have an hour," Henry said. "Don't argue with me; I've got too much to do. George, get back here."

Hutch stared at the ocean. It looked peaceful enough. "This kind of screw-up," she said to Carson, "intentional or not, should cost her her career."

"Who?"

"Truscott."

"That's a joke. We're politically unpopular right now. They'll give her a medal."

Scanners are specialized. Those mounted on the Temple shuttle, intended for archeology, were designed to penetrate subsurface objects and provide detail at short range. What Hutch needed was the broad sweep of her own instruments. "We took the wrong shuttle," she said.

"Too late now. It'll have to do."

It was still snowing.

Hutch looked at her screens. "The wave might be only a meter or so high. I'm not sure that's going to show up."

Carson frowned. "What if we go lower?"

She responded by taking it down on the deck. But she kept air speed at three hundred until Carson grumbled. "We've got to make better time than this."

"We won't find it at all if we aren't careful. There are a lot of waves out there."

Carson shook his head. "This drives me right up the wall. Tidal waves are supposed to be easy to see. You sure Henry knows what he's talking about?"

"He's your boss. What do you think?"

Richard was helping Janet pack rations. The rest of the Academy team trooped in, in twos and threes. Henry plowed back and forth through the community room, head bent, hands locked behind his back.

Carson's voice came over the link. "We're at one hundred kilometers. Nothing yet."

Tri and George came in. That made thirteen people present. All accounted for.

"Okay, people," Henry said. "Now that we're all here, I think you should know what we intend to do. Let me say first that I think Seapoint will be safe. But there's no way to be sure. If we have sufficient time, we'll evacuate. Karl has brought up some light cable. We'll form a human chain, and use the jets to go ashore. Once there we'll head immediately up the pass. There's accessible high ground there, and we should be able to get well out of harm's way within a half hour or so after we get to the beach."

"How long," asked Andi, "is 'sufficient time'?"

"Two hours," he said. "If we don't get two hours to clear out, we'll stay here."

Art Gibbs stood. He looked uncertain and nervous. "Maybe we should put this to a vote, Henry."

Henry's eyes hardened. "No," he said. "No votes. I won't have anyone killed over democratic principles."

"Maybe there is no wave," said Carson. "Maybe it's a gag."

"Could be," Hutch said.

Henry's voice broke through the gloom. "Nothing yet, Frank?"

Carson looked pained. "Negative, Henry. Everything's calm out here."

"I don't think we're going about this right," said Henry. "You're moving too slowly. If it's in close it won't matter if you find it because we'll ride it out here anyway. What we need to know is whether it's far enough away to allow us time to get to shore. Why not take it up to top speed? If you find it far enough out, we're in business. If not, nothing lost."

"No," said Hutch. "I don't know much about tsunamis, but I do know they come in packs. Even if we hustled out and found a wave, we couldn't be sure there weren't others in close. We're not looking for one wave. We're looking for the nearest."

At two hundred kilometers, they ran out from under the storm. The sea was choppy, moonlit, restless. Icebergs drifted everywhere.

They flew on and watched the screens and the ocean. They began to sense that Henry had also begun to hope it was a false alarm.

In the glow of their navigation lights, an enormous black fluke rose out of the water. "Whale?" she asked.

"No whales on Quraqua." Carson looked down. "It has to be a fish. But I don't know that much about local wildlife." Then, without changing his tone, he said, "There's the wave."

It was long and straight, a ripple extending unbroken toward the horizon. It was not high, perhaps two meters. And not at all ominous. Just a surge of water trailing a black, polished wake. "You sure?" she asked.

"Yeah. That's it."

"Henry, this is Hutch. We've got it."

"Where?"

"Four hundred kilometers. It's moving at five-fifty."

"Okay," he said. "We'll stay here."

"Yeah. For what it's worth, it doesn't look bad."

Tommy Loughery was running on the surface. He had heard them pass overhead, outbound, although he'd seen nothing in the clouds.

"Tommy." Andi's voice.

"Go ahead, Andi."

"You heard everything?"

"Sure did."

"When it gets near, go deep. It should be easy to get below the turbulence."

"I will," he said. "Good luck."

"You too. But I think we'll be okay."

He agreed. He'd seen the pictures transmitted from the shuttle, and it now seemed to him like a needless panic. His scanners were watching for the wave. If it grew enough to become a hazard, he would have plenty of time to get down. Truth was, he was grateful to spend a few hours in the storm, watching the snow come down, listening to the sounds of the ocean. The Temple had become claustrophobic, and oppressive, and grim. He wouldn't have admitted it to anyone, but he was almost glad that Kosmik had pushed them off. He'd been here only a semester, and he was scheduled for another. It had begun to seem endless. Better to get back to a world filled with women and lights and old friends and good restaurants. It would not have helped his career to break his contract and leave early. But now, he could return to D.C., and take advantage of his field experience to land a teaching job. In the future he'd leave the long-distance travel to others.

Because the craft was designed to lie low in the water, Tommy's sensors gave him good range only when he topped the crest of a wave. But that happened often enough to keep him aware of anything coming his way.

He drifted, watching the sea and thinking about better days. After a while, he heard the shuttle return, and a few minutes later his sensors gave him an unusual blip at sea level. Range twenty-two kilometers. Decreasing very rapidly. "Andi."

"Go ahead, Tommy."

"I see it. Estimate speed five hundred. It just looks like a long wave."

"Thanks, Tom. Take the sub down."

"I'm forty kilometers out. And diving." But he waited on the surface. It did not appear dangerous. He'd seen bigger along the Carolina coast. He maneuvered the sub until he had the prow pointed directly at the surge, and then he moved slowly forward.

The blue line on his screens grew.

Lightning flickered silently overhead.

He turned on his spotlights, but he could see nothing except rain. The prow tilted abruptly, and he rode up. For a breathless moment, he thought he was going to be flipped. The sub pitched and righted itself and moved again through smooth water. "No sweat," he said, under his breath.

"Look at that son of a bitch," murmured Carson.

The wave raced in graceful silence through the night. In their lights, it was black and clean and elegant. "It's slowing down," said Hutch. "It's under four hundred now." It was also expanding: it was still a solid front, without a crest, but it had begun to uncoil. To grow.

"Shallow water, Hutch." They were both looking at the data displays. "They lose velocity as they approach beaches. Thank God for small favors."

"Frank, how deep is Seapoint?"

"At high tide, which we are approaching, it's thirteen meters. Should be enough."

Carson reported to Andi. She sounded frightened.

The shuttle was running before the wave, close down on the water to facilitate measurement. "I just thought of something," said Hutch.

"What's that?"

"The monkeys. Are they on the beach at night?"

"They're going to have to worry about themselves, Hutch. But no, they aren't. Usually. Some come down, occasionally, after dark, just to watch the sea. When a study was done of them several years ago, it was one of the characteristics the researchers found most interesting."

The Towers came up on the monitor.

Behind them, the wave was a whisper barely audible over the roar of the sea.

They wheeled through the Towers. The tide was out. Hutch remembered that big waves were supposed to do that, suck coastlines dry and then deliver the water back in.

The wave rose, and mounted, and entered the shallows. It was not breaking; rather, the sea seemed to be hurling itself, dark and glittering and marble-smooth, against the ancient Towers and the rocky coastline beyond.

Seapoint. Wednesday; 0320 hours.

Radio and laserburst transmissions were relayed to Seapoint through a communications package mounted on a buoy which floated serenely on the surface directly above the cluster of sea domes. It was now forwarding the shuttle's images of the oncoming wave. Those images were displayed below on eleven monitors, in five different locations. But the one that had everybody's attention was located at the main diving port, a room of substantial size, with a large pool in its center. This was the chamber through which heavy equipment could be moved into the sea. It was advantageous under the present circumstances because there was no loose gear nearby, no cabinets, nothing that could injure anyone. Moreover, the pool was bordered by a handrail, to which they could attach themselves when the time came. There had been considerable discussion as to whether they wouldn't be safer seated in chairs with their backs to walls that faced the oncoming wave. But the sense that there might be a need to get out quickly overcame all other considerations.

They had sealed off the pool by closing the sea doors, after testing once to determine that the weakest among them (thought to be Maggie Tufu, who thereby became irate) could open them manually.

The atmosphere then became almost that of a picnic. The images of the oncoming wave revealed a disturbance so essentially moderate and quiescent that none could take it seriously. The men, for the most part, made it their business to look bored throughout the exercise, while the soft laughter of the women echoed across the pool.

Nevertheless, Richard saw that neither the boredom, nor the laughter, was real. Stiff, somewhat unnerved himself, he strolled among them, trading uneasy banter. And, when it seemed appropriate, giving assurance he did not feel. "I've seen worse at Amity Island," he told Linda Thomas. It was a lie, but it made them both feel better.

With several minutes remaining, the sub checked in. "No problem here," Tommy reported. He could not resist admitting that he had ridden over the top of the surge. If the sub had survived that, the wave couldn't be too serious.

As it approached, all eyes followed it on the screen. The images were the standard shaded blues of nightlight, and there was no audio, which combined to dampen the effect that Hutch and Carson were experiencing from the shuttle. Maybe it was just as well.

One by one, they took their places along the guardrail, used belts and lines to secure themselves to it, activated their energy shields, and began breathing from their airpacks. Richard watched the wave shut off the sky. Someone, Andi, noticed that the water level at the Towers had dropped.

The wave charged across the last kilometer. White water showed along its crest.

They could feel its approach in the bulkheads. They braced themselves, knelt on the deck, gripped the rail. Then the chamber shook, the lights dipped and went out, and the voice of the beast filled the night. The pool erupted and the screen went blank.

Someone whimpered, and there was awed profanity. A second blow fell, heavy, immense, delivered by an enormous mallet.

Richard was thrown against his belt and banged his ribs. Beside him, Linda cried out. Tri was somehow torn loose and flung into the water.

But nobody was seriously hurt. The shocks continued, with generally decreasing fury, for several minutes. The lights came back. They were startled that it had been so severe after all, but relieved that they were all alive, and they started to laugh. It was nervous, tentative laughter. And Henry released his death grip on the guardrail, and gave them all a thumbs-up. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said. "Congratulations."

LIBRARY ENTRY

They came in the spring of the year to tell me you were dead. They spoke of war and pride, and how you'd laughed at fear,

And called my name. All the while the sea grew black and still. Now you lie in a distant land, far from the summer day When we left our tracks on the foamy sand— Yet in the deeps of the night You call my name, your voice in the roar of the tide.

— Fragment from Knothic Hours

Translated by Margaret Tufu Cambridge University Press, 2202

10 On board Alpha. Wednesday; 0610 hours

During the course of an hour, three sea waves struck the Temple site. The first carried away the rear wall of the Temple, blew off the roof, and destroyed the colonnade; the second, which was the largest of the three, demolished two of the Knothic Towers, and buried the Lower Temple; and the third ripped one of Seapoint's domes from its moorings and deposited it two kilometers inland. Several sets of living quarters and a holographic display center went with it. Perhaps worst of all (since the Temple and the Towers were down to their last few days anyhow), an avalanche of sand and loose rock blocked shafts and passageways throughout the excavation site. The military chapel disappeared in the debris.

But they hadn't lost anyone. There were contusions and bruises to go around, and more discouragement. But they were alive. And Karl Pickens summed up one point of view when he suggested they would do well to take the hint and abandon the operation.

Hutch, listening in the shuttle, agreed. She and Carson were coming in from another sweep of the area. They'd been all the way out to the impact site. The sea was covered with ice, but there were no more tsunamis coming. Carson sat wrapped in alternating moods of gloom and outrage. Henry sounded tired and washed out on the circuit, as if it didn't matter anymore.

The floatpier was gone, of course. And Priscilla Hutchins flew above the last of the Towers.

Melanie Truscott's message had been delivered.

Art Gibbs and George Hackett met them with the sub, and they spent the next hour transferring cargo. Without the pier, the task was considerably more difficult. Midway through the operation they dropped a case, and watched it sink slowly out of sight. It was, of course, not beyond recovery, but there was no time to go after it. All in all, it was an awkward, slow business.

George was surreptitiously watching Hutch, and she enjoyed his mild confusion when she talked to him. Amid the gloom generated by Henry's people, he alone managed to retain his good humor. "You do what you can do," he told her, "and forget the rest. No point getting ulcers over things you can't control."

But there were moments when he seemed distracted, and he eventually confessed that he would have liked to see things end under better circumstances. "We're always going to wonder what's down there," he said. "These people lived here for thousands of years. It's a pity to just bury them."

Hutch was silent.

"We'll protest," said Art. "And that's all. And that's the problem with this outfit. Nobody here has any guts."

"What would you suggest?" asked George.

Art stared back at the young giant. "I don't know," he said wistfully. "I don't know. But if I were Henry I'd find something."

"Don't get personally involved," said Carson. "It's a management problem."

"I think we should find a good lawyer and sue the bastards," Art continued. "They were negligent. At least. I don't know about anybody else, but I think I hurt my back." He grimaced in mock pain.

"It wouldn't do any good," Carson said. He and George were doing the bulk of the work. They'd tied the two vehicles together, but there was still a lot of bumping and rolling. George was in the sub, passing containers to Carson. It was a hit-and-miss proposition at best, and Hutch was surprised they lost only the one.

"Why not?" he asked. "It would show the world how Caseway and Truscott operate."

"Nothing would come of it," said Carson. "They'd just blame some pilot way down the chain of command, and throw him to the wolves. Nobody at the top would get hurt."

"But we've been mugged," said Hutch.

"That's true," said George, who was tying down a container. "And we know who did the mugging."

"There should be a way to get at them," said Art. He looked out of place in the role of avenger. He was tentative, self-effacing, cautious—completely unlike the energetic egos one usually found in these remote comers of known space. It was almost as if he'd got on a bus one day in downtown Chicago, and had ended at the Temple.

Hutch was thinking about the gang member Truscott had disarmed and killed in Newark. She wouldn't sit idly by and accept this kind of treatment.

Other than the missing dome, the complex had suffered no major damage. Hutch knew that some leaks had sprung, that one of the smaller modules, housing the compartments used by Andi and Linda, had burst and filled with water. And she could see a couple of people dredging near the sub bay.

She'd begun to wonder whether the drop had been a direct result of her conversation with Truscott. It was hard to draw any other conclusion.

Damn.

Henry's voice broke in on the common channel. "George? We need you at the site."

George acknowledged. "Guess you guys will have to finish without me."

Hutch felt a chill. "They aren't going to start mining again?"

"Probably."

"It's getting a little late," she said.

Art looked at his watch. "Forty-three hours, and change."

They reloaded the sub and returned to the surface. This time, they went a little farther from shore, seeking smoother water. Hutch recalled Alpha from its mountaintop, and guided it in alongside.

Watching Eddie pass cargo across to Art was a funny scene. Neither was strong or adept, and there was a lot of whooping and finger-pointing and suggestions on how the other could improve his performance. Hutch had installed a Teflon deckplate from Wink in the shuttle hold, to ease the operation. Just put the container down inside the hatch, and slide it wherever you want. It worked well, and she was delighted.

They finished up and were on their way back to Seapoint for more when Henry broke in again. "As you're aware," he said, "we've been cutting the evacuation pretty close. Good sense suggests we clear out now.

"But most of you know we've found an object in the Lower Temple that appears to be a rotary printing press. It uses movable metal type, and the typeface are in place. Maggie was able to identify several Casumel C characters before the wave hit. Unfortunately, it is still in the Lower Temple. It won't be easy to get back to it in the time we have. But, (/ we can recover it, we might have an entire page of C text. I need not tell you what that means.

"We are currently doing everything we can to reach the artifact. At the same time, I want to start moving people up."

"Just a moment, Henry." It was a woman's voice. And she sounded unhappy. Hutch looked questioningly at Art.

"Sandy Gonzalez," said Art. "She did most of the work for us on Oz."

"What is it, Sandy?" Henry asked.

"Mining under these conditions is too dangerous. Let's give it up and get out."

"You won't be involved in it, Sandy."

Wrong response, Hutch thought. Henry was supposed to be smart. Maybe he wasn't getting enough sleep. "I'm not just trying to save my own skin, Henry," Sandy snapped. "What I'm saying is, enough is enough. Call it off before somebody gets killed."

"Okay." Henry showed no emotion. "Anybody else want to say something?"

Another woman spoke up. The voice was familiar, but Hutch couldn't place it. "I wouldn't want to spend the rest of my life wondering what the hell that city on the moon is about, and knowing I might have been close enough to find out, and didn't try."

"Linda Thomas," said Art. "She's very good. And very young. I wish I had her future."

One by one, the others spoke. Even, finally, Frank Carson, from the shuttle. Hutch was surprised to hear him vote to cut their losses and leave. But the team was hopelessly divided, with some individuals arguing both sides of the question. Karl Pickens wanted to stay because he refused to be forced off, run out of town, but thought the Temple had been too severely weakened to go back in. "/ wouldn't want to go down there. And I don't think we should allow anyone to. Even if anybody's crazy enough to volunteer."

That brought an irritated stir.

Janet, who had already voted to stay, said, "I hope our watchword isn't safety first."

"Richard?" said Henry. "What do you think?" Hutch wondered whether they could see each other.

"Not my call," Richard said in his most objective monotone. "Whatever you and your people decide, I'll support."

No, goddammit, Hutch thought. Tell him to clear out. This down-to-the-wire approach leaves no room for error.

They did not ask her.

"Okay," said Henry, "for now, we'll play it by ear. George, take no chances." Hutch didn't like that very much. It was a non-decision, and they needed a little forceful leadership. "Meantime, we'll start moving the others out. If we don't make good progress in the chapel, we'll break it off in plenty of time." He was breathing heavily. "Eddie, how are we doing with the artifacts?"

Eddie's voice was cold. "We're going to lose most of them. Maybe we should concentrate on saving what we have, instead of running around—"

Since what they could save depended solely on the number of flights the two shuttles could make, and they were already operating at full capacity, Hutch failed to see how «concentrating» would help. If Henry understood that, he chose to say nothing. "We will save what we can," he said smoothly. "Hutch, we're going to start hauling people as well. How many can you carry? Other than yourself?"

"Four in Alpha. And you can put three passengers in the Temple shuttle."

There were sixteen people, counting Richard and Hutch. "When's your next flight?"

"In about two hours. As soon as we get loaded."

"Okay. Take Maggie with you. And Phil." Those were the philologists. They could work as easily on Winckelmann as in the dome. "And Karl and Janet. I'll figure out the rest—"

"I object," said Pickens. "I didn't say I wouldn't help. I just said it was crazy. That doesn't mean I want to duck out."

Janet also demurred, and the «meeting» dissolved in confusion.

Richard was waiting when they returned to the sub bay. He looked troubled, and drew Hutch aside. "We may have a problem," he said.

"Tell me something I don't know. These people are going to kill themselves. I thought you were a fanatic."

"Hutch, it's more than just the rush for this one last artifact. Henry and his people have built their careers around this place. And now, as they approach the payoff, someone wants to yank it away. You want the truth?"

"Of course."

"Henry's right. They should stay and get the printing press. Anything less is a betrayal."

She was silent.

He smiled gently. "I need you to do something for me. Do you know David Emory?"

She knew of him. Had even met him once at a wedding. A rather prissy African with an Oxford accent. Emory's specialty had something to do with extraterrestrial religions. He wrote books on the subject. "Yes," she said. "I know him."

"He's on Nok. I'd like you to get a message to him."

"Sure."

"About the discontinuities. I'd like to know whether these are random events, or whether there's a pattern of some sort. Maybe there's a planetary or social mechanism. Something biological, possibly. Something that activates periodically." He bit his lip, savoring his inability to get hold of the puzzle. "I'd like to know whether he's seen any evidence of a similar type of event on Nok."

"Why don't you ask him yourself? Seapoint has an interstellar link."

"No privacy. I'd rather keep it to ourselves for now."

"Okay. I'll get it out from Wink."

"Thanks. And ask for a prompt response."

Her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. "Now I need to ask you something."

"Sure."

"Melanie Truscott."

"What about her?"

"What happens to her when this is over?"

He got uncomfortable. "She gets promoted." His eyes drifted away from her. "I know how you feel, Hutch. But we'll lodge a protest. Kosmik will produce a report, send us a copy, apologize, and that'll be the end of it." He shrugged. "Maybe if someone had been killed—"

Janet Allegri was pleased that Henry'hadn't given up on tunneling back into the Lower Temple, but annoyed at being among the first to be evacuated.

Nevertheless, she did not complain. She returned to her quarters to pack. She had brought few personal possessions with her three years ago, but she'd managed to accumulate several artifacts. That wasn't legal, of course. Everything was supposed to be turned over to the Academy. But the Academy already had enough to fill a warehouse, and everybody else had taken a souvenir or two. It was more or less traditional.

One, her favorite, was a sun medallion, so-called because of the rising solar disk and the inscription, Live for the light. She liked it because it sounded so human. She also had an inscribed urn, from the Late Mesatic Period, whose symbols no one could read; and a coin with a Quraquat image on one side, and a Colin bush on the other. Years from now, these mementoes would be among her most prized possessions. Something to remind her of two lost worlds: the Quraquat, and her own youth.

She folded them carefully in her clothes, took her three bags out of the closet, and laid them inside.

The sheets would stay. And the towels.

She took framed photos from her walls, pictures of her brother, Joel, and his family in their living room at Christmas, of six members of the Temple team walking the beach, of the Zeta Fragment (which Janet had found, and which had provided Maggie's first insights into the Casumel languages). She'd lived a substantial portion of her adult life here. Had established herself professionally. Had experienced several romances. It hurt to know that these spaces would soon be filled with mud and water.

She dragged her bags into the passageway, and bumped into Richard.

He gave her a startled look, and she understood his mind had been elsewhere. "May I help?" he asked, after a moment to collect himself.

She'd had little opportunity to speak with him since his arrival. His reputation rendered him a daunting figure, and she felt intimidated. "Thank you, yes. Please."

He gazed at her thoughtfully. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. Why do you ask?"

"You look pale." He glanced at the bags. "It's okay," he said. "There'll be other places."

They carried the luggage through the community room, down to the lower level, and into the bay. Later, Janet would recall that they had talked during the short walk; she would not remember what he had said. Incidentals, no doubt, the sort of perfunctory remarks to which people freshly acquainted are inevitably limited. But she would always remember that he had seemed kind.

Maggie Tufu was the Academy's ranking exophilologist. She had a high opinion of herself, but she might have been that good. She'd made her reputation on Nok, where she'd deciphered ancient and modem languages. Unlike most of the outstanding field performers, Maggie was also a gifted instructor. She was a legend at the University of Pennsylvania.

She'd succeeded at everything in her life that really mattered, with two exceptions: her marriage, and her inability to do anything with the few inscriptions that had survived on Pinnacle.

Now she faced a third potential failure. No one with the Jacobi team had grasped more quickly than she the importance of deciphering Linear C. Like Richard, she believed it might lead eventually to the Monument-Makers, and to the secret behind Oz. Maggie was one of the few who believed there was a secret. Her colleagues by and large shared Frank Carson's view that the lunar artifact was simply alien, and that once one recognized that, there was not much else to say.

Consequently, when the numbing news arrived that the Academy was abandoning Quraqua, that its archeological treasures were being sacrificed to create a habitable world, she had thrown aside all other projects, and devoted herself exclusively to the Linear C problem.

They had recovered roughly five hundred writing samples of the target language, mostly from a dozen major sites. Generally, they consisted of only a few clusters of symbols. Context tended to be limited to the knowledge (or assertion)

that the sample had been taken from a government building, or a library, or a statue of an animal.

The Lower Temple had major potential. Maggie possessed several tablets of varying degrees of completeness, transcribed in one or another of the Casumel family. These were probably inspirational tales, because they were accompanied by picto-graphs that translated to rainstorms, the sea, military valor, the moon. And so she could make a guess here, and take a stab there. She had reconstructed a primary alphabet, and several alternates, and had started a vocabulary. But she desperately needed more samples.

The printing press was the answer. That should give her two or three thousand characters of text. A magnificent find. If she could get her hands on it.

This morning, she was lingering over a tablet which had come in almost two years before from an excavation site several hundred kilometers inland. She had scanned and indexed it, but had not sent it back to the Academy with her regular annual shipment.

The piece was an oblong, as wide as her hand, about twenty centimeters long. It depicted the Quraquat hero Malinar as a child, with a dish in his hand, feeding a ferocious ursine animal with tusks and huge eyes, while an infant watched. She knew the myth: the animal was a horgon, a demon beast capable of seeing all things. The horgon was one of the classic monstrosities of local mythology, a creature suggestive of divinity gone wrong, not unlike Satan. No one could hide from it. No one could defeat it. But it traditionally spared children, because this child had fearlessly approached it with a plate of food to divert attention from his sister. The horgon rewarded Malinar's valor, and never after was known to attack the young. The valor ideograph, which consisted of three arrows within a circle, appeared atop the engraving. And there were six lines of text. She believed she had identified several terms: the verbs to see and to offer, and the nouns Malinar and horgon.

In addition, the text supported some of her syntactical notions.

She had not sent the tablet on to D.C., because she had recognized the character group for horgon from somewhere else: it was part of the Oz inscription.

Andi was in the process of powering down nonessential electronics when Karl passed through Ops with his luggage. On the lower level, he saw Art Gibbs and Sandy Gonzalez tarping a digger. Other equipment, pumps, generators, jet-sleds, had been brought in, and were now being laid in storage. There was a tendency to behave as if Seapoint were simply being mothballed, as if someone would return and pick up where this expedition was leaving off.

The Academy would ordinarily have salvaged its equipment, the diggers, the sub, Seapoint itself. But the decision to evacuate had been made suddenly, without including Henry in the process. And consequently too little time had been allowed, and it had become necessary for the Temple team (and their managers back on the Second Floor in D.C.) to choose between bringing out expensive gear or rescuing artifacts of unknown value. The artifacts, of course, had taken precedence. Karl had been on duty when the Second Floor had directed Henry to leave personal luggage at Seapoint, to make extra room aboard the shuttles for storage. Henry had been around long enough to know better than to disagree. But he forgot to implement.

Karl entered the sub bay. It was empty. He strode along the walkway that bordered the docking pool and dropped his bags beside Janet's, along the boarding ramp. "I'm ready," he said to her. The place was filled with Eddie's containers. There were more than a hundred. "Do we really have to haul all these up to the ship?"

"There are more coming." Janet smiled wearily. "Karl, what are you going to do when you get home?"

"I have a position at the Institut von Archaologie." He tried to make it sound casual. But they both knew it was a prestigious appointment.

"Congratulations." She kissed him. "I have no idea what I'm going to do." There had been a list of vacancy announcements around for about a month. The Academy would keep a few of the team on the payroll, and it would try to assist the others. Most, like Karl, would be going back to the classroom. "I want to stay in the field," she said. "But the waiting list for Pinnacle and Nok are both long."

"Two years, last I heard," Karl said. Allegri was a damned good archeologist. With experience. But it would be like the

Academy to waste her, to offer her a job teaching undergraduates. "Maybe they'll make an exception for people here." The approach lamps came on. "Get Henry to put in a word for you."

The water began to churn. "Pity about all this," she said. "Henry deserves better."

"He may not be done yet," said Karl. "He wants Linear C. And I'm not entirely sure he won't get it."

LIBRARY ENTRY

Like most mythic heroes, Malinar may have had a remote historical basis. If so, the reality is hopelessly entangled with fable. This hero appears in epochs thousands of years apart. This is no doubt due to the extreme length of Quraquat history, and to the lack of technological progress after the exhaustion of the world's nonrenewable natural resources, resulting in a telescoping effect upon earlier eras, all of which come to resemble one another.

Although Malinar's time predates the construction of the Knothic Towers by almost ten thousand years, he is nevertheless said to have visited the holy site to consult an aspect of the Deity. The Temple then stood on a rock shelf well above the sea. We possess a tablet thought to depict the event.

Unfortunately, most of the Malinar cycle is missing. We know neither the reason for the consultation, nor its result. We know only that the Quraquat could not bear the thought that their great hero had not at some point visited the imposing shrine on the north shore.

— Linda Thomas, At the Temple of the Winds Harvard University, 2211

11 Seapoint. Wednesday; 1418 hours

"I'm sorry we found the thing, Hutch." George Hackett was weary, but he managed to look upbeat anyhow. "If I had my way, we'd call the whole business off. I'm ready to go home."

"How long have you been here?"

"Four years."

"Long time."

"Seems like forever." They were alone in the community room, enjoying coffee and toast. The sea moved against the view panels. "I don't think I'll do any more field trips."

Hutch enjoyed being with him. She loved the glow of his eyes, and his gentleness. Old passions were reviving. When they were together, she had a tendency to babble. But she curbed it, and maintained a discrete distance, waiting for him to make a move. When he did, if he did, she would have to put him on hold until they got home. Anything else would be unprofessional. She knew from long experience that it was impossible to keep secrets on shipboard. "Why not, George?" she asked, in a detached tone. "Your career is in the field, isn't it?"

He shook his head. "I'm not an archeologist. I'm an engineer. I only came out here because the opportunity surfaced, and 1 thought it was a chance to travel." He laughed.

"Well," she said, "you've certainly traveled."

"Yeah. That I have." He looked at her wistfully. "You know. Hutch," he said, "you're lovely. It's been worth the trip just to meet you."

She, in her turn, glowed. "That's nice of you," she said.

"I mean it."

She could see that he did. "What will you do when you get home?" she asked.

He stared at her. "I'm going to find a place where there are green parks and lots of summer days. And where all the women look like you." He reached out and stroked her cheek.

Eddie Juliana kept working, kept packing containers. "We'll get everything up," he said. "One way or another, we'll save it all." He urged Hutch to work harder. "These," he said. "These go first. Just in case. Forget the stuff that's down in the bay. In case Truscott decides to drop any more bombs on us." He stared at the ceiling as if observing her attitude on the space station. "Yes," he said, "load these." He indicated a line of red-tags. "I'll get the others." He nodded to himself. "Most definitely."

Hutch worried about him.

"By the door," he said, as they entered his workshop, oblivious of her concern. He was indicating three containers. "These are weapons. From the lower level outpost." He went after the first, signaling Hutch to bring over a cart. "Whatever else happens, we don't want to lose them. They're invaluable." Ordinarily she would have grumbled or gone on strike. But she felt sorry for Eddie, and did what she could. "There's another red-tag next door," he said.

But the container wasn't sealed. She looked in. "It needs a dash of poly-6," she said.

"Take care of it." He arrowed off toward the washroom.

She picked up the gun, aimed it into the container, and pulled the trigger. A thick white stream gushed over the plastene-wrapped artifacts, and the room filled with a faintly acrid aroma. She watched the foam rise, and shut it off. The poly-6 began to inflate, and Hutch hefted the gun and aimed it at an imaginary Melanie Truscott. Eddie reappeared and looked at her impatiently. She pointed the nozzle toward him, and her index finger tightened slightly on the trigger. "Pow," she said.

Pow.

He was in no mood for games. He capped the container, and rolled it onto the cart.

And Hutch had the beginning of an idea. "Eddie, how much of this stuff do we have?"

"Poly-6? Plenty. Why do you ask?"

"How does it work?"

"I don't know the chemistry," he said. "You make it with two barrels." They were in plain sight, labeled «A» and "B." "They're separate compounds. The stuff is inert until it gets mixed. That's what the gun does. When they combine, the urethane expands and hardens. It's been around for centuries. And it's ideal for safeguarding artifacts in shipment."

"Do you have an extra dispenser? A gun?"

"Sure." He frowned. "Why?"

She was calculating storage space on Alpha. "Listen, we may have to cut down the size of this next shipment a little."

"What?" He sounded wounded. "Why?" he asked again.

"Because I'm going to take two barrels of poly-6 with me."

Eddie was horrified. "There isn't room."

"We'll make room."

"What on earth for?"

"I'm going to use it to say hello to Melanie Truscott."

An hour later, Alpha climbed toward orbit, carrying Hutch, Janet, Maggie, Karl, and Maggie's number one analyst, Phil Marcotti. Also on board were twenty-nine containers filled with artifacts, and two barrels of poly-6 components.

Maggie Tufu turned out to be younger than Hutch had expected. She'd heard so much about the woman's accomplishments, that she was startled to discover Maggie was probably still in her twenties. She was tall, taller in fact than either of the men. Her black hair was full and luxuriant, worn in a twist that was probably designed to make her look older. Her eyes were also black, and her features retained much of the Micronesian cast of her forebears. If she'd been able to loosen up, to smile occasionally, she would have been lovely.

She tended to set herself apart from the others. Hutch did not sense arrogance, but rather simply a preoccupation with work. Maggie found people, and maybe everything except mathematics and philological theory and practice, boring.

Her colleague, Phil Marcotti, was a beefy, easygoing extrovert. About forty, he enjoyed his work, and was among those who would have preferred to stay until they'd recovered what everyone was now referring to as "George's printing press." He confided to Hutch that, if he'd had his way, nothing short of armed force would have moved the Academy team. Curiously, this amiable, happy man was the most militant among Henry's true believers.

Maggie took Hutch's right-hand seat. During the ascent she tied into the auxiliary computer and busied herself with rows of alphanumerics. "In one way, we're very lucky," she told Hutch. "We don't get as many Linear C samples as we'd like to. Of course, you never have enough samples of anything. The language is just too old. But a fair amount of what we do get comes with illustrations. We have the beginning of a vocabulary."

"Really," said Hutch, interested. "Can you show me some examples?"

"Sure. This" — a cluster of characters appeared on the screen—"is 'sun. They were letters, not ideograms. And that" — another group—"is 'moon. " She smiled, not at Hutch, but at the display. "This is 'hoe. »

"Hoe" said Hutch. "How did you arrive at that?"

"The group was used to illustrate an epigram about reaping what you plant. I think."

Karl stared moodily out at the clouds. His eyes were distant, and Hutch wondered whether he was thinking about his future.

Janet fell asleep within minutes after their departure. She was still out when the shuttle nosed into its bay on Wink.

Hutch calibrated the B ring spin to point one gee. They unloaded the artifacts, now only a tenth of their planetary weight, and carried them through double doors into Main Cargo. Here, Hutch passed out footwear that would grip the Teflon deck. The storage area was wide and high, spacious enough to play basketball. They crossed to the far bulkhead, and secured the containers beside the two earlier shipments.

Main Cargo had been designed to stow heavy excavation equipment, large quantities of supplies, and whatever the Academy teams deemed worth bringing back. Except for the shuttle bay, it occupied the entire ring. It was compart-mented into four sections, each equipped with outside loading doors.

When they'd finished, Hutch conducted a brief tour. She took her passengers to A Deck, pointed out their cabins, showed them the lounge and rec facilities, demonstrated how the food dispensers worked, and joined them for dinner. They drank to their new home. And they seemed to brighten somewhat.

After they'd finished, she took Janet aside. "Are you interested in a little payback?" she asked.

Janet looked at her curiously. "What are we talking about?" Then she smiled. "You mean Truscott?"

"I mean Truscott."

She nodded. "I'm willing to listen."

"There'll be a risk."

"Tell me what you have in mind. I'd love to see her get hers."

"I think we can arrange it."

She led the way back to B ring. Full ship's gravity, which was a modicum over point five, had been restored. The outside loading doors were located in the deck. In each of the four cargo sections, they were of different dimensions. She'd picked the No. 2 hold, where they were biggest, large enough, in fact, to accommodate an object twice the diameter of the shuttle.

Hutch inspected the doors, satisfied herself they were adequate to the task, and explained her idea. Janet listened skeptically at first, and then with mounting enthusiasm. By the time Hutch had finished, she was grinning broadly. "I don't think I'd want you mad at me," she said.

"If we get caught at it, we'll both wind up out on Massachusetts Avenue with tin cups."

"Will they be able to figure out who did it?"

"Maybe. Listen, I owe you. And I wouldn't want to be responsible for your getting into trouble. I'll understand if you want to keep clear."

"But you can't do this alone."

"No. I can't."

"I wouldn't miss it. The only real problem I can see is that we won't be able to brag about it afterward."

Hutch was feeling pretty good. "It's a small price to send Melanie Truscott a message from the downtrodden."

"Can we really do it?"

"Let's find out."

She cut gravity, and they went to the shuttle and retrieved the two barrels of poly-6. They hauled them back to No. 2 hold and put them in the middle of the deck, which is to say,

centered over the cargo doors. Next Hutch went back for the connector hose and gun.

Now that she was committed, Janet showed no hesitation, had no second thoughts. Good woman to have at your back, Hutch thought.

"We have to have something to start with," Janet said.

Hutch had the ideal answer. "Sit tight," she said. She went up to A ring, to the rec locker, and got one of the medicine balls.

Janet broke into a wide smile when she saw it. "The very thing," she said. She had connected the hose to each of the barrels and to the gun.

Hutch put the ball down and stepped back. She eyed the dispenser. "Would you like to do the honors?"

"Delighted." Janet pointed the instrument at the medicine ball. "Just what the doctor ordered," she said wickedly, and pulled the trigger.

White foam spurted out, coating the deck and the ball. The ball rolled away. "This might take a while," she said.

"Not once we get started."

The ball lost its roundness quickly, and became an uneven, white chunk of hissing foam.

The object expanded as a natural result of mixing the polymer content in one barrel with a water-activated isocyanate in the other. It was designed, once it had set, to resist extreme temperature changes.

They took turns, and learned to back off occasionally to let the chemical dry.

It got bigger. Even when they weren't drenching it with fresh spray, it grew.

It grew to the size of a small car. And then to the size of a garage. And they kept pouring it on.

It got so big they could not reach the top, and they brought over a container to stand on. The thing had gone lopsided, long and wide rather than high. Bloated at one end. "It looks like a dead whale," said Janet.

Hutch fired again. "Born to the poly gun," she said, laughing.

"The thing's a monster!"

When the stream finally sputtered and faltered, pride illuminated their features. "It's magnificent," said Janet, ceremonially flinging the gun away.

"I wouldn't want to have to deal with it."

"Exactly what I was thinking."

Hutch spoke softly: "Never monkey with the Pimpernel." They shook hands. "Okay. Phase two. You stay here. I'm going up to the bridge."

Quraqua floated overhead, hazy in the sunlight. There was no moon.

Melanie Truscott and her space station were on the far side of their orbit. Hutch scanned for Kosmik's two tugs. She found one. The other was probably down among the snowballs, where it would be hard to distinguish. It wouldn't matter: even if it was in the neighborhood of the space station, things were going to happen too fast.

Truscott had no means of independent propulsion. No starship was docked.

Hutch fed the station's orbital data into the navigation console, scanned the "torpedo" — how that word tripped across the tongue—computed its mass, and requested an intercept vector. The numbers came back. With a minor correction, the torpedo could be targeted to complete seven orbits and hit the station on its eighth. In twenty-one hours.

She sat back to consider potential consequences. Last chance for a no-go. Once the thing was launched, she would not be able to change her mind without giving away the show. How might things go wrong? Lawsuit? Heart failure on someone's part?

She saw again the wave surging in, black and cold. And the last Tower. And Karl and Janet, trailing bags like refugees.

She opened the ship's intercom. "Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to be making a minor course correction in three minutes. You'll want to strap down. Please acknowledge."

"Karl here. Okay."

She locked in the new course.

"I need a little time." That was Marcotti.

"Phil, we're going in three minutes, ready or not." She checked her power levels.

"This is Maggie. Ready when you are."

She opened a private channel to Janet. "All set?"

"Yes." The word had a slight echo; Janet was inside her Flickinger field. "How fast will it be going when it hits them?"

"Seven thousand, relative to the station. Impact will occur at seventeen minutes past eight, Temple time, tomorrow evening."

"Seven thousand klicks is pretty fast. Maybe even a chunk of foam will do some serious damage."

"It'll bend a few things," she said, "and pop some rivets. But they'll see it coming, and they'll either get off the station or button up. They'll be fine."

"Okay. What next?"

"Course change." She switched channels. "Phil?"

"Almost ready," he said.

"Good. Please strap down."

Moments later he was back. "Okay," he said. "I'm all set."

She activated the intercom. "Movement in one minute." She engaged the «Execute» function, and watched the seconds drain away.

"Where are we going?" asked Maggie.

"Nowhere," said Hutch uncomfortably. "It's just a routine maneuver." She was a poor liar.

Thrusters kicked in, and the Winckelmann rose to a higher orbit, and changed its heading by a few degrees. When it was over, Hutch issued the stand-down. Then she switched back to Janet's channel. "Everything all right?"

"So far. It rolled a little, but it's still over the doors."

"Going to zero-gee on your deck."

"Okay. I've begun to depressurize."

The B ring slowed. And stopped.

Hutch watched the monitor. The torpedo rose.

"Good show," she said. She already knew that she'd break their agreement to say nothing. She would tell Richard. This was just too good to keep to herself. He'd be angry, but eventually it would become a joke between them. And years from now it would be the bright shining moment in this period of general despair. If the Academy was being forced out, it would go down with all flags flying.

"It's still over the doors. I'm going to open up now."

"At your leisure."

"Doors are opening."

"Hutch?" A new voice. Karl's.

"Yes, Karl?"

"Can I get access to a twelve-by?"

A wall-length monitor. "Yes. In Three A." That was the auxiliary bridge. "But stay put for a couple of minutes. Okay? We're doing routine maintenance."

"Doors are open," said Janet. She was inaudible to the others.

"Okay," said Karl.

"I'll tell you when." Hutch broke away to Janet: "Clearance?"

"Looks good."

"All right. Here we go."

Because ring rotation simulated gravity, the decks were at right angles to the ship's axis. The cargo doors, therefore, opened off the side of the ship. The torpedo's exit would be to starboard. Inside Main Cargo, it was already on course. All they needed to do was remove the ship.

Hutch aimed the thrusters to take the Wink to port, and fired a light burst. And again. "Maneuver complete," she told Janet.

"Doing fine. The torpedo has begun to descend." From her point of view, it was leaving through the deck.

"Still have clearance?"

"Enough. It'll be outside in about thirty seconds."

"Make sure you don't go out with it."

"Hutch," she said, "I believe we've just had a baby."

Priscilla Hutchins, Journal

Tonight, for the first time in my career, I have omitted a significant item from a ship's log. It is an offense that, if detected, would result in the loss of my license.

This whole business was probably a bit off the deep end. But I couldn't resist lobbing something back at them. If in the end I am disgraced and run off, it will have been for a good cause.

Wednesday, June 9, 2202

Thursday. 0854 hours.

The descent into the Lower Temple was filled with silt and rock. George Hackett, whose specialty was submarine excavation, had examined scans of the area, and vetoed proposals to dig a parallel shaft. "Safer," he'd admitted, "but too time-consuming."

So they'd braced everything they could, sucked out the loose sand, and cut through the stone. They got down to the side tunnel in good order, but it too had collapsed. Richard Wald, doing his tour as operations officer, was watching when he got a call from Janet on board Wink.

"I have something for Henry," she said.

"He's in the Temple. You want me to patch you through?"

"Please. You should listen in."

The mission director was a murky image wielding a particle beam projector. That was another aspect of this effort that scared the hell out of Richard: the experience level of the volunteer help. Sending Karl up to Wink with the first group had been a mistake. Karl, Richard had heard, was a master at tunneling.

Henry's homely features appeared. "What is it, Janet?"

"The Field Report is in. Have you by any chance seen it?"

"No. Truth is, I've been a little busy." He sounded annoyed.

"Okay. You're going to want to take a look at the extraplanetary survey from Nok. Section four delta."

The Field Report was issued monthly by the Academy. It was an update on current missions and future projects. Richard had found it and was bringing it up on his screen.

"Janet, please get to the point."

"They've discovered four rock cubes. In orbit."

Richard saw it. My God. "It's all connected," he blurted out. This was wonderful. Inakademeri—Nok—was itself a moon, circling the ringed gas giant Shola. The cubes were in the same orbital plain as Shola's rings and the rest of the bodies orbiting the central world. Early analysis suggests they once occupied equidistant positions. They are of identical dimensions, each roughly 2.147 kilometers on a side. And the Noks, like the Quraquat, had never been in space. What in hell was going on?

"What do you think, Richard?" Henry asked. The sound of his name startled him.

What did he think? Right angles again. That's what he thought.

Later, Maggie told him about the horgon. "Maybe," he said, "we can get by without reading the inscription."

"In what way?" Maggie was speaking from one of the terminals on Wink's bridge.

"AH those squares and rectangles. And two round towers."

"With slanted roofs."

"Yes. My point, exactly. Oz has to be a direction finder."

"We've thought of that too."

"How sure are you that horgon is actually in the inscription?"

"Reasonably sure, Richard. I wish I could give you more. But I just have no way to check it."

"The round towers are unique. Their roofs are not flat, like every other roof in Oz. They incline, directly away from the center of the city. They're aimed at the stars. What could their purpose be other than to serve as markers, to designate lines of sight? Draw a line across each of those rooftops, from the lowest point to the highest—which is to say, from the precise mathematical center of Oz—and extend them into space. At the angle of the roof's inclination."

"You're thinking that there might have been a star associated with the horgon—"

"Like the Dog Star."

"Yes. But if it's true, / don't know about it. And I don't know who would."

"Dave Emory might."

"Maybe." She still looked puzzled. "If it's that simple, why build all the rest of it? Why not just make the towers?"

"I suppose," said Richard, "you could argue they wanted to be sure the towers weren't overlooked."

"But you think there's more—"

"Oh, yes. There's more." No doubt about that. Unfortunately.

Thursday, June 10, 2202 Dear Dick,

.. The discovery of the cube moons has had an unsettling effect. Yesterday, we were of two minds about recovering George's printing press. Today, with the link between Quraqua and Nok established beyond doubt, everybody wants to take whatever risk is necessary to get the damned thing. That kind of unanimity makes me uneasy. Even though I agree.

The refusal of the bureaucrats at Kosmik to budge on the matter of time is nothing less than criminal. I've been in touch with the commissioner, but he tells me nothing can be done. He points out, quite rightly, that no one, including me, has been able to get Caseway to listen to reason.

History will damn us all….

Richard

— Richard Wald to his cousin Dick Received in Portland, Oregon June 30

12 Quraqua. Thursday; 1950 hours

Hutch took Andi, Tri, and Art and another load of artifacts to the ship; and Carson carried Linda Thomas and Tommy Loughery. It was Carson's last delivery. On his return to the Temple, Henry preempted him for the tunneling effort. Eddie dissolved in apoplexy, but nothing mattered anymore except the printing press.

There was now a lot of help on Wink. Hutch could unload quickly, but the time saved was negated when she had to replace a fused pumpboard. A good engineer might have handled the problem in twenty minutes, but for Hutch it was a struggle. In-transit maintenance and repair was a skill pilots seldom needed, and it had never been her strength.

She started back down in Alpha as soon as she finished. But she'd lost her window by then, and faced a long flight. By the time she glided in over the Temple site, the torpedo was homing in for the last stage of its run against Kosmik Station.

The difficulty and danger of loading without the floatpier had by now forced them to find a harbor. Eddie had located a rock shelf, sheltered from the tide, but at a considerable distance from Seapoint. The water was deep enough for the sub, and the currents were relatively tranquil.

Hutch was watching a telescopic view of the space station relayed from Wink, and she was monitoring their communications. Traffic patterns showed nothing unusual. No sudden bursts to the tugs, no change in routine, no upgraded precedence. They had not seen it.

Below, Eddie and the sub were waiting. Eddie had no help because everyone else was either on the tunnel operation or on Wink. Several dozen containers were stacked on the shelf, and Hutch suspected Eddie had done it all. She blinked her lights at him. Poor bastard. In the crunch, they had left him alone.

How could Truscott's people not yet have picked up the torpedo? Answer: they're not looking. She detected no short-range sensor activity. They were ignoring the regulations. Damn. If the thing came in unnoticed, the whole point would be lost.

Janet, speaking from Wink, asked if everything was okay.

"Yes. Descending on Eddie's harbor." They carefully avoided discussing, on an open circuit, what was really on their minds. They'd debated making up a code, but discarded the idea as too dangerous.

Their eyes met, and Janet's excitement threatened to bubble to the surface. "Everything quiet here," she said. Translation: she saw no activity either.

Three minutes later, Alpha set down precisely as Janet, on their agreed-upon schedule, opened a channel to the orbiter, and patched Hutch through.

Harvey Sill's beefy frown formed on the screen. "What is it, WinckelmannT'

"This is Hutchins. Sorry to bother you, but you might have a problem."

He angled his head so he could look at her through half-open lids. "What sort of problem?"

"Are you scanning short range?"

"Of course we are." He looked up, away from her. Did something to his console. Spoke to someone.

"One of your snowballs may have got loose. Check to the northeast, out at about twenty-five hundred kilometers."

"Hang on, Winckelmann." He sighed. There was a fair amount of pleasure in listening to his contempt change, through not so subtle variations, to concern, and then to dismay.

"I'm surprised you don't maintain a search," she said innocently. "It's a violation."

"Son of a bitch." His voice went up an octave. "Where the hell'd that come from?"

She shrugged. But he wasn't watching her any longer. He reached forward, past the screen. "Goddammit, Louise." He punched keys, and jabbed an index finger at someone. «There» he said. "Over there." He glanced at Hutch. "Thanks, lady—" The screen blanked.

"Let me know," said Hutch, in the silence of her cockpit, "if I can help."

Truscott made it to the operations center from her quarters in less than a minute. The alarms were still sounding, and voices filled the circuits. "No mistake?" She stared at the object, repeated across the bank of twelve situation screens.

Harvey Sill wiped his lips with the back of his fat hand. "No, it's closing straight and true. A goddam bomb."

"Where did it come from?"

Helplessly, Sill turned up his hands. "Somebody screwed up."

"How much time do we have?"

"Seventeen minutes."

"Where's it going to hit?"

"It's coming in from above. Eight-degree angle. It looks as if it'll go right into Engineering." That was the hub. "There's a chance it might hit the rim. But it won't make much difference. That thing will go through us like a hot knife."

"Which part of the rim is exposed?"

"Blue."

Someone shut the alarms off. "Get everyone out of there. Harvey, prepare to evacuate. Jeff, get off an SOS to the Winckelmann. Ask them to come running." She opened a channel to Engineering. "Will?"

Pause. "I'm here, Melanie. What's going on?"

"Collision coming. Big one. Button up and get out of there."

"Collision? With what?"

"Runaway snowball. Don't leave anybody behind."

She heard him swear. "On our way. It'll take a while to shut down."

"Be here in five minutes. You need help?"

"Negative." More profanity. "Listen, how big is this thing? We could lose life support and power all over the station."

"No kidding," growled Sill.

Three crewmen moved smartly into the operations center, took seats at the auxiliary boards, and plugged in. The CRT group: Command Response Team. They would coordinate communications and evacuation efforts throughout the emergency.

Jeff Christopher, the watch officer, looked up from his screen. "I make it about thirteen hundred tons."

"We're lucky," said Sill. "A small one."

"Coming at seven-kay klicks." He tapped his earphone, listened, and nodded. "Melanie," he said, "Winckelmann says they don't have a pilot aboard. Nobody knows how to run the damned thing."

Truscott stared out into the dark.

Sill exhaled and sank back in his chair. "We're not going to be able to get everyone off."

"I know. What have we got nearby?"

"Nothing close enough to help."

"Okay." She opened the common channel. "This is Truscott," she said evenly. "We have a snowball bearing down on us. Collision in thirteen minutes. Abandon the station."

"We've got two APVs and a shuttle," said Sill. "We can get three passengers, plus the pilot, into each APV. That's one more than they're designed for, but we can do it. We can put twelve more in the shuttle."

"Make it fourteen."

"Goddammit, Melanie, it won't accommodate fourteen."

"Find little people. Do it. That leaves how many?"

"Four," said Sill. "You and me. And two others."

She thought of ordering him off, but paid him the compliment of saying nothing.

Voices rippled through the heavy air:

"I read A deck secured."

"Terri, we haven't heard from Dave. Check his quarters."

"No, Harold. Don't come up here. You're scheduled on the boat. With Julie and Klaus—Yes, I'm serious. Now move."

"Well, he's got to be somewhere."

Nine minutes. "Ask for two volunteers. Jeff, close out and go. We don't need you anymore." Before Christopher could comply, she added, "But first get me some cushions."

"How many?"

"As many as you can. Make it quick."

Sill was struggling with his assignment. "Why not ask your staff to stay on? The senior people?"

She looked at him, and felt a wave of affection. "They're as scared as everybody else," she said. "I won't order anyone to stay. Harvey, we may die here. I want to have good company." She was watching her technicians moving reluctantly toward the exits. They knew there wasn't room for everyone, and their eyes glided over her. She read embarrassment. And fear. A couple of them approached, Max Sizemore, who touched her shoulder in an uncharacteristically personal gesture; and Tira Corday, who mouthed the word «thanks» and was gone.

Sill spoke to lan Helm with the Antarctic group. He was trying to arrange a quick rescue for the people in the APVs, who would have only an eight-hour air supply. Danielle Lima, the station's logistics manager, was bent over her commlink giving instructions to someone, but her dark eyes never moved from Truscott. Her features were immobile. She was a lean young brunette, bright, ambitious, a good worker, a woman at the beginning of her life. All the color had drained out of that lovely face. She signed off, but her eyes continued to cling to the director. "I'll stay," she said, and turned quickly away.

Truscott stared at her back. "Thanks," she said. But Danielle appeared not to hear.

Blue section was 70 degrees around the arc from Operations, opposite the direction of rotation. Which meant they were probably as safe here as they could hope to be. They'd be well out of the way of the thing both coming and going. What the hell—maybe they had a chance at that.

Danielle spoke into her commlink: "Okay, Hans. Get over here as quickly as you can." She smiled up at Truscott. "Stallworth will stay."

Truscott was trying to think, do what she could to give them a chance. "Get back to him. Tell him to stop by Supply on his way and pick up four Flickingers."

She surveyed her operating team: Marion Edwards, who had never worked for anyone else in Kosmik; Chuck White, a young climber who hoped to be an executive one day (and probably would); and Penny Kinowa, innocent, quiet, bookish. Penny read too much, and desperately needed to become more aggressive. But she was one hell of a systems coordinator. Edwards was removing the base crystal from the mainframe. "I'll see that this gets off the ship safely," he said uncomfortably. Unstated, of course, was his intention to carry it off personally. However this turned out, things would never be the same among this crew.

The crystal contained their records and logs. Wouldn't do to lose that, even if they were all killed. That would be

Norman Caseway's first response to the disaster: did they save the data? Reassured on that point, he would want to know who was responsible for the catastrophe. It wasn't enough that she would be dead; they would also destroy her reputation.

"Okay," said Harvey. "CR team out. You three are on board the remaining APV. Go."

Penny and Danielle traded glances. There was a world of meaning in that final exchange. The two were friends. That also might end, if they survived.

Sill was directing the final shutdown of the station. Truscott watched him. He would make a good manager, but he had a little too much integrity to survive in a top job. After a promising start, he'd made enemies and had wound up here. He'd go no higher, no matter how things turned out.

Edwards closed off his position. "All nonessential systems shut down," he said. "Hatches are closed, and the station is as secure as we can make it."

Chuck White was trying to look as if he were considering staying. "If you need me—"

Truscott wondered how he would respond if she accepted the offer. "Get moving. They're waiting for you. And thanks."

"Six minutes," said Sill.

The snowball, gouged, lopsided, ominous, grew in the screens.

Christopher appeared with two crewmen. They had a pile of cushions and pillows, which they dumped on the deck.

"That's good," said Truscott. "Thanks." She waved them out. They were now alone.

The shadows and the surface features didn't seem to change. "It isn't rotating," said Sill.

She nodded. "We'll think about it later, Harvey." "Everything rotates." Sill stared. Maybe it was simply very slow.

Hans Stallworth came in, arms full of harnesses. He was tall, intense, formal. His specialty was electronics, and he always seemed uncomfortable in Truscott's presence. She thought of him as being superficial, and had been surprised when he offered to stay. "Hello," he said, with as much elan as he could muster. Sill shook his hand. "Good to have you here, Hans."

He set the harnesses down, and no one needed to be told to put one on. Truscott removed her belt. "Find something you can use to tie yourself down. We don't want anyone flying around in here."

"Pity we don't have a serious set of deflectors on this thing," said Danielle.

Sill laughed. "It would be like drawing the blinds. Look at that son of a bitch."

It filled the screens.

"Harvey, let's depressurize the station. All of it."

Sill nodded.

"I wonder," said Stallworth, "whether we wouldn't be better off outside."

"No." Truscott secured her harness and activated the field. "Let's keep as much protection as we can get."

Danielle and Stallworth, who had had little experience with the Flickingers, helped each other. Sill swung his harness lazily over his head and dropped it across his shoulders. "Other shuttle's on the way," he said.

"ETA?"

"About three hours. They should be in plenty of time to pick up survivors." He inspected their harnesses, announced his approval. "Activate the homers," he said, and demonstrated how. "If you're thrown clear, and you're unconscious, they'll still get to you." His fingers moved across the command console. "Commencing depressurization."

Stallworth was looking out through a viewport, shading his eyes. "I see it," he said.

Truscott followed his gaze but could see nothing. "Confirming original projection," said Sill, not without a trace of pride. "It'll hit Blue on the way in, and then impact directly with the hub."

Danielle had posted herself at the comm console. "Both APVs are away. Shuttle's about to launch."

"They get everybody?"

"They've got twenty-two. We make twenty-six." All accounted for.

"They may not get far enough away," said Danielle. "We may be safer in here."

"Two minutes," said Sill.

"Shuttle?"

Danielle checked the board. "Negative."

"What's holding them up?"

The officer spoke into a side channel. "They thought somebody else was coming. Ginger says they have room for one more."

"Doesn't matter now," Truscott said. "Tell her to clear out." She looked toward Sill. "Seal it up. Close off everything. Power down. Except the lights. Let's keep the lights on."

Electronics died throughout the wheel. Computers went to maintenance modes, monitors blanked, food processors gurgled to a halt, water heaters died.

"Shuttle away," said Danielle.

A star had appeared. Truscott watched it brighten and take shape. It developed ridges and chinks. No craters. Irregular, almost rectangular surface. Club-shaped, she thought.

Not spinning.

"Okayr" she said. "Everybody down. The main shock will come through the deck. Lie flat. Use the pillows to protect all vulnerable parts. Tie yourself to something solid."

They watched it come.

Forty seconds.

It sailed through the sky, bright and lovely in the sunlight. It moved across the viewport, corresponding to the rotation of the outer rim, and disappeared finally to the left.

Truscott reached deep inside for the old arrogance, her lifelong conviction that things always turn out well if you stay cool and do the things that need to be done. She hoped she looked arrogant. That was what they needed now. That and divine intervention. "Face away from the impact," she said, pointing where she meant.

"They need to build these bastards with seat belts." It was Stallworth. He sounded calm.

And in that moment, it hit.

The station shook.

Someone screamed. They were thrown against pillows and deck.

But there was no hammer blow. Klaxons did not scream, and the steel bulkheads did not rip. A few alarms sounded: minor damage. And that was all.

"What happened?" asked Danielle, still holding tight to her chair.

Sill said: "Damned if I know."

"Everybody stay down." Truscott was taking no chances.

And, in her earphones, there was a voice from one of the ships: "Where is the goddam thing?"

Truscott, dazed, was also puzzled by the sound of the strike.

Bonk.

13 Seapoint. Thursday; 2005 hours

"The space station is having a problem." This was how Janet alerted the people on Wink and at the Temple site to the approach of the torpedo. She broadcast a running description of events and relayed the frantic plain-language calls among the orbiter, the ground stations, and the tugs. To Henry and Sandy Gonzalez, who were in the Seapoint operations center, she also transmitted telescopic views of the object closing on the orbiter. The station, its twin outer wheels rotating placidly, looked flimsy. It was a tense moment. One would have had to pay close attention to detect the overlay of satisfaction in Janet's voice.

All work stopped. They watched with morbid fascination.

"No estimate on mass. But it is closing very fast."

"Serves the bastards right," said Henry.

And Carson: "Not very competent, are they? Plunked by one of their own rocks."

Sandy stood at Henry's side. "Maybe we've got our extension after all," she said.

"Is everybody off?"

"Don't know."

"Can't be. They're still talking on the station."

Despite their animosity for the terraformers, nobody wanted to see them dead.

"Is it actually going to hit!" Henry asked Janet.

"Yes," she said. "No question."

Henry's next thought was that the Wink should be riding to the rescue. "Where's Hutch?"

"With you. She's on the surface."

He noted, and then dismissed, an impression that her reaction was wrong. Not pleased. Not fearful. But righteous.

"Okay. Contact somebody over there. Explain our situation, and tell them we stand by to assist any way we can. I'll turn Hutch around and send her back up if it'll help."

Janet hesitated. "Okay. But I doubt they'll want any help from us."

"Offer, anyway."

She took a long breath. "I'll get right on it."

Moments later, he had audio contact with Hutch. "What can I do?" she asked innocently.

"Stand by. We might have a rescue mission for you." And, to the tunnelers: "It's closing fast. Just seconds now."

Henry watched it race across those last few kilometers, a shining white bullet. It blasted into the space station, and both vanished in an eruption of white spray. "Impact," he said.

Sandy let out her breath.

The picture slowly cleared, while excited voices asked for details. Incredibly, the orbiter was still intact. It had developed a wobble, but it was still turning at the same unhurried pace.

Ten minutes later, Janet reported back. "They said thanks. But they're doing fine."

Below the sea floor, George and Carson worked with a particle beam to extend their tunnel. They were beneath the outer wall of the military chapel, attempting to chart the best route to the printing press. George was nothing if not conservative, and no amount of urging by Henry or anyone else could persuade him to embrace unnecessary risks. Consequently, they installed braces and proceeded with all possible caution. "I'd like to get back down there as much as anybody," he told Henry. "But common sense is the first priority."

George knew the general direction of the printing press. He employed the particle beam with increasing impatience, and he was tired. Shortly they would go back, George to rest, and Carson to relieve Henry at the monitor. Sandy and Richard would take over the digging, and Henry would man the pumps. In fact, he could already see the flash of lights in the tunnel.

And something else. A reflection, on the silt. Carson picked it up. It was a piece of smooth rock, a tablet, about eight centimeters across, flat on both sides. "It's got writing on it," he said. He brushed it, examined it in the lamplight. "Something on the back. An image of some kind. A spear, maybe."

He held it up for the camera, and they transmitted pictures back to Seapoint.

"Hell." Henry got excited. "Look at it. It's Linear C."

"Bingo," said George. "Jackpot." He turned it over and squinted. "What is it?"

The reverse pictured what appeared to be a long, tapered rod, spade-shaped at one end, heavy and thick at the other. "It's a sex organ," said Sandy, with an oblique laugh. "Fully distended and ready for battle."

Maggie's voice came from the ship: "Funny how some things seem to be universals."

"Damndest chapel decorations I've ever seen," said Carson. Maybe there was a brothel in the area. "Did the Quraquat have brothels?"

"Yes," said Sandy. "And the Noks as well. Seems to be a fixture of the advanced male, regardless of species."

The important consideration was that they had another sample of Linear C. And there might be more. While Richard and Sandy took over the tunneling, Carson and George began a search. George had little enthusiasm for the hunt, but Carson seemed tireless. Within an hour, they had recovered a small trove of tablets, and other, mostly undefinable, objects.

Five of the tablets, including the original, were sexually explicit. Others contained arboreal and sea images, and one depicted a sailing vessel. Several lines of text were engraved on each. They were too worn to make out, but restoration might be possible. One by one, George displayed them to the camera.

He was about halfway through when Maggie's voice came on-line. "These are superb, Henry."

"Yes," said Henry. "They are quite good."

"Can we go back to that last one?" she asked. The tablet depicted a disembodied, fully erect male member protruding through a wreath. There was also a line of symbols curved around the perimeter. "We know some of these," she said. "Marvelous." Nobody made a joke of it.

George showed them another one. "Good," breathed Maggie.

And another.

"Let's see that again," Maggie said. Another sexual theme, straightforward this time: a simple coupling. "We didn't get a very good picture of the text. Both sides, George. Give us more light."

There was a single term atop the amorous pair.

"What are these things?" asked Carson.

"Probably decorations," said Maggie. "Doesn't matter, for now." Then she started. "Henry, can you see that? The title term?"

The word at the top of the tablet was from the inscription atOz.

"Damn!" Henry was ecstatic. "Richard, are you there?"

"I'm a little tied up at the moment." He was on the beam projector.

"George, show that one to Dr. Wald."

"No question about it." Maggie bubbled with excitement. "It's not identical, though. The Oz inscription has an additional character, and the letters are differently formed. But that's purely stylistic. I'll be more certain when we can get it cleaned up. Six of the symbols match perfectly. If we don't have the same word, we should have the same root."

"You're right," said Richard. "It's lovely."

"I think," said Sandy, "this building is distinct from the chapel. Frank's probably right about the brothel. Sex may have been part of the rituals."

"Okay." Richard was speaking to Maggie, and examining the tablet. "What does the word mean?"

"Sex," said Maggie. "Or ecstasy."

"Where does that leave us?" asked Henry. "This way to a hot time? Is that what the Oz inscription says?"

Richard shook his head. "It need not have a sexual connotation," he said.

"I agree,".said Sandy. "The word could mean love. Or fulfillment. Or release."

"Or," suggested George, "ships that pass in the night."

Kosmik Station. Friday; 0030 hours.

Truscott looked up at the sound. "Come."

Sill entered. His eyes were fierce, his lips drawn into a scowl.

She pushed back from her desk, and swung round to face him. "What have you got?"

"It wasn't a snowball."

"We already know that."

"We've retrieved some of it. It was a polymer."

She nodded. "It was manufactured," she said.

"I don't see what other conclusion we can draw. And since there's no one here except the Academy people—"

Truscott laughed. Not her usual measured chuckle. Her heart was in this one. And, when he only looked on in surprise, she reproached him. "Come on, Sill," she said, "where's your sense of humor?"

He reddened. "I don't see what's funny, Melanie. They've created a lot of trouble. People could have been killed."

"Yes." Her eyes fell away from him. "They've paid us in our own coin, haven't they?"

Temple of the Winds. Friday; 0200 hours.

The tunnel resisted their best efforts. The mud was tougher to deal with than the rock. However much they sucked out, it kept coming back in. Carson, on Richard's private channel, confessed that it was useless.

Detonation was eight hours away.

Too close.

The base was quiet. Eddie was gone now, banished to Wink, ostensibly because his services were no longer needed, but really because he kept asking Henry to give it up, and to reassign Carson to help move artifacts. Hutch was off again and would rendezvous with the starship in another hour. When she returned, they were all to be waiting at the inlet, bags packed, ready to go. No matter what.

Richard sat in the operations center. The monitor was a montage of blurred light, slow-moving shadows, tunnel walls. Grunts and epithets and profanity rolled out of the commlink.

The room was damp and chilly. Technically, he was supposed to stay awake, but conditions had changed: the watch officer was no longer coordinating a wide range of operations. And you had to sleep sometime.

On impulse, he called Wink's bridge, where he woke Tommy Loughery. "Is Maggie available?" he asked.

"She's right here."

He'd expected it. They'd sent up the new tablets—there were thirteen of them—on board Alpha. And she would be waiting for their arrival.

"Good morning, Richard," she said. "When are we going to break through down there?"

"You mean to the press?"

"What else? It's getting late."

"It's what I wanted to talk to you about. We may not make it."

"That's not what Henry thinks."

"Henry is optimistic. He wants this one, Maggie."

"So do I."

"You already have a substantial number of samples. With more coming. You've seen the new set. What happens if we have to leave with nothing else? Will it be enough?"

"Maybe." She looked drained. "The analysis will take time. I just don't know." Her dark eyes reflected worry. "It would be a lot easier with the printing press."

"If that's in fact what it is."

"That's what it is."

Richard stared at her. "Can you estimate the odds?" And, when she looked puzzled, he explained. "Of being able to decipher the inscription? With no more samples."

"We are pushy tonight, aren't we?"

"I'm sorry. This may become, in the morning, life and death."

Shadows worked in the corners of her eyes and in the hollows of her temples. "Richard, get the whatever-it-is. Okay? If you really want to help, get it out of there and bring it to me."

0600 hours.

"It's imminent now. We're almost there."

Richard was exasperated. "Call it off, Henry. Let's clear out."

"She won't be back for two hours. What's the point of standing around out on that rock? We've still got time. Let's use it. Have faith."

0711 hours.

Hutch, gliding through the morning light, was not happy. The commlink echoed with the low-powered hum of particle beams, the burble and banging of vacuum pumps. Voices leaked through the clatter:

This is where it was supposed to be.

But it isn't. It's not here.

Neither is the wall. The whole goddam chamber dropped. Or rose.

Why didn't you take a picture?

We did. It was here two days ago.

We thought we could see it. It was the plank. We were looking at the damned plank!

Maybe we just missed it. Is that possible?

No'.

And the words that stung her, enraged her, spoken by Henry: Get the scanner over here. Take another look. Let's find out where it is.

She activated Richard's private channel. "You're out of time."

"I know. Just give us a few minutes. Till we find out where the goddamned thing went."

"Richard, the creek is about to rise."

"Hutch, you have to understand. This isn't my call. These people know the risk. This is just too important to turn around and walk out on. Come on, you can tough it out."

"You're beginning to sound as crazy as they do," she snapped. And she broke the link without letting him reply. She switched to Carson, who was waiting in his shuttle at the inlet. "Frank, you got any control over this?"

"Not much."

"Henry's going to get them all killed."

"No. He won't do that. Whatever else happens, he'll be out in time. You can trust him."

Okay, I recognize this.

You sure, George?

Yeah. Yeah, no question about it.

All right, let's go. Where the hell's the goddam projector?

"Hutch," said Carson. "Another hour here may be worth years of research at home. Be patient."

"Another hourT'

"That's my guess. But it still gets us out of here with time to spare."

"Hutch." George's voice. "Do you have a winch on board?"

"Yes. I can activate a winch."

"Okay. Plan is that after we free the printing press, we'll lift it into the Upper Temple. We've got everything in place to do that. You drop the line. As soon as the press is clear of the shaft, we'll connect it, and you can haul it in. The rest of us should be on board a few minutes after that."

She shook her head. "This is crazy, George. You haven't even found the press yet."

"We're working on it."

Richard came back. "It's okay," he said soothingly. "We'll make it. And we'll have the printing press with us."

She watched the shoreline unroll below. It was a brilliant, sun-washed day, white and cold, filled with icebergs and needle peaks and rocky islands. Long thick waves slid across snow-covered beaches. Beach monkeys walked and played at the edge of the surf.

The inlet came into view, and she started down. The Temple shuttle, resplendently blue and gold in the sunlight, waited on the shelf.

Hutch landed clumsily. As if her haste would change anything. Carson stood on the rock. He was too courteous, or too distracted, to comment on her technique.

0837 hours.

The particle beam cast an eerie blue-white glow through the chamber. Water bubbled and hissed. George was firing blind. He was cutting through that most dangerous of obstacles, loose rock and sand.

The digging strategy was to pick an area that looked stable, if you could find one, divide it into individual targets, and attack each separately. You sliced a hole, and stopped. If nothing happened, you enlarged the hole. Then you braced everything and moved on. "The problem," he told Henry, "is that the tunnel will have to be widened further to get the printing press out."

George was pleased with himself. In the field, engineers tend to exist in a somewhat lower social stratum than pure archeologists. Not that anyone mistreated him. The Temple team had always been a close-knit crew. But he was taken less seriously as a professional. His was a support role, and consequently he was something of a hanger-on. When celebrations broke out, they never drank to George.

But this time, he had made the discovery. George's Printing Press. And he was leading the assault on the Lower Temple. It was a good feeling. A good way to wrap up his efforts here. It was a little scary, maybe. But he felt immortal, as young men invariably do, and he did not believe that Kosmik would actually pull the trigger if there were still people down here.

Moreover, the timing was perfect. He was entranced by Hutch, infected with her brilliant eyes and her vaguely distant smile. His own tides ran strong when she was nearby, and she was now watching him in action. How could he possibly fail to stay the course? And during those dark, claustrophobic moments when an appreciation of the risk seeped through, he drove it away by imagining the hero's reward that waited.

Maggie's voice cut in. "We have a preliminary reading from the 'sex' tablet." She was referring to the character group that appeared atop the wedge, and in the Oz inscription. "We don't think it's a sexual term."

"What is it?" asked Richard.

"We've located parts of the same cluster of symbols elsewhere. We've got the root, which suggests duration, maybe infinite duration."

"You're right," said Sandy. "That does it for sex."

"There's a positive connotation. It's linked with sunlight, for example. And ships in peaceful circumstances. I would be inclined to translate it along the lines of good fortune rather than pleasure."

"You sure?" That sounded like Tri.

"Of course I'm not sure," she snapped. "But there's a fair degree of probability."

"So," said Richard, "we have good fortune and a mythical beast. What's the connection?"

Ahead, George turned off the projector, and waited for the water to clear. "I think we're through," he said. "We have a tunnel."

Henry and Sandy moved forward to insert the braces. George poked at the roof. Gravel and silt floated down. "No guarantees," he said.

Henry shrugged and plunged ahead. "George," he called back, "do what you can to widen it."

"Not while you're in there."

"Do it," said Henry. "My authority."

Your authority's not worth much if you're dead. Suppose George started cutting and the roof fell in? He shouldn't even allow Henry to proceed before he conducted a safety inspection. But things were happening too fast.

Obediently, he activated the particle beam, and chipped away at the sides of the tunnel.

The chamber had partially collapsed. Henry crawled between broken slabs and decayed timbers. His lamp blurred. "Up ahead somewhere," he told his throat mike. The printing press should have been close enough to show on the sensors. But he was getting no reading.

He came to a wall.

He floated to a stop and laid his head against it. That's it, he thought. He hated this place the way it was now: squeeze past rock, dig through mud, grope in the dark.

Richard moved up behind him, held his lamp up. "Over there," he said. "It's open to your right. Look."

He pointed and Henry saw that it was so. But he knew it was getting desperately late and that he had a responsibility to get his people out. While he hesitated, Richard pushed past. His lamp moved in the dark.

"I think I can see it," he said softly.

Sandy's hand gripped his shoulder. "We ought to wait for George," she said.

"Attaboy, Richard," said Maggie. She was ecstatic.

Henry followed the light, turned a corner, and swam down into the small room that he remembered from his previous visit. "We've got it," Richard was saying. He knelt two meters away, blurred in the smoky light.

The frame was half-buried. They scrounged around, digging with their fingers, trying to work it free. They found a rectangular chase. A gearbox lay beneath loose rock. "It's the press bed," said Maggie.

A second chase was wedged under a cut slab.

Sandy's scanner revealed something in the floor. She dug it up. At one time, it had been a compartmented drawer or case.

Henry poked at the chases. "There is type set in these things," he said.

"Good!" Maggie egged them on. "It's enough. Let's go. Get it out of there."

The frame was stuck tight. "We need the pulser," said Henry.

Richard touched his arm. "I don't think we want a beam anywhere near it."

It was large, almost two meters long, maybe half as wide. Sandy and Richard tried to pry it loose.

It did not give.

"This is not going to work," Sandy said. "Even if we get it out, it's too big to take back up the tunnel." She looked at it in the lamplight. "How about just taking the chases?"

"Why the chases?"

Maggie's voice crackled. "Because that's where the type is set."

Hutch broke in. "It's about to get wet up here. If you're planning on leaving, this would be a good time."

Henry measured the chases with his hands. "We'll still need to widen the exit," he said.

"How about just taking a good set of holos?" George suggested.

"No help," said Maggie. "We need the chases. And we need the type. We're going to have to do a major restoration if we're ever going to read those."

Henry was playing his light around the room. "Should be some type trays around somewhere."

"Forget it." Richard tugged at the chases. "Sandy's right. Let's make do with what we've got."

"If there's more type down there," said Maggie, "it would be nice to have it. The type in the chases will be pretty far gone."

"Goddammit, Maggie," Hutch exploded. "You want the type, go down and get it yourself."

The common channel went silent.

"Okay, let's do it," said Henry. "Cut it. We've no time to be particular." The particle beam ignited.

George cut with a will. He broke the press apart and dragged the chases free.

"Sandy," said Henry, "get to the top of the shaft and be ready to haul when we're clear of the tunnel. Richard, why don't you go up and give Hutch a hand? No point in your hanging around."

"You'll need help with these things," he said. "I'll wait."

Henry nodded. "Okay." He checked the time. "We can manage it."

"Hurry up," said Maggie. Henry remembered an incident years before when a football had rolled onto an ice-covered lake and the older boys had sent him out to recover it. Hurry up and throw it in, they'd cried, before you fall through.

0935 hours.

The tide sucked at the Tower. There were a couple of icebergs on the horizon. The coastal peaks glittered in the sunlight.

Hutch, angry, close to tears, swung the winch out, hooked a ten-pound ring weight to the cable, and punched the button. The ring fell into the sea, followed by fifteen meters of line. The shuttles lay side by side in the water. Carson stood on Alpha's wing, rocking gently with the motion of the waves. "This is crazy," he said. "I can't believe this is happening."

It was a gorgeous day, clear and gold. The hour before the end of the world.

Four of Quraqua's flying creatures, animals that resembled manta rays, flowed in formation through the sky, headed north.

"Maybe," he said, "we should talk to Kosmik."

Hutch stared at the cable.

Inside the military chapel, George, Richard, and Henry had completed their work and started down the tunnel at last.

Kosmik Station. 0945 hours.

Truscott stood behind Harvey Sill with her arms folded. Her face was dark with anger. "Any progress yet?" she demanded.

"Negative." Harvey pressed his earphones tight. "They're still on the surface."

"Can you tell what's happening?"

"They're in the tunnels. That pilot, what's-her-name, is pretty upset. She's got something going for her, that one. But I don't know what it's about. It's even possible this stuff is all prerecorded to drive us nuts."

"You've gotten paranoid, Harvey. Have you asked them what their situation is?"

Sill shook his head. "No."

"Why not?"

"Because I thought it would encourage them if they thought we were worried."

Truscott was beginning to feel old. "Harvey, get them on the line."

"Might not have to. Incoming from the Wink shuttle." He put it on visual. "Go ahead, Alpha."

The woman pilot looked down at him. "We've got an emergency, Kosmik. Please let me speak with Dr. Truscott."

The director stepped forward. "I'm here. What's the problem?"

"We still have people in the tunnels. They aren't going to make it out before the deadline."

"Why not?" Truscott bit off the words, like pieces of ice.

"They were trying to finish up. Sorry. I don't have control over this. Can you delay the firing?"

Truscott let her hang a moment. "How long?"

"An hour," Hutch said. She sounded desperate. "One hour."

"You have any idea how much trouble this makes for us? What it costs?"

"Please," said Hutch. Her eyes were wet and red. "If you go ahead, you'll kill them."

She let the pilot see her contempt. "One hour," she said, finally. "And that's it."

Hutch nodded, and looked relieved. "Thanks."

When the link had been broken, Sill said evenly, "That's a mistake."

"We'll argue about it later. Get the word out. Tell everyone to stand down. One hour."

Kosmik Ground Control South, Aloft. Friday; 0954 hours.

The first white lamp lit. The nuclear weapon at Delta Point had just armed.

lan Helm sat in the right-hand seat of his shuttle. No clouds obscured his view. The south polar ice sheet spread out below him, from the ridges along the Koranda Border, which masked the line of the northernmost volcanoes, to Dillman Harbor, where they'd set up the first base camp two years ago. He remembered standing in that great silence, cold even through the Flickinger field because his heating unit had malfunctioned, warmed rather by the exhilaration of the moment, by the knowledge that he would one day annihilate this ice continent, melt its mountains and its foothills, fill its valleys and rills with steam and rain. In a single glorious sequence, he would convert this wasteland into the stuff of regeneration. No one would ever really give him credit, of course. Caseway and Truscott would take all of that. And they deserved it; he didn't begrudge them their due. He was satisfied that the design was his. And the finger on the detonator.

"lan." A green light flashed on the instrument panel. "Sill's on the circuit. Wants to talk."

The blue and white glare from icecap and ocean hurt his eyes. Helm looked at his pilot. "Jane," he said, "do we have a disconnect?"

She frowned. "Just pull the plug."

He yanked it out. "Let everybody know that we're worried about the possibility of bogus instructions. Set up a code word. No one is to accept a transmission without it."

"What code word?"

He thought briefly. "Fidelity." Jane looked troubled. "I'll put it in writing."

"Truscott won't be happy."

"I'm saving her from herself," he said.

Two more lamps blinked on. One at Little Kiska close to the pole, and the other at Slash Basil inside a volcano.

"Eventually, she'll thank me."

LIBRARY ENTRIES

The velocity of a tsunami equals the square root of gravitational acceleration times the depth of the water. Depths in the ocean surrounding the southern icecap on Quraqua are relatively modest; the velocity of the wave could be expected to diminish in the narrow confines of the Yakata. Calculation shows that a major tsunami, traveling at the unlikely average speed of 850 kilometers per hour, could not reach the Temple within four hours. At WOO hours, Jacobi was correct in believing he still had a substantial safety margin from waves originating at the ice pack.

However, in their concern about tsunamis, the Academy team overlooked a more immediate danger: shock waves triggered by the collapse of the ice pack would travel at 7.1 kilometers per second, arriving at the Temple area in about six minutes.

A major fault, running east to west across the Yakata, would react to the shock waves by triggering a seismic response. This secondary earthquake would almost certainly generate sea waves. It was these waves which struck the coastline approximately eleven minutes after the initial detonation.

— Barnhard Golding,

God on Quraqua: The Temple Mission (2213) Eberhardt & Hickam, Chicago

Let your courage shine before you, fear nothing, take no thought for your well-being. Live by the law, and know that, in your darkest hour, I am at your side.

— Fragment from Knothic Hours (Translated by Margaret Tufu)*

'Original hard copy includes notation "Let us hope so" in translator's handwriting, dated Friday, June 11, 2202.

14 Temple of the Winds. Friday; 0943 hours

The two chases constituted the essence of the find. Rescue these, with their text relatively intact, and they would have all they could reasonably hope for. Therefore, despite the urgency, Richard moved with caution. He and Henry took the time they needed to extricate the artifacts from their tomb and start them up the tunnel. George moved ahead of them, removing obstacles and where necessary widening the passage.

They reached the vertical shaft at four minutes to ten.

Henry shone a light upward. "What do you think? Wait it out here until after zero hour? If there's a quake while we're in the shaft, the chases could get damaged."

Richard could not help but admire Henry's singleminded-ness. A quake in the shaft would damage more than the chases. On the other hand, he couldn't see that they were any safer staying put. "Let's keep moving," he said.

A line stretched up into the dark. George passed it to Henry, and they secured it around the first of the artifacts.

"Melanie, we have a problem."

She had known there would be problems. There were always problems when you tried to shut down an operation this size. "What is it, Harvey?"

He looked unhappy. "Helm won't answer up."

They were inside two minutes. "Forget him. Call the control posts direct."

"1 tried. Signals are locked out. We need a password."

"Hutch." Truscott's voice. "Go ahead, Kosmik."

The director's face was red with anger. "I've been unable to get through to our stations. Detonation will proceed as scheduled."

"But we've still got people down there," Hutch protested.

"I'm sorry. We'll assist any way we can. Keep us informed."

Ten o'clock.

The southern sky brightened. A second sun might have ignited just below the horizon. Hutch looked away. "Richard."

"Okay."

"It's started. I can see it from here."

"All right. Keep cool. We're coming. We've got time."

The sea was calm.

"Ready here," said George. He was at the top of the shaft.

"Look okay?" Henry asked Richard.

"Yes. Let's do it."

George took in the slack, and they lifted the chase into the shaft, and commenced to haul. Henry swam up with it, guiding it.

Richard stayed with the second unit. He brushed silt from it; ridges of individual characters passed under his fingertips. What a treasure it was.

But he was alone in the tunnel, and he felt the weight of the sea. The walls were bleak and claustrophobic. Tiny fish swam past his eyes.

The cable came back. He secured it quickly around the chase, creating a harness.

Above, George pulled the first one out of the shaft. They grappled with it for a few moments, casting shadows down the walls, and then it disappeared. George turned back. "All set," he said.

"Go," said Richard. "Haul away."

At that moment, the water moved. Just the barest tremor, but a school of fish that had been watching darted away.

"Coming up," said George. Richard pushed the chase into the shaft. It dropped a half meter, and then began to rise. He opened a channel to Hutch. "You're not sitting on the surface, are you?"

"Of course I am. How else did you expect to get aboard?"

"Maybe not a good idea." He floated up behind the artifact.

"We're getting shock waves. Keep an eye open."

"I will."

Richard delivered some final cliche\ some plastic reassurance that could not have helped her state of mind.

On Wink, Janet Allegri strode onto the bridge, walked up to Maggie Tufu, and, without saying a word, knocked her flat.

Melanie Truscott had watched with helpless fury as the white lamps blinked on. Seconds before detonation, she noted that one unit, at Point Theta, had not armed. Locking mechanism had failed. A ten-buck part.

"What do you want to do?" asked Sill.

Goddam Helm. Some of the Academy people would likely die. Worse, if they blew off one icecap and not the other, they might induce a wobble, and possibly cause a complete reorientation of planetary spin. Quraqua could be unstable for centuries. "Tell Harding to cancel the hold. Proceed as planned."

Sill nodded.

"When you get Helm, I want to speak to him."

The design did not call for simultaneous explosions of all devices. The patterns of ice faults, the geometry of the underlying land (where it existed), the presence of volcanoes, the distribution of mass: these and other factors determined the sequence and timing of individual events. It is sufficient to note that all but one of the fifty-eight southern weapons detonated within a period of four minutes, eleven seconds. Blasts ranged from two to thirty-five megatons.

At the icecap, approximately eight percent of the total mass was vaporized. Formations that had stood for tens of thousands of years were blown away. Enormous sheets, like the one at Kalaga, fractured and slid into the sea. Millions of tons of water, thrown out by the blasts, rushed back and turned to steam. Mountainous waves rolled out of the white fury and started a long journey across the circular sea.

During the third minute after the initial detonation, a volcano buried deep in the ice pack exploded. Ironically, it was not one of those whose throat had been laced with a bomb. But it was the first to go. The others erupted according to plan. Hot rain began to fall.

Shock waves rippled out at five to seven kilometers per second, triggering earthquakes in their wake.

Hutch stood in the hold while the cable came up. The spacecraft floated beside the Temple shuttle. Carson stayed in his cockpit, as a precaution against the unexpected. The jolt that Richard had felt moments earlier in his tunnel had been indiscernible on the surface, nothing more than a ripple and an air current. But a second, more severe shock wave now arrived. Hutch was pitched forward.

Alpha filled with voices from the Temple.

"That was a big one."

"Everybody okay?"

"Damn, I think we lost part of it."

"Let it go, Richard."

"Only take a minute."

"Hutch, you've got a package." It was Henry. "Haul it in."

She winched it up and the first chase broke the surface. An impossibly corroded box. But Hutch knew first-hand the miracles of enhancement. / hope it's worth your lives.

She pulled it aboard. Water poured out of it. She disconnected, and heaved the line back over the side.

"Okay, Richard, let go." That was George. "I've got it."

The sea had turned rough. Water boiled and churned.

Sandy appeared to port. She swam swiftly to the shuttle, and Hutch pulled her in. "By God," said Sandy, "we did it."

"Not yet. Where is everybody?"

"Coming. A couple of minutes."

"Okay. Listen, we're going to get a little crowded here. Things'11 go quicker if you're in the other shuttle."

"Whatever you think," Sandy said.

Carson tossed a line, and she dived back into the sea.

"Frank," Hutch said, "I'll pick up the rest of them." She hesitated. "It might be a good idea if you got some altitude." She cast a worried glance toward a troubled horizon. "Watch for waves."

Most of the undersea lamps had gone out. Only the red trailmarkers still burned bravely within the murky recesses of the wrecked Temple.

They carried the second chase out into the clear water of what used to be the nave, where the cable from the shuttle was waiting. Richard's hair was in his eyes, and he was exhausted. He felt the drag of the sea. Undertow. Odd that it would be so strong on the bottom.

"Negative, Hutch," Frank told her. "Nothing yet."

"Okay. What scares me is that I can see the top of the Temple."

"What? That's under five meters of water. At low tide."

"Yeah? Well, I'm looking at it." She switched channels. "Hey, guys, move it. We got another tidal wave coming."

"How close?" Henry's voice.

"Probably a couple of minutes."

Richard broke in: "We're coming as fast as we can." He sounded exasperated. And maybe resigned.

"Hutchins?" It was Truscott. "What's happening down there?"

"I'm a little busy right now." There was a visual signal, but she did not put it on the display.

"I've ordered two of our CATs to assist. But they're four hours away."

In a less stressful moment, Hutch would have recognized the concern in Truscott's voice. But not today. "That'll be a little late, thanks." She broke the link. Looked again through her scopes. Sea still calm.

"Hutch?" Carson again. "I see it."

Cold chill. "Where?"

"Twenty-five kilometers out. Coming at, uh, five fifty. You've got three minutes."

"You guys hear that?"

"Yes—" George's voice.

"Forget the chase. Get up here." She trained her scopes on the horizon. Still nothing. "Frank, how big is it? Can you tell?"

"Negative. Looks like the other one. Small. You wouldn't notice it if you weren't looking for it."

"Okay." She watched a stone wall break the surface. "Water's still going down."

George pulled in several meters of slack. The others held the chase while he secured it. Twice around. Loop crosswise. Reconnect with the cable. Don't lose it now. When he fin-

ished, Henry pointed toward the surface. "Let's go."

"You can take it aboard, Hutch." George let go the line and started up.

The currents dragged Richard along the sea bottom. Above, the shuttle hull was dark, and close, in sunlit water.

Henry was also drifting. "Heads up," he said. "The tide's a bitch." His voice was shrill.

"Hang on, Henry," said George. "I'll get you."

Hutch was frantic: "Let's go!"

Richard got a hand on the cable. He was still on the bottom, and his arms were weary.

"George," cried Hutch. "Come back. We'll get him with the shuttle. Richard, where are youT'

"With the chase."

"On the cable?"

"Yes."

"Okay. We're out of time. Hang onto the line. Got that? Don't let go, no matter what."

There was a loose end on one side of the artifact. He got it around his waist and knotted it. Then, wearily, he stopped struggling.

"There he is." Hutch's voice again. Richard wasn't sure who she meant. He thought, She's always been there when 1 need her. He felt strange. Disconnected.

"Relax, Henry," said George. "We've got you."

"Goddammit," Hutch said, "the son of a bitch is on top of us." Over the voices, he heard a murmur, like a wind stirring.

"You still there, Richard?"

"I'm still here."

"Can you secure yourself to the cable?"

"I already have."

"Okay. About thirty seconds and we're going for a ride."

"Don't lose the chase, Hutch," he said.

George: "Here, take him." They must be talking about Henry.

And Carson: "Get out of there, Hutch."

"Okay, I got him. Hang on, Richard—"

His line jerked and the sea brightened. He rose a meter, moved horizontally, and started to settle. There was a second tug, stronger this time.

The water rushed past him.

The wave was not like the others. This was a mountain of water, a liquid behemoth roaring toward her across the open sea, breathing, white-flecked, green, alive. It crested five kilometers out, and broke, and built again. And Hutch had waited until she could wait no longer. There would be no lone Tower standing after this one. George had finally got Henry on board. "Go," he told her, and Carson was frantic. Eleven hundred meters high. You're not going to get out, Hutch—

The last of the Knothic Towers awaited the onrush. The sea had withdrawn and its base was mired in muck. The angel-creature on its pinnacle knelt placidly.

The ruined Temple glittered in the sunlight. She saw no sign of the beach monkeys.

Henry's voice came out of the hold, demanding to know what was being done for Richard. Little late to think about that. Hutch was ten meters off the surface now, watching the line, watching for some indication he was still there.

The chase came out of the sea first. Richard dangled beneath it. Reassured, she began to climb. "This'll hurt," she warned him. And she poured the juice to the magnets. He cried out. But she could hear his breathing. The shuttle rose, fleeing inland, fleeing toward the defile, running before the wall of water. This was not a wave, in the sense that the earlier tsunami had been a wave. The entire ocean was rushing inshore, hurling itself forward, mounting the sky, blocking off the sun. Bright daylight turned wet and furious, and the thing kept growing. White water boiled at its crest.

Hurricane-force winds ripped at the spacecraft, hammered it, drove it back toward the surface.

Too slow. She was moving too deliberately, trying to protect Richard, but in the shadow of the monster her instincts took over: she cut in her jets, quarter speed, the most she dared. The shuttle leaped forward, climbed, and the ancient river valley opened to receive her. Spray coated her wings and hull. The roar filled her ears; George, trying to be stoic, bit down on a whimper.

The tail was thrown violently to one side, and she almost lost the controls. Alpha pitched and yawed; her stabilizers blew.

Then they broke out, wobbled, and looked down on the crest. Hutch, for the moment, ignored the half-dozen bleeps and flashing lights on her board. "Richard," she cried into the link, "you okay?"

No answer.

"Richard?"

She listened to his carrier wave.

DOWNLINK HOLO

"Hello, Richard. Greetings from Nok." David Emory squares his shoulders. He is an intense man, with intense eyes, and quick birdlike gestures. His skin is very dark; his hair at this period has just begun to gray. He wears an open-necked short-sleeved brown shirt with huge pockets and flaps, of the style made popular by the dashing simmy adventurer, Jack Hancock.

He is seated on a small boulder, overlooking a river valley. Behind him, white and red sails are visible on the river. Docks, a winding road, and a pair of ferry stations line the banks. The countryside is cut into agricultural squares. The setting is quite terrestrial. Save for the enormous ringed planet which hangs like a Chinese lantern in the sky, one might think he was in Wisconsin.

This is Inakademeri. Nok. The only known world, other than Earth, which is currently home to a living civilization.

The colors are slanted toward purple, a bright but nonetheless gloomy twilight.

He waits, allowing time for his correspondent to take in the view. Then: "I've heard about your problems on Quraqua and I can't say I'm surprised. Vision is in short supply. Here the natives are waging a global war, and we'll be lucky if we don't all get blown up. Bombs falling day and night. World War I without gasoline.

"To answer your question: we do have what you describe as a discontinuity. Around AD. 400. Religious background, sinful world, vengeful deity. Sodom and Gomorrah on a global scale. According to the sacred texts, it happened in a single night. We don't take that too seriously, but we cannot account for the general destruction. Bill Reed thinks some sort of virus might have got loose and done the damage. The truth is probably more mundane: major wars, combined with plague and famine.

"You asked about the age of civilization here. Common wisdom puts it at six thousand years, roughly the same as ours. Also like us, they have an Atlantis legend, a place called Orikon. Except that this one really existed, Richard. Don't know how old it is, but it would go back a long way."

He gestures toward the river valley. "Incidentally, you will be interested in knowing that tradition places Orikon in this area. Come see it, before they blow up the neighborhood.

Cheers."

— David Emory, Response CKT144799/16 (Received on Winckelmann, June 16, 2202)

INTERLUDE

PASSAGE

The flight home lasted twenty-seven days, eleven hours. This brought the Winckelmann in approximately two days behind schedule, well within the inexactitudes imposed by transdimensional travel.

During the voyage, the members of the Academy team went through a period of mourning. Those who had argued to press their luck at the Temple found that their exhilaration over having recovered the foundations of a Linear C vocabulary was diluted by a shared portion of guilt. Henry, particularly, sank into dark moods. He spent time with his people, but they could see that the life had gone out of his eyes.

They responded to all this, for the most part, by losing themselves in examining their trove of artifacts and data, and beginning the decades-long process of analysis and interpretation. No such retreat was available to Hutch.

Almost none understood the ties between Richard Wald and his longtime pilot. They regarded his death as their own loss, and tended to reserve their sympathies for members of the Temple team. The ship's captain was left to her navigation.

For Hutch, the moment when an emotional link with George might have developed came and went. George kept a discreet distance, she thought, while he awaited an encouraging signal from her. But the time was not right for even an implied promise of future possibility. Maybe it was her need to mourn, or the general gloom that weighed on her during this period. Or maybe even her fear that George might come to associate her with disaster. Whatever her motivation, she began a policy of treating him with polite neutrality, and found that it locked quickly into place.

When they docked finally at the Wheel, they held a farewell dinner in the Radisson Lounge. Everybody said a few words, and there were some tears. And the steaks were very good. In the morning, the first contingents rode shuttles to Atlanta, Berlin, and London.