The Heart of the Comet

CARL

Kato died first.

He had been tending the construction mechs—robots that were deploying girders on the thick black dust that overlay the comet ice.

From Carl’s viewpoint, on a rise a kilometer away, Kato’s suit was a blob of orange amid the hulking gray worker drones. There was no sound, in spite of the clouds of dust and gas that puffed outward near man and machines. Only a little static interfered with a Vivaldi that helped Carl concentrate on his work.

Carl happened to be looking up, just before it happened. Not far from Kato, anchored near the north pole of the comet’s solid core, eight spindly spires came together to form a pyramidal tower. At its peak nestled the microwave borer antenna, an upside-down cup. Kato worked a hundred meters away, oblivious to the furious power lancing into the ice nearby.

Carl had often thought the borer looked like a grotesque, squatting spider. From the hole beneath it came regular gushes of superheated steam.

As if patiently digging after prey, the spider spat invisible microwaves down the shaft in five-second bursts. Moments after each blast, an answering yellow-blue jet of heated gas shot up from the hole below, rushing out of the newly carved tunnel. The bellowing steam jet struck deflector plates and parted into six plumes, fanning outward, safely missing the microwave pod.

The borer had been doing that for days, patiently hammering tunnels into the comet core, using bolts of centimeter-wavelength electromagnetic waves, tuned to a frequency that would strip apart carbon dioxide molecules.

Carl felt a faint tremor in his feet each time a bolt blazed forth. The horizon of ancient dark ice curved away in all directions. Out-croppings of pure clathrate snow here and there jutted out through thick layers of spongy dust. It was a scene of faded white against mottled browns and deep, light-absorbing black.

Kato and his mechs worked near the microwave borer, drifting on tethers just above the surface. The core’s feeble gravity was not enough to hold them down when they moved. Overhead, thin streamers of ionized, fluorescing gas swayed against hard black night, seeming to caress the Japanese spacer.

Kato supervised as his steel-and-ceramic robot mechanicals did the dangerous work. He had his back to the spider.

Carl was about to turn back to his own task. The borer chugged away methodically, turning ice to steam. Then one of the giant spider legs popped free in a silent puff of snow.

Carl blinked. The microwave generator kept blasting away as the leg flew loose of its anchor, angling up, tilting the body. He did not have time to be horrified.

The beam swept across Kato for only a second. That was enough. Carl saw Kato make a jerky turn as if to flee. Later, he realized that the movement must have been a final, agonized seizure.

The beam blasted the ice below the man, sending luminous sheets of orange and yellow gas pouring into the darkness above, driving billows of dust. Vivaldi vanished under a roar of static.

The invisible beam traced a lashing, searing path. It jittered, waved, then tilted further. Away from the horizon. Toward Carl.

He fumbled for his control console, popped the safety cover, and repeatedly stabbed the countermand switch. His ears popped as the static storm cut off. Every mech and high-power device on this side of Halley Core shut down. The microwave finger ceased to write on the ice only a few score meters short of Carl.

The spider began to collapse. Halley’s ten-thousandth of a G was too weak to hold down a firing microwave generator, but without the upward kick of expanding gas and radiation pressure, the iceworld’s own weak attraction asserted itself. The frame lurched and began its achingly slow fall.

—What the hell you doin’? My power’s out.—

That would be Jeffers. Other voices babbled over the commline.

“Mayday! Kato’s hurt.” Carl shot across dirty-gray ice. His impulse jets fired with a quick, deft certainty as he flew, unconsciously moving with the least wasted energy, the result of years of training. Crossing the rumpled face of Halley was like sailing adroitly over a frozen, dusty sea beneath a black sky.

Against all hope, he tried calling to the figure in the orange spacesuit, splayed, face downward, on the gouged snowfield. “Kato…?”

When he approached, Carl found something that did not resemble a man nearly so much as a blackened, distorted, badly roasted chicken.

Umolanda was next.

The timetable didn’t leave much room to mourn Kato. A med team came down from the flagship, the Edmund Halley, to retrieve Kato’s body, but then it was back to work.

Carl had learned years before to work through unsettling news, accidents, foul-ups. Shrugging off a crewmate’s death wasn’t easy. He had liked Kato’s energy, his quick humor and brassy confidence. Carl promised his friend’s memory at least one good, thoroughly drunken memorial party.

He and Jeffers fixed the spider, reanchoring the foot and reflexing the leg. Carl cut away the damaged portion. Jeffers held the oxygen feed while he slapped a spindly girder segment into the opening. At Carl’s signal, the other spacer played the gas jet over the seams and the metal leaped to life, self-welding in a brilliant orange arc. They had the repair done before Kato’s body was back on the Edmund.

Umolanda came over the rim of Halley Core, pale blue jets driving her along the pole-to-pole cable. The easiest way to move around the irregular iceball was to clip onto the cable and fire suit jets, skimming a few meters above the surface. Magnetic anchors released automatically as you shot by, to minimize friction.

Umolanda was in charge of interior work, shaping irregular gouges into orderly tunnels and rooms. She met Carl near the entrance to Shaft 3, a kilometer from the accident site. The piledriving spider labored away again on the horizon.

—Pretty bad about Kato,— she sent.

“Yeah.” Carl grimaced at the grisly memory. “Nice guy, even if he did play those old junk movies on the 3D all the time.”

—At least it was quick.—

He didn’t have anything to say to that, didn’t like talking a whole lot out here anyway. It just interfered with the job.

Umolanda’s liquid eyes studied him through a bubble helmet spattered with grime. The neck ring hid her cleft chin. He was surprised to see that this omission revealed her as an otherwise striking woman, her ebony skin stretched by high cheekbones into an artful, ironic cast. Funny, how he’d never noticed that.

—Did you investigate the cause?—

“I checked the area where the spider leg got loose,” Carl answered. “Looked like a fault under it gave way.”

She nodded. —Not surprising. I’ve been finding hollows below, formed when radioactive decay warmed the ice long ago, as Halley formed. If some hot gas from the spider’s digging worked its way back to the surface through one of those hollows, it could undermine the spider’s anchor.— Carl squinted at the horizon, imagining the whole cometary head riddled with snaking tunnels. “Sounds about right.”

—Shouldn’t the spider have cut off as soon as it lost focus?—

“Right.”

—The switch?—

“Damn safety cutoff was defective. Just didn’t kick in,” Carl said sourly.

Her eyebrows knitted angrily. —More defective equipment!—

“Yeah. Some bastard Earthside made a little extra on the overhead.”

—You’ve reported it?—

“Sure. It’s a long walk back for replacement parts though.” He smiled sardonically. There was a brief silence before Umolanda spoke again.

—There will always be accidents. We lost people at Encke, too.—

“That doesn’t t make it any easier.”

—No… I guess not.—

“Anyway, Encke was a pussycat of a comet. Old. Sucked dry. Lots of nice safe rock.” He scuffed the surface softly with a boot tip. Snow and black dust puffed at the slightest touch.

She forced a grin. —Maybe all this ice is supposed to keep us alive over the long haul, but it’s killing us in the short run.—

Carl gestured toward three mechs which stood nearby, waiting for orders. Already the machines were pitted and grimy from Halley’s primordial slush. “That’s your team. Kato was shaping them up. But you might want to give ’em a once-over, anyway.”

—They look okay.— Umolanda whistled up the color-coded readout on the back of the nearest one and nodded. —Some luck here. The microwave beam didn’t hit them. I’ll take them down, put them to hollowing out Shaft Three.—

She tethered the boxy, multiarmed robots and gracefully towed them to the tunnel entrance. Carl watched her get them safely aligned and disappear down the shaft, leading the mechs like a shepherd, though in fact the mechs were as smart as a ten-year-old at some things, and a lot more coordinated.

He went on to check out more of the equipment that other crewmen were ferrying down from the Edmund. It was dull labor, but he had been working in the shafts for days and needed a break from the endless walls of rubble-seamed ice.

Overhead, gauzy streamers wove a slow, stately dance. Halley’s twin shimmering tails were like blue-green silks. They were fading now, months past the brief summer crisping that came for the comet every seventy-six years. But still the banners of dust and ions unfurled, gossamer traceries waving as if before a lazy breeze, the flags of vast angels.

The expedition had elected to rendezvous with Halley’s comet after its 2061 perihelion passage, when the streaking planetoid was well on its way outward again. Here, beyond the orbit of Mars, the sun’s violent heating no longer boiled off the huge jets of water molecules, dust, and carbon dioxide that made Halley so spectacular during its short summer.

But heat lingers. For months, as Halley swooped by the fierce, eroding sun, temperature waves had been diffusing down through the ice, and rock, concentrating in volatile vaults and scattered clumps of rock. Now, even as the comet lofted back into the cool darkness of the outer solar system, there were still reservoirs of warmth inside.

The gritty, dark potato shape was a frozen milkshake of water, carbon dioxide, hydrocarbons, and hydrogen cyanide, each snow subliming into vapor at a different temperature. Inevitably, in some spots, the seeping warmth melted or vaporized ices. These pockets lay waiting.

Carl was partway through assembling a chemical filter system when he heard a sharp high cry on suit-comm.

Then sudden, ominous silence.

His wrist display winked yellow-blue, yellow-blue: Umolanda’s code.

Damn. Twice in one shift?

“Umolanda!”

No answer. He caught the polar cable and went hand over hand toward the mouth of Shaft 3.

Mechs milled at a cave-in, digging at the slowly settling ice amid swirls of sparkling fog. No signal from Umolanda. He let the mechs work but popped pellet memories out of their backpacks to scan while he waited. It was soon apparent what had happened.

Deep in the ice, the mechs had dutifully chipped away at the walls of the first vault. Umolanda controlled them with a remote, staying in the main tunnel for safety. The TV relay told her when to sequence the robots over to a new routine, when to touch up details, when to bore and blast. She hung feathered, and monitored the portable readout board, occasionally switching over to full servoed control of a mech, to do a particularly adroit bit of polishing.

She had been working at the far end of what would soon be a storage bay when a mech struck a full-fledged boulder of dark native iron two meters across. Captain Cruz had asked them to watch out for usable resources. Umolanda put all three mechs to retrieving it. Under her guidance they slipped levers around the boulder and tried to pry it free. The sullen black chunk refused to budge.

Umolanda had to come in close to inspect. Carl could envision the trouble; mechs were good, but often it was hard to see whether they were getting the best angle.

Carl had a dark premonition. The boulder had been absorbing heat for weeks, letting it spread into a slush that lay intermediately behind it, a pocket of confined carbon dioxide and methane. This frothy soup would be perched at its critical point, needing only a bit more temperature or a fraction less pressure if, burst forth into the vapor phase.

Oh for chrissakes, Umolanda don’t …

A mech slipped its levering rod around the boulder, penetrating into the reservoir of slush. Umolanda saw the robot lurch, recover. She told it to try again, and moved a little closer to observe.

The mech was slow, gingerly. Its aluminum jacket was spattered and discolored from several days in the ice, but its readouts showed it was in perfect running order. Using as its pivot its own tether in the wall, it levered around the boulder, lunged—and the iron gobbet popped free.

No!

Release of pressure liberated the vaporization energy. The explosion drove the pry bar out of the mech’s grip like a ramrod fired through the barrel of a cannon.

Umolanda was two meters away. The lever buried itself in her belly.

The pellet-memory readout terminated. Carl blinked away tears.

He waited while the mechs cleared the way. There was really no need to hurry.

Mission Commander Miguel Cruz called off operations for two full shifts. The setup crew had been working to the hilt for a week. Two deaths in one day implied that they were making errors from plain fatigue.

Umolanda’s accident had spewed forth a pearly fog for an hour as the inner lake of slush boiled out. Had anyone Earthside been watching through a strong telescope, they could have detected aslight brightening at the cometary head. It was a fleeting memorial. The blinding storm had driven her mechs out into the shaft, dislodged enough ice to bury her. Carl and the others were kept outside until it was too late to recover her and freeze her down slowly for possible medical work. Umolanda was lost.

Carl came up on the last ferry. The mottled surface seemed to darken with distance: the cometary nucleus dwindled to a blackish dot swimming in a luminous orange-yellow cloud. Though the fuzzy haze of the coma was still visible with a small telescope from Earth, from near the head itself the shimmering curtains of ions were lacy, scarcely noticeable. Gas and grains of dust still steadily popped free of Halley’s surface, making cargo piloting tricky. Most of the outgassing now came not from the sun’s ebbing sting, but from the waste heat of humans.

As the ferry pulled outward the twin tails—one of dust and the other of fluorescing ions— stretched away, foreshortened pale remnants of the glories that had enthralled Earth only two months ago. Ragged streamers forked out toward Jupiter’s glowing pinpoint. Oblivious, Carl stretched back and dozed while the ferry rose to meet the Edmund.

When they clanged into the lock, he peeled off his suit and coasted toward the murmuring gravity wheel at the bow. He climbed down one of the spoke ladders and stumbled out into the unfamiliar tug of one-eighth G, feeling bone-deep weariness descend with the coming of weight.

Sleep, yes, he thought. Let it knit up whatever raveled sleeve he had left.

Virginia came first, though. He hadn’t seen her in ages.

She was in her working module, of course, halfway around the wheel. She seldom left the thing nowadays. The door hissed aside. When he slipped into the spherical world of encasing memory shells there was an almost cathedral-like hush, a sense of presence and humming activity just beyond hearing. He sat down quietly next to her cantilevered chair, waiting until she could extract from interactive mode. Tapped into channels through a direct neural link and wrist servos, she scarcely moved. She had to know he was there, but she gave no sign.

Her slim body occasionally fidgeted and jerked. Like a dog dreaming, he thought, and trying to run after imaginary rabbits.

Her long, half-Polynesian features were pointed toward the banks of holographic displays suspended above her, and her eyes never even flicked to the side to see him. She gazed raptly at multiple scenes of movement, sliding masses of ever-flickering data, geometric diagrams that shifted and evolved, telling new tales.

He waited as she worked through some indecipherable problem. Her long face momentarily tightened, then released as she leaped some hurdle. She had delicate, high cheekbones, too, like Umolanda. Like a third of the expedition’s crew, the Percells, products of Simon Percell’s program in genetic correcting of inherited diseases. Carl wondered idly if fineboned, aristocratic features were traits the DNA wizard had slipped in. It was possible; the man had been a genius. Carl’s own face was broad and ordinary, though, and he had been “developed,” as the antiseptic jargon had it, within a year of Virginia. So maybe Simon Percell had taken such care only with the women. Given the gaudy stories told about the man, he couldn’t rule out the possibility.

By anyone’s definition, Virginia Kaninamanu Herbert was clearly a successful experiment. A Hawaiian mixture of Pacific breeds, she had a swift, quirky intelligence, deliciously unpredictable. There was restless energy to her eyes as they moved in quick darting glances at the myriad welter before her. Below, her mouth was a study in quiet immersion, slightly pursed, thoughtful and pensive. She was not, he supposed, particularly attractive in the usual sense of the term; her long face gave her a rangy look. The serene almond smoothness of her skin offset this, but her forehead was broad, the mouth too ample, her chin was stubbed and not fulsomely rounded as fashion these days demanded.

Carl didn’t give a damn. There was a compressed verve in her, a hidden woman he longed to reach. Yet all the time he’d known her she had stayed inside her polite cocoon. She was friendly but little more. He was determined to change that.

On the main screen, obliquely turned girders fitted together in precise sockets. The frame froze. Done.

Abruptly Virginia came alive, as though some fluid intelligence had returned from the labyrinths of her machine counterpart. She stripped the wrist inputs. The white socket for her neural connector flashed briefly as the tap came off and she fluffed her hair into shape.

“Carl! I hoped you’d wait for me to finish.”

“Looks important.”

“Oh, this?” She waved away the frames of data. “Just some cleanup work. Checking the simulations of docking and transfer, when we take everybody down. There’ll be irregularities from random outgassing jets, and the slot boats will have to compensate. I was programming the smarter mechs for the job. We’re ready now.”

“It’ll be a while.”

“Well, a few more days… Oh, yes.” She suddenly became subdued. “I heard.”

“Damn bad luck.” His mouth twisted sourly.

“Fatigue, I heard.”

“That too.”

She reached out and touched his arm tentatively. “There was nothing you could do.”

“Probably. Maybe I shouldn’t have let her go down that hole right after Kato bought it. Thing like that, shakes you up, screws up your judgment. Makes accidents more likely”

“You weren’t senior to her.”

“Yeah, but—”

“It’s not your fault. If anything, it’s the constraints we work under. This timetable—”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Come on. I’ll buy you some coffee.”

“Sleep’s what I need.”

“No, you need talk. Some people contact.”

“Trading arcane jokes with that computer crowd of yours?” He grimaced. “I always come out sounding like a nerd.”

She flexed smoothly out of her console couch, taking advantage a of the low gravity to curl and unwind in midair. “Not at all!” Something in her sudden, bouncy gaiety lifted his heart. “Blithe spirit, nerd thou never wert..”

“Mutilated Shelley! God, that’s awful.”

“True, though. Come on. First round is on me.”

SAUL

To most people the creature would seem hideous. Vaguely globular, specked with yellow and ocher spots and spiky protrusions all around, it had the sort of looks only a particularly indulgent mother could love.

Or a stepfather, Saul Lintz thought.

Millions of the tiny, ugly things darted about in the crowded confines of a single, glinting drop of saline water, beaded by surface tension into a high, arching meniscus on the glass microscope slide.

Saul played the fiber optic controls until his magnifier zoomed in on a single cyanute. “There we are,” he muttered softly. “You’ll do as a test subject, my lad.”

He pressed a trigger and the cytology instrument took over following the tiny microbe, automatically tracking it wherever it swam within its little universe.

The creature was a pulsing mass of tiny, rainbowed cilia that rippled faster than the eye could follow. But Saul knew the thing anyway, to its smallest part. He could imagine every mottled, microscopic component down past where the instrument could not go—to the level of acids and bases, of sugars and finely balanced lipid barriers.

It darted to and fro amid the thousands of other rough, rippling cells, seeking what it needed to survive.

Not unlike us, Saul thought. Only our search has brought us humans half a billion miles from home.

He rubbed his eyes and bent forward in a habit from long-ago days, when one still occasionally peered through cold glass lenses instead of letting the machines do all the hard work. Relax, Saul told himself. There’s no need to crane over the screen.

Even here, in Edmund’s slowly spinning gravity wheel, there wasn’t enough of a pull to fight against. One had to keep loose, or expend enormous energy just to stay still.

Only half of the screens and holo displays in the biology unit brimmed with light. In a dozen other dark faces Saul’s own pale image was reflected… thick eyebrows above a generous nose, and lines that most people, on meeting him, guessed came of a lifetime spent smiling.

Only those who knew Saul well—and they were few these days—understood the true source of those craggy indentations: a stoicism that warded off the pain of many, many losses.

The creases stood out now as Saul’s blue eyes narrowed it concentration. Delicately touching a hand controller, he brought a hollow sliver of metal down into the little ball of salty water on the microscope slide. On the main holo screen the image of the tiny needle seemed to loom like a javelin as computers guided it toward the chosen test subject.

“Come on, meshugga,” Saul muttered as the microbe tried to dart away. “Hold still for Papa.”

The cyanute was less than fifty microns across, so small and innocuous that its ancestors had lived peacefully in human bodies for millions of years of quiet symbiosis, until they were discovered only a generation or so ago. For Saul the little creature contained as many wonders as the huge comet commanding such attention outside.

The main vision wall of the lab had been left tuned to a view of Halley, not as the comet looked now—a slowly ebbing cloud of banked fluorescence surrounding a six-mile chunk of dingy snow—but as it had been only months before, in all its brief glory, streaking past the sun at half the Earth’s orbital distance, its ion tail flapping in the protonic breeze.

They were well matched in beauty—the titanic, cosmic messenger that was to be their home for most of a century and the microscopic wonder that had made the sojourn possible. Still, it was no surprise that, of the two, Saul concentrated on the tiny living thing drifting in the little glob of water.

After all, he had made it.

Sh’ma Yisrael… he reminded himself. There is but one God—even though he should place his tools in our hands—tools to shape life and forge worlds. He is only stepping back to see what we will do with them.

In Saul’s line of work he found it wise to remember that, from time to time.

When the needle had approached to within a cell’s width of the subject, Saul spoke a word and triggered the test sequence. A small, indistinct puff disturbed the water near the needle’s tip, where tiny traces of hydrogen cyanide solution spurted forth.

No more than a scattering of molecules was involved, yet the tiny organism reacted nearly instantly. Its cilia erupted in a sudden spasm of activity and the creature sprang forward…

Forward, toward the needle. It engulfed the tip, throbbing with seeming eagerness.

So far, so good. Saul would have been surprised if it had behaved differently. The cyanutes had been thoroughly tested on Earth before the mission to Halley’s Comet was approved. No factor was more important to the success and health of 410 brave men and women than these little creatures.

Confident he was. But life—even specially gene-tailored life—had a way of changing when you least expected it. The survival of all those people depended on the tiny “nutes” working as planned. He had led the team that designed them, and he did not intend to allow any failures. There were more than enough ghosts already in his life. Miriam, the children, the land and people of his youth… and, of course, Simon Percell.

Poor Simon. All too well he recalled how one mistake had ruined his friend’s life and nearly everything he had worked to accomplish. Keep reminding me, Simon. Keep reminding me of the dangers of playing God.

All the HCN was gone now, according to the displays, sucked up by the eager organism. Saul nodded in satisfaction. Every human being on this mission had millions of cyanutes living in his or her bloodstream and in the little alveoli air sacs that made up their lungs. This sample, taken at random from one of the crew, had just demonstrated that it would do its main job—sop up any trace of deadly, dissolved cyanide gas before the stuff could get near its host’s red corpuscles. Another puff of dissolved gas proved its ability to gobble carbon monoxide before that chemical could bind to human hemoglobin.

Saul touched off the next stage in the test. Minute traces of a new compound swirled into the saline bubble. This time the little microbe on the screen quickly withdrew from the needle, curling almost as if it had been stung. Cyanide and CO were fresh grazing to this creature, but human tissue factors appeared to be a definite no-no.

Again, good news. The second test showed that the cyanute was totally disinclined to look on human cells as meat.

So much for the basics. There were countless other things to check. Saul mentally ran down a list as he triggered the sequencer to begin the automatic phase of the test program.

… Self-limiting reproduction, benign acceptance by the human immune system, pH sensitivity, a voracious appetite for other potential cometary toxins…

It wasn’t so much a catalog of attributes as a litany of challenges met and conquered. Saul couldn’t help feeling proud of his small team back on Earth, which had had to overcome prejudice, bureaucracy, and undisguised superstition to do this work. In the end, though, they had created a wonder-a new human symbiont.

Cyanutes would be a permanent, benign part of every man and woman on the crew for the rest of their lives… and perhaps, he dared imagine, a part of the human animal from now on, like the intestinal flora that had always helped him digest his food and the mitochondria within his cells that burned sugars for him, converting them into usable energy.

“Who can compare with thee, oh Lord…” he whispered wryly, teasing himself for his ineradicable corner of hubris. Saul had long ago concluded that he and God would have to be patient with each other. Perhaps the universe was not conveniently set up for either of them.

He watched the test results unfold on the screen—all nominal, nearly perfect—until a soft squeak announced the opening of the bio-lab portal behind him.

“So! We are poking away at our pets again, Saul? You just cannot leave them alone?”

He didn’t have to look up to know the voice of Akio Matsudo. “Hello ’Kio.” He waved without turning around. “Just double-checking. And everything looks fine, thanks. Aren’t they lovely critters?”

He smiled as the spry, tall Japanese physician came alongside and made a sour look. The chief of Mission Life Sciences had never disguised his opinion of Saul’s “critters.” They were necessary—utterly vital to the success of their seventy-eight-year voyage. But poor Akio had never come to see their more aesthetic side.

“Ugh,” Matsudo commented. “Please do not remind me of the infestation even now swarming in my bodily fluids. Next time you wish to inject me with alien parasites—”

“Symbionts,” Saul corrected quickly.

`—against which my body has no immune capability whatsoever—next time I will make the incision myself—from crotch to sternum!”

Saul could only grin as Matsudo ’s serious mug broke and the man actually giggled. It was a “kee-kee-kee” sound that spacers had already mimicked into a sort of clarion call below decks. Akio frequently made such light jests about the traditions of ancient Japan.

Perhaps it was similar to the way Saul dropped Yiddishisms into his speech now and then, although he had learned the language only a decade ago. It’s a proper dialect for exiles, he thought.

“What have you got there, ’Kio?” He pointed at a flimsy sheet in the other’s hand.

“Ah. Yess.” Matsudo tended to slur his sibilants. “Even as we are speaking of immune systems, I have come to ask you to go through the stimulants inventory with me, Saul. I believe that it is time to release an attenuated disease into the life-support system.”

Saul winced. He never looked forward to this.

“So soon? Are you sure? Four-fifths of the expedition is still frozen aboard the Sekanina and the other freighter tugs. All we have awake now are the Edmund crew and support staff.”

“All the more reason.” Matsudo nodded. “Thirty spacers have been living together on this cramped ship for more than a year. Another forty have been out of the slots for two or more months, as we got closer to the comet. All of the colds and minor viruses they brought with them when they departed Earth have run their course by now.

“I’ve done a parasite inventory, and have found that more than three-quarters of the ambient pathogenic organisms have already gone extinct! It is time to release a new challenge.”

Saul sighed. “You’re the boss.” Actually, the entire bio committee was supposed to pass on immune challenges. But reminding Akio would only offend him. The procedure was routine, anyway.

Still, Saul’s nose already itched in unhappy anticipation.

He reached over to the bio-library console and punched out a rapid code. A page of data appeared in space before a black backdrop.

Saul nodded at the glowing green lettering. “There is a lovely array of nasty bugs at your disposal, Doctor. With what plague do you wish to infect your patients? We have chicken pox, fox pox, attenuated measles…

“Nothing so drastic.” Matsudo waved. “At least not so soon.”

“No? Well, then there’s impetigo, athlete’s foot… :’

“Amaterasu! Heaven forfend, Saul! In this dampness? Before the comet-tunnel habitats have been set up and the big dehumidifiers are working? You know how the navy feels about fungus aboard a spaceship. Cruz would have our—”

He stopped abruptly and grinned lopsidedly. “Ha ha. Very funny, Saul. You are pulling my leg, of course.”

Saul had known Matsudo casually, from scientific conferences and by reputation, for many years. But the man was still somewhat of an enigma to him. For instance, why had he volunteered to come on this mission? Of all the types who would sign up to leave Earth, spend seventy-three years of a seventy-eight-year mission in slot sleep, and return to a world grown alien and strange, which category applied to Akio? Was he an idealist, following Captain Miguel Cruz’s dream of what the mission might mean to mankind? Or was he an exile, like so many on this expedition?

Perhaps, like me, he’s a little of both.

Matsudo ran a hand through his lustrous black hair, as thick as any youth’s. “Just pick me out a head-cold virus, will you be so kind, Saul? Something that will challenge the crew enough to keep up their antibody production and T cell counts. They needn’t even notice it, for all I care.”

Saul spoke a chain of letters aloud, and a new page appeared. “The customer’s always right,” he ruminated aloud. “And you’re in luck! We seem to have eighty varieties of head cold on sale.”

“Surprise me;” Matsudo said. But then he frowned and held up both hands. “No! On second thought, let me choose! I don’t want any of your experimental monsters loose right now, no matter what you say about the wonders of symbiosis!”

Saul pushed off to one side as Akio bent forward to peer at the list of available diseases, muttering softly to himself. Obviously, Matsudo had left his contact lenses out again.

He’s about three decimeters taller than his grandfather, Saul thought. And yet he’s suspicious of change. A scientist, and yet he’s too conservative to get a corneal implant that would let him see without aid.

What ever happened to the innovative, future-hungry Japanese of so long ago?

For that matter, what had happened to Israel, his own homeland? How could the descendants of the Negev pioneers, the most potent warriors in two centuries, slowly decline into superstition and cultism? What had turned clear-eyed Sabras into cowed sheep who let the Levite and Salawite fanatics just walk in and take over?

The mysteries were part of a greater one that still amazed Saul, how courage seemed to be leaking away from humanity, even as the Hell Century was ending and better times appeared near at last.

It wasn’t a calming train of thought. Biological science was in just as bad shape. The bright hopes offered by Simon Percell and the genetic engineers of the early part of the century had nearly collapsed in a series of scandals more than a decade ago, leaving only a stolid pharmaceutical industry and a few mavericks such as Saul to carry on.

Earth was rapidly becoming unpleasant for mavericks—one of the reasons he was on this mission. Exile through space and time certainly beat some of the alternatives he had seen coming.

“We will use rhinovirus TR-3-APZX-471,” Matsudo announced, apparently satisfied with his selection. “Do you concur, Saul.”

Saul already felt a sneeze coming on. “A naive little varietal, but I’m sure you’ll be amused by its presumption.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Never mind,” he grumped. “As official keeper of small animals, I’ll have an incubated vial of the nasty buggers in your in-box by tomorrow morning.” He touched a key and the glowing inventory disappeared.

Matsudo lifted himself easily in the one-eighth G of the Edmund’s laboratory wheel, and sat on the counter. He sighed, and Saul could tell that his friend was about to go philosophical on him. Over the long journey from Earth they had exchanged chess games and views of the world, and never budged each other on any issue at all.

“It’s not much like back when we were in Medical school, is it, Saul? You in Haifa and me in Tokyo ? We were brought up to hate pathogens—the infectious viruses and bacteria and prions—to want only to wipe them from the face of the Earth. Now, we culture and use them. They are our tools.”

Saul nodded. Today half a physician’s job involved careful application of those very horrors, serving them up judiciously to create challenges.

“Exercise the patient’s immune system, and let him do the rest,” Saul said, nodding. “It’s a better way, Akio. I only wish you’d see that my cyanutes are part of the same progression.”

Matsudo rolled his eyes. He and Saul had been over this many times.

“Again, I regret that I cannot agree. In one case we teach the body to be strong and reject that which is foreign. But you coax it to accept an interloper, forever!”

“Perhaps half of the cells in a human body are guest life forms, Akio… gut bacteria, follicle cleaners. They help us; we help them.”

Matsudo waved his hand. “Yes, yes. Most of what you call you, is not! I have heard it before. I know you see us not as individuals, Saul, but as great, synergistic hives of cooperating species.” There was a biting edge to Matsudo ’s voice that Saul did not remember having heard before. Exaggeration was not Matsudo ’s usual style.

“Akio…

Matsudo hurried on, though. “And what it you to right Saul’ All of those organisms that share our bodies with us grew into symbiosis over millions of years. That is entirely different from throwing gene-tailored monsters into such a delicate balance on purpose!”

Matsudo flushed slightly. Saul considered trying to explain one more time—that the cyanutes were descended from creatures that had lived peacefully in man for aeons. But of course, he knew how Akio would answer. After all the changes that had been made, the ’nutes were a new species, as different from their natural cousins as men were from apes.

“Saul, the Movement to Restore and Reflect teaches us that we must think carefully before we interfere with nature The Hell Century has shown how dangerous it can be to meddle where we don’t understand.

Glancing up at the microscope screen, where his tiny test subject was still being run through its paces, Saul saw that the animal was still throbbing near the needle—harried but well.

“I…” He shook his head and went silent. Saul had an idea what was bothering his friend.

“There’s still no sign of the Newburn yet, is there?”

Matsudo shook his head, his gaze on the floor. “Captain Cruz and his officers are still looking. Perhaps when the comet has calmed down some more, when the coma and ion tail are less noisy… Fortunately, there were only forty people aboard that one. If it had been one of the other slot tugs, the Sekanina, or the Whipple, or the Delsemme—” He shrugged.

Saul nodded. No wonder Matsudo was irritable. More than three hundred men and women had been shipped from Earth five years ahead of Edmund—along with most of the expedition’s massive equipment—chilled down to near freezing aboard four slender robot freighters, riding sunlight behind gossamer sails a thousand kilometers across.

Only the “founder” team took the fast, energetically expensive track aboard the old Edmund Halley. They exhausted almost the last of their propellant to match the comet’s furious retrograde orbit. Whey they arrived the first task awaiting the torch ship’s crew was to recover the huge cylinders containing the deep sleeping majority of the mission crew.

There were disadvantages to each style of travel-torch ship or slot tug. Much of the Edmund staff had to take long turns enduring the boredom and cramped living of more than a year in space. As well, they shared the recently evident dangers of setting up the base.

On the other hand, they had some control over their fate. It was not their lot to coast for years in near-frozen sleep, relying on someone else to catch up, capture their slim barge, and finally awaken them.

Would the men and women aboard Newburn drift forever? If Cruz and his team never found the tug, might they be picked up by someone else, in some faraway age? What might they awaken to, after such a long trip down the river of time?

“It is going to be a long eighty years, Saul.” Matsudo shook his head pensively, looking at the picture wall, vivid with Halley’s Comet in its full glory against a backdrop of stars. The plasma and dust tails glittered like flapping banners, like plankton in a phosphorescent sea. “It is a long time until we see home again.”

Saul smiled, hiding his own misgivings for his friend’s sake. “We’ll sleep through most of it, ’Kio. And when we do get home, we’ll be rich and famous.”

Matsudo snorted at the thought, but he acknowledged Saul’s intent with a smile. Irony was the common trait that made them friends, in spite of all their differences.

A bell chimed and Saul looked up as the probe’s needle withdrew from the watery, saline bead. The subject cyanute floated gray and limp now. The last test had been to prove that the creatures could still easily be killed, if ever the need arose.

A creator’s prerogative? he wondered. Or are my shoulders stooped imperceptibly under one more tiny guilt?

Scavengers were already nosing up to the microscopic corpse. Saul reached over and turned the microscope off.

VIRGINIA

The place smelled of rank, unwashed man.

Virginia ’s nose wrinkled when she entered the workout gym for her mandatory exercise period.

We’re strange creatures. Mammals evolve odors that make males aggressive, and all of us nervous around one another, and then we pack a whole crowd of people together into a tin crate for a year or more, and ask them to make nice.

Actually, Virginia did not mind the smell all that much. She did not even mind men.

They just aren’t the reason I accepted exile into the twenty-second century. riding a speck of stardust and ice out into the Big Night.

Virginia had her own motives. For her, volunteering for Project Halley had little to do with herding comets for harvest.

She stripped down to her shorts and mounted a bicycle ergometer, attaching the bio-monitor straps. Virginia pushed the pedals, accelerating until the readout showed she was fulfilling Dr. van Zoon’s orders.

The workout gym was located in the Edmund Halley’s gravity wheel, where most of the crew snoozed through their sleep periods under weight. Virginia understood the need to let blood and bones feel the Old Pull now and then to keep them in shape. But these thrice-weekly sessions with straps, pulleys, and ergometers struck her as truly burnt logic.

She had considered monkeying with the med center’s data flow, inserting simulated feedback from all these exercise machines. She could do it, too. Virginia wasn’t modest about her competence in Data Intelligence. Lefty d’Amaria might be head of the department, but she was the best.

Oh, well, I guess I need this, she thought as she pushed down on the pedals. Sweat began popping out, glistening on her olive skin.

Normally, she took pride in keeping a taut physique. Back home in Hawaii, she had surfed nearly every other day. But now it seemed she had to shake off a lassitude that still hung over her after a year’s chilled sleep. Until three weeks ago she had been suspended, life functions barely ticking over at just above freezing. Perhaps it was a lingering laziness from the slot drugs that had made her so reluctant to come down to the gym.

Well, as long as I’m here, let’s do it right.

She bore down hard and pretended she was pedaling across the Lanai-Maui bridge. The omnipresent rumble of the gravity wheel faded into an imagined background of roaring wind and water. Virginia pictured that the door in front of her might let her out, blinking, into yellow sunshine and the rich scent of pineapple.

Her muscles felt warm and stretched after the workout. And it was good to spend some time after showering just brushing her long black hair. Stepping back into her drab pullover was reminder enough, though. Maui lay a hundred million miles from here.

You made your choice, girl. There are things to accomplish out here… things more important to you even than remaining in the Land of the Golden People.

She decided to take a brisk walk around the gravity wheel before returning to the freefall portion of the shi[. Virginia strode long-legged in the direction opposite to the wheel’s spin.

It seemed nobody was about. Dr. Marguerite van Zoon wasn’t chivying the spacers to visit the gym these days. Those poor folk were sweating quite enough right now, and were exempt from the Walloon physician’s obsession with exercise.

Virginia ’s journey around the rim hallway took her past one of the spoke ladders and beyond, to the part of the wheel dedicated to laboratories. The doors were all closed, so she couldn’t tell if the Biological Sciences section was being used right now. She paused by the door, her hand hesitating, half-raised toward the buzzer.

Oh come on, Ginnie. It’s not as if Saul Lintz will bite you. Why all these little-girl heart palpitations?

All she knew was that the man held a fascination for her, more than she had felt toward anyone in years. Was it his worldly experience? Or the expression in his eyes—perseverance and quiet strength?

Since she had been unslotted, she had hoped he would say something, make some first move. It was frustrating to realize, at last, that he simply assumed she saw him as a father figure. That left Virginia wondering if she should attempt an overture herself.

Her hesitation over the buzzer lasted until she felt ridiculous.

It would seem so contrived to barge in on him now. What would I say?

Later there’ll be opportunity to arrange something more casual. After all, what we have plenty of is time.

At least that would do for an excuse. Oh, if only she understood people half as well as she did machines! She swiveled and left without disturbing the buzzer.

As she walked down the rim corridor, she noticed all the ways in which the Edmund Halley had aged over the past year. The corridors no longer shone. Buff, color-coordinated wall panels had warped and even buckled in places. The old girl had not started this mission exactly in the blush of youth, and no space vessel of her size had ever been required to accelerate so far, for so long. The strain showed.

Virginia thought she was past surprise, but as she approached another of the spoke ladders, she stopped and stared.

Oh, it can’t be this bad!

An air vent dripped onto the gently curved hallway. Patchy, dark green growth discolored the floor where Coriolis effects had pushed a small puddle against the wall.

Virginia ’s generous lips pursed in disgust as she stepped gingerly past the moldy infestation and climbed a damp ladder toward the hub, making a mental note to report this to maintenance. It was hard to believe she was the first to discover it.

The rungs pressed against her body as she surrendered angular momentum to the rotating wheel. The spoke passageway was dim and dank and all too smelly. Only half the phosphor panels in this tunnel were working, makingthe ascent seem a bit like a trip through a city sewer.

It’s a good thing the Halley habitats will be ready soon, she thought. This creaky barge needs a long overhaul.

There would be little enough for the four hundred members of the expedition to do during three-quarters of a century… investigating the mysteries of a major cometary nucleus… testing the sublimation control panels and the big Nudge Flingers… another busy time in thirty years or so as Halley neared its farthest reach from the sun, when Virginia would help calculate parameters for the all important Grand Maneuver… then the long fall toward Jupiter and finally, home.

For most of the intervening time, nearly everybody would be asleep, accumulating Earthside pay in nearly dreamless slot state.

That was when the small, rotating watch shifts would slowly refurbish poor Edmund.

Seven decades ought to be time enough. It had better be. Come Halley’s next fiery plunge into the inner solar system, this old bucket has to be good enough shape to take us home again.

Climbing hand over hand, Virginia felt her weight seep away into the ladder as she approached the grumbling bearings, where the null gravity of space resumed. The four spoke tunnels came together in a small, rotating, octagonal room.

Just before reaching the hub, however, she blinked in stunned surprise at a small lubricant leak, spraying fine, greasy vapor into the passage.

I know most of Edmund’s spacers have been called away to work on Halley Core. Still, there’s no excuse for this! We’re going to need the wheel for a long time to come!

“Disgusting,” she muttered aloud. “Simply disgusting.”

That was when a voice spoke from beyond the faint, oily jet.

“I agree, Virginia.”

She glanced up quickly A slightly paunchy man in a gray shipsuit floated by one of the two exits, his broad, Slavic mouth pouting in a sour expression. A wool cap was pulled down over sparse brown hair flecked with gray. His arms were long and powerful- looking, all the more so since he had no legs.

Spacer Second Class Otis Sergeov had never appeared particularly disabled by his handicap. In fact, it seemed to make him quicker in microgravity. She had heard that Sergeov was now assigned to helping Joao Quiverian and the other astronomers studying Comet Halley.

He was the oldest Percell Virginia had ever met.

Being one of the first had its drawbacks. Simon Percell’s famous early work in genetic surgery had made it possible for Sergeov’s parents to have children at all. But a mosaic flaw had left him with only small nubs below his shorts.

“Oh, hello, Otis,” she greeted him. “Something has to be done about this. Has anyone reported it yet?”

The Russian spacer shrugged. “Is doing what the hell good, reporting thing like this? Nobody does nothing about it, for sure,” he groused bitterly in mixed Russian and English. “The Stchakai cretins!”

Virginia blinked at the apparent nonsequitur. Of course Captain Cruz would order repairs at once, when someone told him …

Then she noticed that Sergeov wasn’t even looking at the lubricant leak. Virginia rode the slowly rotating hub until she was even with the man, then edged past the intermittent spray and pushed off hard.

The octagonal room seemed to spin around her. She had to grab twice in order to grip a rubberized handhold, and still her body collided with the padded wall. I’ll never get this right! she thought as she fought to orient herself.

Sergeov pointed. “You think Ortho bureaucrats will do anything about this thing, do you?” he snapped “This?”

Virginia blinked. He was glaring at a graffito scrawled on the bulkhead nearest the grumbling axis bearings.

“Arc of the Sun,” he identified the symbol, bitingly. “The Kakashkiia bastards have followed us, even out here.”

“I’ve seen it before,” Virginia said softly. She felt a little short of breath over this unexpected sight. “Even in Hawaii…”

“So?” Sergeov interrupted snidely. “Even in Land of the Golden People? Even in your techno-humanistic paradise?”

Virginia ’s brow knotted. Back in mission training she had taken a dislike to Sergeov, fellow Percell or no. He had spent nearly all his life in space—turning his physical drawbacks into assets in freefall—and yet every time she encountered him she felt uncomfortable, as if the man radiated long-suppressed bitterness.

She promised herself she would use her own computer to worm her way into the personnel files. She would see to it that they never shared a shift out of the slots during the seven decades ahead.

“Goodbye, Otis. I have work to do.” But he stopped her, seizing her arm.

“You know this is not first incident,” he said. “Only most blatant. Some of Arcists,” he sneered, “refuse to even talk to Percells aboard. They avoid us like we are xherobiy… unclean!”

Virginia shrugged. “Everybody’s been under a lot of stress lately. That’ll change when the habitats are completed, and once people have room to move around again. When we’ve unfrozen some folk from the slot tugs and get to look at some fresh faces for a change…”

Sergeov’s grip was iron-strong from years of hauling space gear around. “Might help symptoms,” he insisted. “But the disease goes on. You saw what Earth was like when we left. One after another of shlyoocha Hot Belt countries pass laws restricting our rights… rights of all genetically enhanced people!”

Virginia only wanted the man to let go of her arm. She tried reason.

“The nations of equatorial Africa and America have had a hellish century, Otis. I don’t like the specious turn their ideology has taken in recent years either, but at least they’re environmentalists, nowadays. If they’ve become a bit fanatical in that direction, well, anyone will admit it’s an improvement over the way their grandfathers behaved. The pendulum will swing back again.”

Virginia did not like the expression on Sergeov’s face. He looked at her as if she were pitiably, even criminally naive.

“You think so? But no, my dear young Percell. Is only the beginning! They are already at war with us!”

His unshaven face drew closer. “And who can blame them? When Homo sapiens awakens to what is happening, more and more repression will come against us—the Successor Race. Nothing less than future generations are at stake here!”

“Oh, come on, Otis. Virginia laughed dryly, trying to lighten the tone. “It’s not like we few Percells are the next step in evol—”

“No, you listen, girl!” Sergeov’s eyes narrowed. “This is the main reason for ail such paranoia, such persecution! Is hard to blame Neanderthals for trying to protect their obsolete form, after all. Species protect selves.”

He grinned severely. “But that does not mean we must let bastards squash us, either. Is up to us to act first, or perish!”

Even though they were clearly alone, Virginia quickly looked about. She did not want to be around if this seditious talk was overheard. With no wasted motion she used a judo grip-break to yank her arm away hard, sending the man spinning back. Sergeov bumped his head on the unpadded wall.

“Ow!” he protested in hurt surprise. “Yayatamiy! Govenka! What you do that for?”

“You Uber extremists don’t have the answer,” she breathed. “You only give Percells a bad name by talking like that. We aren’t Nietzsche’s supermen. We’re misunderstood human beings. That’s all!”

Sergeov grimaced, rubbing his head. “Ask the regular human beings, the Orthos, if they think us brothers,” he grumped.

Pushing the walls with her hands, Virginia backed away like a fish from a shark, even though Sergeov showed no inclination to follow her. Once down the hall a few feet, she spun about and kicked off down the dimly lit corridor toward her sanctuary.

Everything in Virginia ’s private work capsule was neat, crisp efficient. The screens and opalescent holo displays that surrounded her webcouch all operated perfectly. Far from home and everything she had known—even hurtling out of the solar system at thirty kilometers per second—this was the center of her universe. She made certain everything was in good working order.

Officially, her role was to provide special support to Computations Section. But she had actually inveigled her way aboard this mission in hopes of getting some of her own research done. In the kind of scientific environment that was developing on Earth, the sorts of things she was interested in were frowned on.

Bio-organic computers… machines that might really think…These were areas that had been diagnosed as improbable, even dangerous, by increasingly conservative twenty-first-century science. Even in her native Hawaii, her superiors had grown more and more uncomfortable with the attention her work was drawing from the outside world.

But I know bio-organics can eventually outperform silicon and gallium! And machines can do better than moron mechanical water drawing and wood hewing. Stochastic processors can be made to think.

Over to the right, tucked under a desktop was the squat box containing her own, special simulation unit; the Kelmar organo computer had used up nearly all of her small personal-effects allowance, but it was worth it.

Panel lights rippled as the hatch hissed shut behind her and she slipped onto the web-couch. Virginia belted herself in and spoke softly.

“Hello, JonVon.”

The main holo screen glittered.

HELLO, VIRGINIA.

WILL IT BE WORK OR PLAY TODAY?

She smiled. No doubt in the eighty years ahead much progress would be made. It had to happen—even in a growing tide of scientific conservatism.

But right now her charge was the best there was—unconventional, using technology all but banned back home, but supreme in her own estimation.

She had named the unit after John Von Neumann, inventor of the theory of games. The program/mainframe could mimic a human’s response patterns well enough to pass a third-stage Turing test… fooling an unsuspecting person in a five-minute casual vidphone conversation into thinking the face and voice on the other end of the line were those of a real person, not a computer.

JonVon could even tell a dirty joke, leering just enough and chuckling at the right time.

Unprecedented, yes. But stunts like that weren’t true “machine intelligence”—not the way Virginia felt should be possible.

The molecular hardware in that five-liter box should be good enough to model the complex standing wave in a human brain. She was sure of it. They didn’t agree back home, of course, and so it had never really been given a chance.

For the next few weeks she would have little time to engage in her private experiments. She had to use all her equipment, including JonVon, to supplement the ship’s mainframe Nearly all her energy was devoted to preparing those mathematical models Captain Cruz’s spacers kept demanding.

Later, though, during her years on watch, there would be time. Time for work and undiluted thought.

Back in the twentieth century, they knew how to have daring dreams, she thought. They did not believe in limits. It was one reason she liked old-time flat-screen movies… and enjoyed simulating old-time film stars and long-ago poets.

Those people nearly wrecked the world with their greed, but they did believe in ambition. They wouldn’t have rested until they had machines that could think.

She glanced at the timepiece etched indelibly under her left thumbnail. “How about twenty minutes of diversion, Johnny?” Virginia lifted a cable from the console and bared a whitish bump at the back of her head. When the connection clicked home, the symbols on the screen were accompanied by a rich voice inside her head.

POETRY, VIRGINIA?

She answered quickly with an impulsive thread of verse:

The line to her acoustic nerve hummed:

MIXED STYLES, VIRGINIA?

DOES THE SECOND PART APPLY TO LOVE?

She blushed. “Oh hush, silly. Come on now. Let’s take a look at your conversation subroutines.”

CARL

The dusty ice sheets were speckled and splashed, rainbow-mottled, packed and scoured.

Carl Osborn spun his workpod and vectored down toward Halley Core. He flew away from the razor-sharp dawnline, aiming for the north pole where their base was finally taking shape.

The grainy gray and brown surface was changing rapidly now. Like tiny, fat ants, mechs moved over it, preparing docking areas and mooring towers. Spiders hammered holes into the ice, their endless microwave zzzzzzttts leaking faintly into some of the data channels. Carl muttered a quick correcting command to his suit’s comm filter control and the interference stopped.

Shaft 3 was nearly finished, a yawning pit like a dead eye socket. The first group of sleep slots would be going down that way soon. A kilometer of sheltering ice would shield the sleepers from the fatal sting of cosmic rays and the sleeting solar storms.

Random gouges surrounded the shaft. Discharging mech fuel cells had pitted the crusty ice. Broken gear lay where teams had dropped it. Chem spills had condensed into powdery green and yellow splotches. Discarded girders and sonic cartridges and shockjackets lay everywhere. What mankind would study Carl thought wryly, he first messes up.

Just barely visible over the curved horizon, now slowly coming into view along the dawnline, were the black gas-suppression panels. They were an ongoing experiment, armored against the high velocity dust streams and designed to generate electricity from sunlight. Their shadows reduced the outgassing from one-eighth of Halley Core’s surface, introducing an asymmetry in the boiloff. The panels could be turned so that they trapped heat, too, increasing the outgassing on the night side of the core. The net effect was a faint, persistent push that could alter the comet’s orbit, given time.

Or so the story went. To Carl the big black panels had been one solid week of grunt labor. They were too delicate to let the mechs do more than hold them in place, while he and Lani Nguyen and Jeffers had mounted them to the robo-arms that would turn them. The astroengineers were still tinkering with the gimmicks piling up data to analyze during the long outbound voyage.

It was hard to tell what was an intentional experiment and what was yesterday’s garbage. He wondered how messy Halley Core could get. In nearly eighty years they might thoroughly trash even this much ice.

Carl could see a thin black stripe coming out of shadow at the dawnline—the polar cable. It wrapped around Halley Core, pole to pole, and joined the equatorial cable at a perfect right angle, but separated by several meters for safety. The rails provided swift ways to zip around the surface. Still, Carl seldom used them. He liked to get free of the bleak ice, swim in serene blackness above it all.

Between him and the slowly spinning, potato-shaped iceworld were the swarming mechs he supervised. He thumbed instructions into his lap console, muttering code phrases automatically, making the distant dots turn their burden—a huge orange cylinder. Its smooth sheen reflected glinting sunlight.

—Channel D to Osborn. Real pretty, uh?—Jeffers sent from below.

“Well …”

Awful color, he thought. And it’s the inner-corridor lining. We’ll have to look at it for seventy years.

The mechs dropped lower, angling the cylinder for Shaft 3, following his instructions. The potato-like shape of Halley Core revolved every fifty-two hours, just fast enough to make readjustment necessary as they approached. Subliming gas still rose from some of the active patches the scientists called “Sekanina-Larson” regions, making visibility hazy and creating a hazard of high-velocity dust. The thin fog blurred images at this distance—8.3 kilometers, his board said-and made it hard to use his automatic aligning program.

He had backup on the Edmund, in case of a malf. Fine, in theory. But by the time he got somebody online, the mechs might dutifully try to stuff the cylinder into a hill of ice. Despite Virginia ’s earnest faith, computers could do only so much. From there on you had to eyeball it.

“Bringing it in slow,” he sent.

—Looks vectored up just a hair. Two clicks too high along the local y-axis,— Jeffers replied.

Carl looked down, recalibrated, saw that Jeffers was right. “Damn.”

—You okay?—

“Yeah. Just keep those beacons going.”

The four laser aligners bracketed Shaft 3 clearly, and Carl turned the mechs into configuration using the bright markers. A touch of delta V, a compensating torque. His board approved the shift. Good. But now the irregular ice was looming fast, and—

Gravity. He’d forgotten the damn gravity. Halley Core had only a ten-thousandth of Earth’s pull…but in his half-hour decent from the solar-sail freighter the momentum had built…slow but steady…He punched in a correction, watching the equations ripple across his board.

Lights flashed red. “I’m braking;” he sent, and fired the mechs’ retros.

Damn the gravity anyway. Carl had been at Encke, worked around the rocky comet nucleus for weeks. It had been just like any deep space work—sometimes almost an elaborate waltz, smooth and sure, and a lot of grunt and sweat at crucial moments. Still, it was basically easy if you watched that your vectors matched, didn’t push anything except at its center of mass, worked steadily, kept your head.

But Encke was a runt. An old prune of a comet, broiled by its long stay in the inner solar system. Halley had a lot more mass, mostly ice. On the surface you never noticed the slight tug, but coming in like this, taking your time to aim carefully, that ten-thousandth of a G could add up.

The mechs’ blue jets fanned against the backdrop of ice, slowing the cargo. Carl saw suddenly that it wasn’t enough. The ponderous, hundred-meter-long cylinder was coming in too fast.

He ordered the lower portwise mech to turn and thrust at full bore. The unit spun, fired its reserve.

—What the hell you— Jeffers began.

“Clear the shaft!”

— What—

“Clear it!”

Standard procedure was to bring cargo to rest about fifty meters out, then nudge it in. His board said that was impossible. Instinct told him to try for something else.

He jetted forward, nearly caught up with the cylinder. A touch from the lower starboard mech, two quick torques here, a jolt sidewise to line her up—

An arrow from on high, aimed at a puckered black circle.

The orange cylinder struck the lip of Shaft 3, slowed—broke off an edge of ice—and drove on in, scattering flakes off into space.

Bull’s-eye, he rejoiced as the cylinder disappeared within the hole.

Jeffers cried out, —Hey! What’s the idea?—

“She got away from me.”

—Hell she did! You’re showin’ off, is all.—

Carl pulsed his own jets and landed easily, feet down. “Don’t I wish! Nope, I just corrected at the last minute. Figured it was better to try for a clean hit than to burn fuel decelerating. Especially since I couldn’t stop it anyway.”

Jeffers shook his head, exasperated. —Show-off,—he insisted, and went to check for rips in the material.

There weren’t any. Slick and snag proof, fiberthread could wriggle around sharp edges, which made it good for lining the snaking tunnels inside Halley Core.

The fifteen members of the Life Support Installation Group had ten days to honeycomb a fraction of the north polar region, line the shafts and tunnels with pressure-tight insulation, then flush it with air. Not long enough. And all that time the newly awakened scientists aboard the Edmund would be chafing.

Even with 112 mechs it was going to be a tight schedule. There were only so many hands to guide them. The entire expedition had only 67 “live” members at present. Nearly 300 more lay in the sleep slots, their body temperatures hovering within a degree above freezing.

Overhead, the spindly tugs waited with their human cargo. Their immense, gossamer solar sails were furled now, not needed for seventy years. Beside the whalelike Edmund, the silvery Sekanina, Delsemme, and Whipple looked like patient barracuda.

Still no word on the Newburn, Carl thought. How could it have gotten lost?

—You guys all right?— Lani Nguyen’s light, tinkling voice came from somewhere.

Carl looked around and found the speck rapidly growing as she sped along the polar cable. She had one arm clamped on the stay-carry while she waved with the other, looking remarkably like a bird skimming the ground with only one wing flapping.

—Jess fine,— Jeffers sent.

—I thought I heard some trouble…—

She cut free of the cable and vectored their way, adroitly turning to shift her center of mass and avoid picking up any spin from the jet thrust. She’s good, Carl thought. Damn good. Lani’s light delicacy belied a firmly muscled physique. But why come to check on a minor malf?

“Nothing much to it,” he answered.

—Well, I was finished, just on my way inside.— She landed with catlike agility ten meters away, kicking up only a small cloud of dust. —Want to take a break?—

—Can’t,— Jeffers said. —We got to check out the tube, see it gets unsprung right.—

Lani looked at Carl. —That’s routine. It shouldn’t take two.—

Carl said, “Cruz is riding our ass on safety.”

She studied him through their dust-marred helmets. —Sure? you’re due to go off shift.—

—Hey, I’m not working alone, li’l lady,— Jeffers said good-naturedly but firmly.

She shrugged. —Okay. Just wanted a little R and R. I’m running a fraction ahead of schedule.—

—See you tonight, then.— Jeffers eyed her appreciatively but she seemed not to notice.

—Right,— she said to Carl. —Tonight.—

She lifted off gracefully and headed for the main shaft.

—Wouldn’t mind that at all,— Jeffers said dreamily on a closed comm channel. Carl ignored him.

—We’ll have to be thinkin’ about pairin’ off pretty soon now.—

“You’ll be an icicle in a month.”

—Man has to plan ahead.—

“Think you can get her to share a shift with you?” Carl answered.

—Might. Gonna be cold and lonely, later on.—

Carl laughed. “Your idea of foreplay is six beers and a game of pool. She’s not your type.”

—Necessity makes funny bedfellows, isn’t that what Shakespeare said?—

“Stick to grunt work, it’s your strong suit.” He gave Jeffers a friendly shove toward the shaft entrance.

—Can’t blame a man for tryin’.—

“Come on, your tongue is hanging out.”

They flew their mechs ahead of them, down through the hollow center of the orange cylinder, popping free restrainer clips as they went. The fiberthread tube unflexed, articulating in sheets along the original axis. Every two minutes it extruded from itself a hundred-meter segment, automatically pressure-sealed the ends, and began pushing out another—each barely narrower than the one before. To Carl, it resembled a gaudy tube-worm that continuously regenerated itself, burrowing into an apple.

Side tunnels took more care. The mechs cut holes for the intersections, fuse-sealed them, and deployed the smaller tube extruders. Carl and Jeffers had to maneuver them into place, yoke and unyoke, check joints and seals, and be sure nothing snagged on an outcropping of rock or jagged ice. In the tunnels chunks of icy cometary agglomerate rubbed off—the mechs were sometimes clumsy—and floated freely through the dark spaces, striking multicolored halos around the spot torches the men carried. It was steady, meticulous, tiring work, even in near-zero gravity.

Their meal break was in a tunnel segment recently filled with air. They cracked their helmets and moored on a wall, enjoying the freedom even though the cold, tangy-flavored air cut sharply in their nostrils.

“Think you’ll ever get used to it?” Jeffers asked, munching methodically on a self-warming ration bar. “Living in here?”

Carl shrugged. “Sure. The exercise wheel and electrical stimulation will take care of the low G, the docs say.”

“Trust ’em for eighty years?” Jeffers’s lean face seemed fitted for a skeptical expression; his mouth drooped down toward a pointed chin, eyes narrowed and quizzical. “Anyway, what I meant was the ice all around you. Feel how cold it is? And that’s with all this insulation and our suit heaters goin’ full bore.”

“It’ll warm up. That’s a meter’s insulation we just laid around this, remember.”

“Gonna be a looong winter.” Jeffers grinned. He would soon be swimming blissfully in the slots, and clearly relished the thought. Jeffers had been awake on the flight out. It had been boring, and now the work was hard and dangerous. He was ready for others to take over. The first watch.

Still, Carl couldn’t understand the man’s attitude.

“There’s some risk in the slots, y’know. System malf, or—”

“I know, I know. My biochem might screw up in some way the experts missed out on. Or maybe you guys on watch throw a wrong switch, cut off my power, and the safeguards fail. Or an asteroid hits us all. He grinned again. “Still. it’s a one-way trip across more’n a couple decades.”

Carl frowned. “So?”

“I’d just as soon sleep through the dull part, accumulatin’ Earthside pay.” Jeffers’s thin face twisted into a sardonic grin. “Comet farmin’ in the outer system—that’ll be fun. But I can skip the kiss-ass politics.”

“What do you mean?”

“C’mon, you’re a Percell too. You know how this whole expedition’s been set up.”

“Uh …how?”

“The Orthos! They’re running everything.” Jeffers ticked off the names on his fingers. “Cruz, then Oakes, Matsudo, d’Amaria, Ould-Harrad. Quiverian. Every section head is an Ortho.”

“So?”

“They think we’re freaks!”

“Oh, come on.”

“They do! Look at the way the Orthos are treating our people Earthside. Think these here are any different?”

“They aren’t like that mob that burned down the center in Chile last week, if that’s what you mean. Sure, I read about that stuff, and the other places. That’s one reason I work in space, same as you.”

“Space’s no different.”

“Sure it is. These Ortho—these people know they’re really the same as us.”

Jeffers said triumphantly, “But they aren’t.”

Carl smiled humorlessly. “Now who’s being prejudiced?”

“Hell, you know we’re not the same as them.” Jeffers leaned forward, speaking earnestly. “Our bodies are better, that’s for sure. And we’re smarter, too. The tests show that.”

“Hell they do.”

“Can’t argue with statistics!”

Carl grunted with irritation. “Look, we were boy wonders back when we were growing up—before people started turning against us. All Percells were. Remember the scholarships? The special attention?”

“We earned that. We were smart.”

Carl shook his head. “We turned out smart—because of the VIP treatment.”

“Naw. I’ve always been quicker than your typical Ortho, even if I don’t bother to talk real well.”

“And you are. But you’re no better than people like Captain Cruz or Dr. Oakes.” Carl got to his feet too rapidly and his velcro grips tore free of the fiberthread. He shot across the tunnel and banged his head against the ceiling.

“Damn!”

Jeffers snickered but said nothing. Carl rubbed his head as he drifted back, but refused to let his irritation show any further. Jeffers was like too many Percells—wrapped up in their own sense of persecution, picking at every imagined slight like a festering sore. Arguing with them just encouraged it.

“Open your eyes:” his friend persisted. “Who’ve they got in the dangerous jobs like ours? Percells!”

“Because a lot of us are trained for zero G. We had the scholarships to get into it.”

“Then why not put a Percell in charge of all Manual Operations?”

“Well…we’re not old enough yet. No Percell is as experienced as Cruz or Ould-Harrad or—”

“Come on! Look at who’s doing the outgassing experiments. And developing long term sleep slotting. All Orthos.”

“So?”

“That’s where the real money’ll be! Learn how to steer comets with their own boiloff, show you can sleep and work in decade shifts—and you can sell your talent anywhere in the system.”

Carl couldn’t help laughing. Jeffers sure did take the long view. “Come on, that’s—”

“And what about Chem Section? If we turn up anything half as valuable as Enkon here, you know who’ll make out. And they’re all Orthos, too, except Peters.”

“We all signed patent agreements. Any techniques discovered, we all get a cut, after recouping basic expenses.”

Jeffers’s face contorted into a sour, sardonic mask. “The Orthos’ll find a way around that.”

Carl felt his own conviction wavering. What if he’s right? But then he blotted out the thought. “Look, get off that line. We can’t continue those stupid Earthside fights out here.”

“We’re not—it’s them.”

Exasperated, Carl stuffed the remains of his lunch into his carry pouch. “Let’s go—I’d rather work than argue.”

Still, that evening he entered the rec-lounge bar troubled, looking for Virginia. She was a reasonable Percell and might understand what he only slowly admitted to himself this afternoon—that he halfway agreed with some of Jeffers’s accusations. It was the man’s tone, his black-and-white way of putting everything, that got Carl’s back up.

He collected a drink, turned to go, and saw the sign DUCK OR GROUSE just in time to remind him. He stooped and entered the lounge. The first week aboard, he and other Percells had slammed their foreheads into the doorjamb a dozen times; the Edmund’s designers had apparently believed only Orthos socialized.

Lani Nguyen intercepted him near the smiling tungsten bust of Edmond Halley himself. “Ah, at last you appear.”

She gave an immediate impression of slim, efficient design, every inch a spacer. Lean muscles bunched in her bare almond-colored arms, but otherwise she was covered in a draping, cool blue dress that moved in light pseudo-gravity with a graceful, modest independence. Carl liked the effect of shimmering cloth lagging behind her precise, delicate movements.

“Uh, yeah, we had some trouble with the tunnel articulation.” He smiled cordially but tried to scan the lounge without seeming to do so.

Dr. Akio Matsudo was talking earnestly to Lieutenant Colonel Ould-Harrad, the head of Manual Ops. Through the viewport Halley Core glimmered and swam as the G-wheel turned. Captain Cruz stood ramrod-straight against the starry background, easily dominating the room, surrounded by the usual mesmerized pack of ladies.

Where was Virginia ?

“Oh?” Lani asked with a distant smile, similar to the Buddha-grin of the sculpture over her shoulder. “That should be automatic.”

Carl blinked. “Uh… we ran into a patch of boulders.”

“I usually send a forward mech ahead to slice those off with a cutter. Then—”

Jeffers appeared out of nowhere and Carl snagged him. “Better tell this guy, he’s the point man in our team. I’ll just run a little errand…” And he was away, free, before Lani’s pert surprise could turn to protest. Let Jeffers have an opening, Carl thought. He deserves it. A bit unfair to Lani, maybe, but first things first. Let’s see, her shift should be up by stow…

He passed the group surrounding Captain Cruz and on impulse slowed. He insinuated himself into the cluster. Cruz always spoke to the whole group, never leaving anyone out, and he smiled at Carl. “How’s it going down there, Osborn?”

Carl was startled at being addressed personally. He had in tended simply to listen in. “Uh, pretty tough, sir, but we can handle it.”

“I saw that neat trick at Shaft Three.” Cruz raised his eyebrows slightly and his gaze swept over the circle. Although an Ortho—a natural human being—he was as tall as most Percells.

Carl felt his face getting hot. He had to say something, but what? “Well, I guess I kinda—”

“Marvelous! A bull’s-eye! I felt like applauding.” The commander chuckled.

Carl was dumbfounded. “Well… I…”

“It’s good to see a little audacity,” Cruz said warmly.

Carl grinned self-consciously. Does he know it was a mistake? “Well, we got a schedule to keep.”

“So we do. I only wish other sub-sections were moving as crisply as yours.”

Carl wondered if that was a veiled joke. But Cruz raised his bulb of bourbon in salute and, to Carl’s surprise, the crowd did, too. Carl covered his confusion by taking a sip, watching the crowd for signs of mirth. No, they meant it. He felt a sudden delight. He had bobbled the maneuver, sure, but recovered well. That was what mattered to the captain.

Cruz caught Carl’s eye and there passed between them the barest moment of understanding. He knows I screwed up. But he’s rewarding initiative over timidity. Why? Carl had tried to perform well all during the Edmund’s flight out, but until this moment Cruz had never paid him more than polite, distant attention.

That’s It—-Kato and Umolanda. He doesn’t want people getting spooked. He knows it was faulty equipment and plain bad luck that killed them, much more than carelessness.

“We’ll make our deadlines, sir,” Carl said firmly.

Cruz nodded. “Good.” With practiced smoothness, the captain turned his attention to a woman communications officer standing nearby. “The new microwave antennas are up on schedule, aren’t they? Having trouble getting signals through the plasma tail?” Cruz asked.

“A little, yes.”

“How soon can we deploy a microwave radar to search for the Newburn?”

“I’ll have an estimate for you by tomorrow, sir.”

Carl listened to the friendly, open way Cruz drew information out of the woman, commented on it, made a little joke that set the crowd to laughing. Now that’s how to lead, Carl thought. He’s in touch with everything, and never looks worried. I wonder if I’ll ever earn the knack.

He would have liked to stay longer, but he wanted to find Virginia He discovered her in a laughing group of varicolored Hawaiians, her dress a blue shimmer that suggested without revealing The semiautonomous state of Hawaii had financed twenty percent of the expedition’s cost. As the true capital of the pan-Pacific economic community, they invested heavily in space. Their representatives lent a cheery air to most ship functions.

He waited for a lull in conversation, caught Virginia ’s eye, and drew her away to an alcove. He quickly described Jeffers’s complaints. “Do you think he might be right?” he asked.

“You mean, will the Orthos try to rake off whatever they can?” She smiled speculatively. “Sure. This isn’t a charity operation.”

“I didn’t come just to make money.” Carl drew back, folding his arms. He knew it would probably be smarter to appear urbane, even a shade cynical-at least that’s what he thought attracted Earthside women. But somehow his real self always came out.

“Offended?” Virginia smiled, her full lips drawing back to reveal startlingly brilliant teeth. “Don’t be so straitlaced. Even idealists have to eat.”

“Did you sign any quiet little agreements Earthside?”

Virginia frowned. “Of course not. Look, there’re always going to be rumors that so-and-so has a sweet extra deal to leak expertise. Who knows, maybe somebody’ll tightbeam stuff back before we return, have a bundle waiting for him in a Swedish account.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me. With four hundred people taking turns standing watch over seventy years, there’ll be plenty of chances to cheat.”

Virginia moodily stirred her bulb goblet of pina colada with a pink straw. To Carl the festive colors of the lounge seemed out of place when cold steel and vacuum lay only meters away. The psychologists probably thought tropical splashes of amber, green, and gold would take people away from raw reality, but for him it didn’t work.

Virginia said slowly, “There’s an old saying: Ordinary men choose their friends, but a genius chooses his enemies.”

Carl grimaced. “Meaning?”

“The Orthos run this expedition, granted. If we create friction, they can do a whole lot more to make it hot for us.”

He thought for a moment. “Okay. Conceded. That doesn’t change my aims, though.”

Virginia nodded. “Ah yes. Plateau Three.”

Carl knew she thought his opinions were too simplistic, too much a rubber stamp of the NearEarth colonies’ doctrine. Still, he honestly didn’t see how she could disagree.

A century of struggle had finally given mankind the technology to exploit the solar system—efficient transport, mech’d mining and assembly, integrated artificial biospheres of any size needed.

Now was the moment, the colonists argued, to move out.

Unmanned satellites had been the first level of space exploitation—Plateau One. As far back as the 1980s people had made billions with communications satellites. Saved lives with weather sats.

Automated space factories using lunar materials had been the next rung up—Plateau Two.

Each Plateau had been climbed by a few who saw the benefits well in advance and took huge risks for that vision. Plateau Two had nearly failed, then became a roaring economic miracle-helping to pull the world out of the Hell Century.

Each ascent seemed to provoke an Earth-centered apprehension—first, that the investment might go bust, then that the birthplace of mankind was being relegated to a mere backwater. This was aggravated by Earth’s never-ending social problems—malaises that the space colonies, by design, did not share. The Birth and Childhood Rules, which commanded that each spaceborn child must spend at least its first five years on the ground, were a legal expression of an underlying fear.

PlateauThree was a dream, a political issue, an economic sore point, a faith—all rolled into one. But big rotating colonies were possible now. The colonists now looked on the Birth and Childhood Rules as symbols of apronstrings they had long out-grown. They wanted to exploit the rocky asteroids and moons, but needed volatiles as well, for propellants and for biospheres. They’d even funded a small Ganymede ice mine, but that hadn’t worked out well.

Some saw comets as the key, and fervently believed that humans could scatter through the solar system like dandelion seeds, if they could only learn to herd the ancient snowballs to orbits where they were usable.

Virginia leaned back languidly in her web-chair. “You can’t expect Mother Earth to let go so easily.”

“They have everything to gain! We’ll bring them asteroids galore, raw materials, provide new markets—”

She held up her palm. “Please, I know the litany.” An amused expression of feigned longsuffering patience flitted across her face, instantly disarming him. Perhaps It wasn’t t intended that way, but with a single gesture she could make him see himself as gawky, thick-wilted, too obvious. Well, maybe I am. I’ve lived in space over half my adult life.

“Just ’cause it’s familiar doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

“Carl, do you really think mining comets for volatiles is going to ring in the millennium?”

“Where else can we get cheap fluids?” To him this was the trump card, a cold economic fact. At the very beginning of the solar system, the hot young sun had blown most of the light elements outward, away from the inner solar system. Only Earth had retained enough volatile elements to clothe its rocky mantle with a thin skin of air and water. When humans ventured into space to exploit the resources there,—asteroids, the moon, Mars-they had to haul their liquids up from Earth.

“Sure,” Virginia said. “Get ice from comets! In eighty years we’ll be back, Hail the conquering heroes! But by then somebody may’ve discovered frozen lakes deep in our own moon. Or even found a cheap way to chip iceteroids out of the Jovian moons—who knows?”

Carl was startled. “That’s crazy! No way you can pay the expense of dipping into Jupiter’s grav well, just for water and ice. Jupiter Project is proving that.”

She smiled impishly. “So? Chasing comets is easier?”

Her dark eyes teased, and Carl knew it, but he couldn’t let go.

“It’s worth a try, Virginia. Nobody’ll find a way to steer comets unless we make the outgassing method work. Nobody’ll find volatiles hiding on the moon or Venus because they’ve been baked out. You can’t prospect and mine the asteroids with mechs alone—because finding metals is still a craft, not a science. Dried-up comets like Encke can’t be herded precisely because there’s no way to use their outgassing to steer them. So—”

“I surrender, I surrender!” She held both hands high.

Carl blinked. Oh hell, he thought. Why do I always get carried away?

A deep male voice said from over Carl’s shoulder, “Do not rush into defeat, Virginia. Ask for reinforcements first.”

Carl turned as Saul Lintz settled into a soft green web-chair nearby and put his drink into a hold notch on their table. He was lean and weathered, his movements in low gravity deliberate.

“You’re too late,” Carl said, searching for something witty to say to redeem himself. “She’s already conceded that I’m a bore.”

“Then my help is unneeded.” Saul chuckled as he said this, but Carl felt a quick jolt of irritation.

“I was arguing that we’re all going to get rich out of this expedition, if we’re patient,” Carl said evenly. “And we should leave politics behind us.”

Saul nodded, took a long pull at his drink. “Admirable sentiments.”

“We’ve got to. Halley Core is too small for the kind of petty—”

“Insert coin for Lecture Twelve,” Virginia said lightly.

“Well, it’s true.” Carl did not know how to take her, didn’t like the way her attention had swerved to Saul Lintz the moment he joined them. She had turned halfway in her chair, nearly facing Saul, and barely glanced back as Carl finished. “And any hints that some people are going to profit more than the rest of us—well it’ll cause troubl.”

Saul lifted an inquiring eyebrow. He seemed to know how to comment on what you’d said with a minimal gesture or shrug, an economy of expression Carl envied.

‘He refers to scuttlebutt below decks,” Virginia explained. “The fact that, ah, non-Percells hold all the important slots.”

“Non-Percells such as myself?”

“Now that you mention it,” Carl said.

“Seniority. After all, none of you genetically preselected people are over forty.”

“You sure that’s all?” Carl leaned forward, hands knitted together, elbows on knees.

The older man frowned, sensing something in Carl’s voice. “What else do you think it could be?”

“How about Earthside not wanting any of us where we could make trouble?”

Saul carefully put his drink down and sat back. “Exiles are ill powered to cause Pharaoh grief,” he said as if to himself.

The remark seemed irritatingly opaque to Carl. “Why don’t you just answer my question?”

“Was that a question? It sounded like an accusation.”

Carl’s voice had been more harsh than he had planned, but he’d be damned if he’d back down now. “Look at Life Support Installation, my group. Our section head is Suleiman Ould-Harrad, an…”

“Ortho?” Saul supplied quietly.

“Well, that’s the slang, yeah.”

“So he is. Genetically orthodox.” Saul leaned back, making a steeple of his fingers “Meaning an untampered zygotic mix from the sea of human genes-no more. Genes do not carry opinions.”

Carl shook his head. He disliked the pedantic manner the scientists always adopted, as if all that jargon made them better, smarter, wiser. “Look—the outgassing work, the slot studies—all in the hands of… you people.”

“So you surmise that they will clutch these fruits to themselves? To sell their skills upon our return?”

Virginia said mildly, “It’s not an impossible scenario, Saul.”

Saul looked surprised to hear this coming from her. “I’m afraid for me it is. The direct implication that there is some conspiracy of the normal contingent—”

“See?” Carl pounced. “He calls his people `normal’—so we’re not.”

Saul said stiffly, “I did not mean it that way.”

“That’s the way it came out.”

Virginia said, “Carl, you can’t jump on every—”

“I’m not. I’m just looking to see if where there’s smoke there’s fire.” He felt warm, gulped his drink.

Saul paused, running his tongue meditatively over his lower lip. “Let me begin afresh. Carl, if you knew anything about me, you would understand that I am not hostile to you people. Precisely the opposite, in fact.” He looked steadily at Carl. “I suppose you would find out sooner or later anyway… I worked for years with Simon Percell.”

Carl was stunned. Virginia gasped and said, “You did? I’d heard rumors, but… I didn’t believe them.”

“Merely as a postdoc.” Saul shrugged. “Our last project together studied deviations in the activation level of lupus erythematosus. You may remember that was one of the principal diseases Percell freed you people from. That awful, untreatable thing that attacked skin, connective tissue, spleen, kidneys.”

Virginia nodded. “My mother died from it.”

“Yes,” Saul said. “And your grandmother as well.”

Virginia ’s lips pursed in surprise. Saul shrugged. “I remember your case. Simon carried out the necessary alterations of your mother’s DNA while I was first learning the techniques.”

Virginia leaned forward. “Did you…”

“Do the actual work? I cannot remember, honestly. I performed as assistant for marry gene-tailoring methods, some experimental, some fairly straightforward.”

“Then you… could be…”

Saul blinked, sitting back in his chair, avoiding her rapt gaze. “It was a purely mechanical task by that time. Very little research to it, other than my part. I did studies of how the resulting… cells… responded to chemical incursions which, for normal lupus, would cause a spontaneous rise in the disease.”

Virginia said slowly, “And mine… did not?”

“Obviously, you were one of our successes. You have no trace of lupus, I trust?”

She shook her head. “Because of you.”

“No; Simon Percell. I merely went to him to learn his techniques. It was during those few years when he enjoyed full support, when all things were possible. Or so we thought.”

Carl said, “Still… I didn’t know you’d worked with Percell.” He felt chagrined. Saul had probably been present when Carl’s mother’s genes were delicately trimmed, freed of the microscopic molecular constellation that carried heritable leukemia. Then the gene wizards had added expert snippets of DNA to give him the suite of physical improvements that now marked every Percell. To Carl, that small, brave band of genetic engineers was legendary. He had never met one before.

Saul crossed his legs, smoothed his pants leg, visibly uncomfortable. Carl realized that the man must have been through similar meetings often, and was wary of the pent-up emotion that might burst forth from any Percell.

“I… I’m sorry about what I said,” Carl murmured.

Saul nodded silently. He, too, was holding feelings behind a tight-lipped dam.

Virginia ’s eyes brimmed. “You… could be…

Carl saw that she wanted to say You are my father, too but could find no way to state the complex blend of emotions she felt. Saul had helped give life to thousands who would have been blighted, killed, maimed. Those years could not be forgotten—except by the braying, suspicious, hate-filled majority Earthside.

That kind had killed Percell, as surely as if they had pressed the muzzle of the.32 revolver to his temple. Simon Percell himself had pulled the trigger, driven into a depression over what was now obviously an unavoidable mistake.

One gene-editing error in a treatment to eliminate an inheritable kidney disease had killed an entire year’s program of children.

Worse, they had not died until the age of three. Then it struck suddenly.

The sight of so many writhing in agony, yellow-skinned and gnarled, their kidney and liver functions stopped abruptly—it had been torture. Media bigots flashed the images around the globe. Coupled with the growing public chorus against him, the threats of prosecution, and the sudden cuts in his research support, it had been too much for a man who held himself to the very highest standards.

Carl shook himself. It was still so easy to touch off the memories. His own mother dying miserably. The years of waiting to see if he, too, would begin to show the signs. The final liberation when he knew it was all right, that he could go into space with a clean genetic record. Those memories cut deeply in him still.

“I… Look, let me buy you another drink,” Carl said lamely.

“Why, sure,” Saul said with a wobbly smile.

“Maybe a chess game later?”

“Certainly!” Saul said heartily. “This time, no quarter I’m defending the honor of normal people.” The Saul paused, quickly turned aside, and sneezed. Both Carl and Virginia jumped slightly. Then they all laughed, the tension relieved.

“Well now,” Saul said expansively as he put away his handkerchief “that’s one Percell modification I will take credit for. Tailoring in a suppression of the histamic response. Doesn’t do me any good, but you people don’t suffer as I do from pesky colds. I’ll be envying you every time Akio Matsudo releases one of his damn challenge viruses!”

But years afterward, Carl would well remember that convulsive, startling eruption, the first—but certainly not the last—time he had heard Saul’s explosive sneeze.

SAUL

Saul finished reading the printout and looked up at the man who had thrust it upon him.

“For this you waste paper in a printout, Joao? You could have fast-faxed it to my console just as easily.”

Joao Quiverian was a slender, sallow-faced man with an untamable shock of black hair and a Roman, almost hawklike ornament of a nose. The man was not distracted by Saul’s banter. He insisted on an answer.

“You’d just ignore a fast-fax. I want to know right away what you think of this vote, Saul.”

“Where does my opinion matter?” Saul shrugged. “I’m disappointed the Diaspora only abstained. A worldwide federation of refugee peoples ought to take a stand on something like this. But they’re trying so hard to win acceptance that it’s really no surprise.” He handed back the sheet. “Other than that, I’d say the world is acting true to form.”

The answer obviously did not satisfy Joao, who had been made chief planetologist only three weeks ago when a freak accident killed Professor Lehman. Saul knew this had to be a frustrating time for the Brazilian, anyway. Here he was, only a few score kilometers from a truly great comet, and orders were that science would have to give way to engineering for weeks to come.

Quiverian had to rely on part-time help from Saul and a few other “amateur cometologists” who had been trained in the field as a second specialty. No doubt he looked forward to the awakening of some of the sleepers from the slot tugs and discussing cometary arcana with fully accredited peers.

Saul generally got along with the man, as long as they were discussing the primordial matter of the ancient solar system. This time, however, Quiverian was in a political mood.

“Come now, Saul. This news from Earth is important, a milestone! I had expected more out of you. An indignant protest. Perhaps a declaration that Percells are actually human beings.”

Saul was here in the planetology lab to help analyze the delicate ice cores the spacers were bringing back from Halley—the “second hat” he had been assigned because of his laboratory skills. He had not come to be goaded by Quiverian. He looped his left foot under the chair stanchion. “Come on, Joao, you wanted me to examine some organic inclusions for you. Let’s look at the sample.”

He held out his hand for the slender, sealed, eight-foot tube the Brazilian had laid on the table behind him.

But Quiverian was insistent “Nobody’s saying that these poor mutants are unhuman. Only that they were a horrible mistake. You cannot blame the people of Earth-with the nations of the Arc of the Sun in the vanguard-for calling for controls.

“I see.” Saul nodded. “Controls like banning Percells from the Olympics. What’s next, Joao? Segregated restrooms? Special drinking fountains? Ghettoes?”

Quiverian smiled. “Oh, Saul. It wasn’t just those athletic records a few Percells had broken—freakish performances that raised the ire of millions. Those were only the last straw. Your creations—”

“Not my creations.” Saul shook his head insistently.

Quiverian held up a hand. “Very well, Simon Percell’s creatures—his monsters—these people are living reminders of the arrogance of twentieth-century northern science, which nearly destroyed the world!”

Saul sighed. “Come on, Joao. You can’t blame science and the Old North for everything. True, they used up more than their share of resources, but you talk as if the nations of the Arc were completely guiltless for the Hell Century. After all, who cut down the tropical forests in spite of all the warnings? Who raised the carbon dioxide levels—”

Quiverian interrupted him, red-faced: “You think I am unaware of that, Saul? Look at my homeland, Brazil. Only now, after massive struggle, are we beginning to recover from an environmental holocaust which wiped out a third of the Earth’s species… all sacrificed at the altar of thoughtless greed.”

“Very well, then the guilt is distributed—’

“Yes, certainly. But technology itself was partly at fault! We simply barged ahead with the best of intentions”—Quiverian arched his eyebrows sardonically—”doing good to the detriment of Nature herself!”

Obviously, the man believed this, passionately. Saul found it ironic. Back before the turn of the century, the nations of the Old North had preached environmentalism to an unheeding Third World —after already reaping most of the planet’s accessible wealth. Now, the pendulum had swung. The equatorial peoples in the Arc of the Sun seemed obsessed with a mystic passion for nature that would have astonished their land-hungry grandparents.

Why must conversions always come so late? Why do people apologize to corpses?

He was spared having to reply as a thickly accented voice rose from beyond a table stacked high with core samples.

“Hey! Did I miss something? Eh? Exactly what crimes was do-gooder science responsible for? I’ll tell you which! Maybe our Brazilian friend refers to foreign doctors who came in to reduce infant mortality in countries such as his. Boom! Overpopulation. To your modern Arcist, that must have been the worst horror of them all!

Quiverian’s face colored. “Malenkov, you fat Russian hypocrite! Come out here and argue face to face like a man. You don’t have to hide; I am no Ukrainian sniper!”

“Thank the saints for that much, at least.” Nicholas Malenkov rounded the table holding a clipboard, smiling, a hulking giant of a man who moved with the grace of a wrestler, even in the awkward Coriolis tides of the gravity wheel.

Rescued, Saulthought gratefully and seized the chance to change the subject. “Nicholas, I hear Cruz and the engineers have preliminary results from the gas-panel experiments. Were you there?”

The stocky Slav grinned. “They wanted at least one of us iceball lovers around when they tried it out. You, Joao, and Otis were busy. So I sat in.”

Along with Saul and the legless spacer, Otis Sergeov, Dr. Malenkov wore a second hat as a cometologist… much to Joao Quiverian’s frequent protests of dismay. The big Russian spread his hands. “My friends, the results are encouraging. With only a few of the panels in place we have already altered the orbit of Comet Halley! The effect is small, but we’ve proved that controlling the comet’s outgassing can let us make orbital changes!”

Saul nodded. “Of course, the method only works near perihelion, close to the sun.”

“True. This run of tests showed only a small, diminishing effect. Soon surface sublimation will cease altogether. The panel project will shut down for seventy years. But next time,” Malenkov “when we are diving once more inward, toward the Hot…”

The Hot. It was the first time Saul had heard the sun referred to that way…

“… then this work will prove its usefulness. With the big Nudge rockets having their maximum effect at aphelion, and the evaporation-control panels working at perihelion, we will have the means to herd this ancient iceball into almost any orbit we want!”

Quiverian frowned darkly and shook his head. “Suppose all of this meddling works. Exactly what, Doctor, would you want to do with… with a herded comet?”

Oh, no. Saul saw where the conversation was heading.

“Who cares!” Malenkov said enthusiastically. “Ideas have bounced around for more than a century, about what people might do with comets.”

“Crackpot ideas, you mean.”

Malenkov shrugged. “Our present plan is to arrange a loop past Jupiter in seventy years, and use big planet’s gravity to snare Halley into much more accessible orbit. Eventually, this iceball can supply cheap volatiles and help the NearEarth people create their Third Plateau in space.”

Quiverian shook his head. “Propaganda. I have heard it a thousand times.”

Malenkov went on unperturbed. “The possibilities are endless. When we have proven long-duration sleep slots, comets may make great space liners—to cruise the solar system in safety.”

Saul saw that a small audience had begun to gather at the open door to the lab, attracted from nearby offices. Malenkov noticed them and waxed even more enthusiastic.

“We might find more useful chemicals, maybe, like those Joao and Captain Cruz found on Encke. Why, there may even be some merit in that wild idea to use comets to terraform Venus or Mars! Eventually they might be made suitable for colonization.”

“Hah!” Quiverian snorted.

“Gentlemen,” Saul cut in. “I suggest we—”

But Quiverian ignored him, shaking a slender, plastic-coated sample tube at Malenkov. “This is the attitude I cannot bear. The original idea was to study comets, the most pristine of all God’s handiworks. But now knowledge for its own sake doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Now you not only want to harvest this comet, but recklessly alter entire worlds before we even understand them!”

Malenkov blinked in surprise at Quiverian’s anger. Saul knew that Nicholas had few political opinions. He was one of the most brilliant people Saul had ever met, but the man never seemed to learn that to some people a disagreement was not a chess game, not a sport for gentlemen. In this respect, he was a most unRussian Russian.

Saul tried once more to stop this. “Joao! Nick was only talking about possibilities. In thirty years Earth will have had time to decide…”

But the angry Brazilian wasn’t listening anymore. Quiverian’s left hand clenched the core tube and his right formed a fist. “We have just emerged from the most terrible century in human history… the worst for our world since the holocaust of the Pleistocene… and now idiots want to send giant iceballs hurtling down onto planets?”

“I never said—”

Quiverian stepped menacingly toward Malenkov. “Tell me, Doctor. How long before the target is not Mars, or Venus, but Earth?”

His arms chopped for emphasis, unwise in the weak pseudo-gravity. Quiverian flailed for balance and the long tube smashed onto the tabletop, splitting with a loud report. Dark brown ice, laced with black and white veins, spilled out onto the lab bench.

“Idiot! Goyishe kopf!” Saul caught the Brazilian before his head struck the big core microscope. He swiveled quickly and pointed at the people standing by the door.

“All of you, out! Shut that hatch and trigger the air seal. Nick, Joao, go get masks!”

Saul pushed Quiverian off toward the emergency cupboard. Moving quickly he grabbed up a plastic recycling container and dumped its wad of crumpled printouts onto the floor. By the time Malenkov returned, fastening a small mask over his face and holding out another, Saul was sweeping slivers of swiftly melting ice into the tub.

The Russian’s voice was muffled. “Your mask, Saul! Put it on.”

Saul shook his head and kept working. He had complete faith in his little bloodstream symbionts—in their ability to keep him safe from cyanide and other cometary poisons. They had better, or the colony wouldn’t last long inside Halley. Right now he was more concerned about preventing contamination of the other samples than danger to himself.

The spilled slivers seemed to give off a faintly pleasant aroma…reminding him of the almond groves of Lake Kinneret, in the Galilee at springtime.

“My core!” Quiverian cried out as he returned, fumbling with his face mask. “What are you doing, you meddlesome Jew`’ That was the deepest core we had taken!”

Saul swept up the last slivers, threw the sponge into the tub, and sealed its lid. There were more than a trillion tons of ice out there under Halley, ready to be studied. This loss was no scientific tragedy.

“Oh, but that’s not true, Joao,” Malenkov said reassuringly. The stocky. Russian sifted through the self-cooling tubes on the counter. “Why, only an hour ago my countryman, Otis Sergeov, returned with a new core, taken from a kilometer within Halley! Let me see if I can find it here.”

“Sergeov!” Quiverian cursed. “That fanatical Percell mutant? Oh, fates! There were so many fine planetologists who might have come along! Why, oh why have I been saddled such assistants—a huge Russian fool, a legless Percell, and a genetic w itch doctor!”

Malenkov shrugged and answered amiably, as if it were the most reasonable question in the world, “I guess you’re stuck with us because those other guys didn’t come along, Joao.”

Saul closed his eyes, and put his hands over them.

“Yaah!” Quiverian threw himself at the door, ignoring the yellow air-alert light, and burst out through the crowd outside.

“What is eating him?” Malenkov asked Saul after the door hissed shut again. He frowned. “Saul? What’s the matter? Are you in pain?”

Saul uncovered his eyes at last. They were filled with tears.

“Saul? My friend, I…”

Saul slapped the console next to him and laughed out loud, unable to contain it any longer.

“Joao is right,” he said, wiping his eyes. “Comet Halley definitely deserves better than this. But it’s stuck with us.”

Saul wasn’t surprised, a while later, when an officer came around to investigate the spillage incident. But he did blink when Lieutenant Colonel Suleiman Ould-Harrad entered, a clipboard in one hand and a trace-gas detector in the other. The dark-skinned Mauritanian was the last man Saul expected.

Ould-Harrad’s specialty was large, massive life-support systems, the kind they were installing on Halley right now. But he must have been the only one available at the moment to investigate the accident.

Everyone knew why Ould-Harrad was on this mission. The young officer had had friends in the Temple Mount Conspiracy, and only ties with the Mid-African royal family had won him exile instead of imprisonment for the crime of unwise associations.

The Mauritanian had spoken no more than ten words to Saul over the last three years. The regard had been returned.

Earth is far behind you, Saul reminded himself. And nothing can change the past. He stepped aside. “Come in, Colonel. I’ve already dictated an accident report. Go ahead and look around while I fast-fax a copy for you.”

Ould-Harrad seemed ill at ease as he followed Saul into the lab, his broad nostrils flaring at the faint aroma of escaped cometary gases. His eyes kept flicking to the gauges of the instrument. His dour expression seemed little cheered by Saul’s obvious good health.

“Dr. Lintz, you should not have remained here after the leakage alert was thrown.”

Saul tapped the face of a sense-screen display. “Yes, yes. I know. But somebody had to stay and clean up the mess. Anyway, I might as well be the first guinea pig. It’s appropriate, that I should give the blood cyanutes their first field test, no?”

The console spat out a small data pellet. Saul marked it with his namechop. He smiled up at Ould-Harrad. “If I drop dead, we all might as well climb into sleep slots and wait a few centuries to be picked up, ’cause this expedition is over.”

The spacer officer nodded curtly, accepting the logic. “There are rules, nevertheless. Procedures designed for collective safety and order.”

Saul tossed the data pellet to the other man and laughed somewhat bitterly.

“Safety and order, yes. How well I remember those words. Didn’t General Lynchon use that very phrase when his U.N. troops moved into the Judean hills?”

Ould-Harrad shook his head. “It was a consensus operation, Dr. Lintz. The coalition government of Israel-Inshallah invited them in.”

Saul nodded. “After the Levites and Salawites assassinated enough opposing legislators to get a majority.”

The African’s voice was low, as if he dreaded this topic but was drawn to it like a moth toward a flame. “The world was tired of centuries of strife in a region that had never known peace.”

“And is it better now.” The High Priest in Jerusalem reigns over a balkanized realm, with sect sniping at sect as never before.

“And did it help the planet? From the Nile to the Euphrates, Israel-Inshallah had planted more trees than existed before in all of Africa north of the equator. Last I heard, a third of the forests were gone—chopped down to make barricades.”

Ould-Harrad’s skin deepened darker than its already rich shade. Saul thought about pulling back. He has already been punished.

Yes, but enough?

“Dr. Lintz, I…”

“Yes?”

Ould-Harrad shook his head. “I had nothing to do with the attempt to blow up the Great Temple. It’s true, I had friends in the Conspiracy—and in penance for that association I am on this I’ll-stared cruise—but I never wanted to bring harm to the holiest shrine of three faiths. I assure you, I would rather have torn out my…”

“Oh, you poor bastard,” Saul interrupted, half-pitying the fellow and laughing to crush his own painful memories. “For ten years you’ve heard but not listened, been punished but never understood. When, oh when will people like you ever come to understand that real Jews never wanted that blasted temple built in the first place?”

Ould-Harrad’s gas sensor hung from one hand, forgotten. He stared. “A few kibbutzim, some secular humanists fought it, I know. But—”

“But nothing!” Saul leaned forward. “The vast majority of Jews, in Israel and abroad, voted against it, argued against it, fought it every step of the way. It was compelled on us, by murderous fanatics and by an ignorant world all too eager for peace.”

Saul almost spat the word. “Peace! It wasn’t enough to destroy my nation and my family, Colonel Ould-Harrad. They installed priests that actually had the effrontery to tell me how to be a Jew! Even Hitler did not try to do that!”

In the faint, centrifugal tug of the gravity wheel, Ould-Harrad seemed to lose the strength to stand. He sagged into a web-chair.

“But the leader of the New Sanhedrin is of your Cohen priestly clan! And the Lead Temple Attendant is a Levite… The Pope’s Legate, the other Christians and Muslims, must take second place to the oldest faith’s precedence!”

Ould-Harrad shook his head. “My comrades objected to that humiliation—and to the removal of the beautiful mosque that stood where the temple was to go—but I don’t understand what the Jews had to complain of. Was not two millennia of prophecy being fulfilled at last?”

Saul did not answer immediately. He looked across the room, where the picture wall depicted the onion domes of old Kiev. Sunset flared brilliant tints across the steppes beyond the city walls. New gilt crosses once again topped the tower peaks, signifying Great Russia’s return to its mystical past.

Ten years, he thought. And still it seems impossible to make anyone understand.

Perhaps he owed it to the man, out of charity, to try. But how could one explain that Judaism had changed over two thousand years of exile, since the Romans burned the Temple of the Maccabees to the ground, slew the priests and scattered the people to the winds?

The remnants had wandered to strange climes, adopted alien ideas. Gradually, Hebrew farmers who pioneered the Polish and Russian plains were crowded by later peoples into cramped cities to become an urban folk. The priestly family lines—the Cohens and Levites—lost their influence. For how could they perform their rituals with no central site from which to make sacrifices to appease a terrible godhead?

Spiritual leadership fell upon the rabbi—the teacher—a role one did not inherit, but earned through learning and wisdom.

A role described in detail by Jesus, if the truth be told. Only he, too, had those who prophesied in his name. He, too, was followed by priests.

After a hundred years of strife and accomplishment, the alliance led by Israel had finally begun fraying during Saul’s youth. The Hell Century took its toll even in the belt that folk called “The Green Land.” Prophets appeared on street corners, and cults proliferated.

Islam, too, had suffered a hundred schisms, and Christianity was battered, divided.

Then someone had a bright idea… an obvious solution. And, like so many obvious solutions, it was disastrously wrong.

The Diaspora changed us, Saul thought. In exile, we became individualists, a people of books, and not of sacrifices on golden altars. We mourned the Temple. But wasn’t its burning a sign that it was time to know God in other ways?

How would Ould-Harrad ever understand that no modern Jew wanted anybody to intercede for him? Everyone had to come to his car her own understanding with God.

Ould-Harrad looked down at his hands. “When the conspirators blew up the Al Aqsa Mosque in protest, it was intended that the Levites take the blame, not the kibbutzim. The plan… they never wanted a bloodbath…”

He seemed unable to continue. Saul realized that the man was haunted by guilt and also, perhaps, by a dread that he might not ever even understand the role he had played.

Saul blinked away a memory of smoke over the Judean hills. He shook his head, knowing that there was no way he could help this man.

“I’m sorry,” he began softly. Then he cleared his throat. “Is that all, Colonel? If you’re finished, I have some important experiments under way.”

The black spacer looked up and nodded curtly. “I will report the situation under control.”

Saul had already turned back to his microscope when he heard the door hiss behind him. He tried to return to the business that had been interrupted, first by Joao Quiverian’s persistent questioning, and then by the dolorous Ould-Harrad, but his hands seemed locked over the controls.

“Room environment, dim lights by half,” he commanded aloud and the laboratory darkened in response.

Work, he knew, was a way to take himself away from the memories. “Sample AR 71B dash 78 S, on screen twelve,” he said to the ever listening, semi sentient lab computer. “Let’s see if those inclusions look as suspicious now as I thought they did before Joao stank up the place.”

The last part was not for the computer. And although he hunched over the holistank to immerse himself in mysteries, Saul found that he did not really mind at all the faint scent of ice and almonds in the air.

VIRGINIA

She tapped tentatively. Then, when no muffled answer came, a harder rap. This brought forth a faint, querulous grunt. When the panel finally hissed open, Virginia stepped through and stood barely inside, feeling the door suck shut behind her.

She said diffidently, “You had sample breakage?”

It seemed a good opening. The danger—if any—was well past before she had heard. Saul had already left the planetology department, where the sample broke, and come down here to his own bio lab. But the ripple of concern among the crew had made her at last muster the courage to seize a pretext.

“Ummm?” Saul was studying his screens, making tiny notes in a small ledger with an old-fashioned pencil. She wondered at this eccentricity; the expedition used standard electronic markers and memory pads. He must have brought a packet of notebooks in his own small, personal weight allotment. She had heard of bringing vintage cabernet and caviar, but not pencils, for heaven’s sake.

And look at me, she thought ruefully. I used up most of my mass-carry lugging along computer hardware everybody Earthside has given up as hopeless, a dead end.

She said nothing. Better to let him work a few moments, float up from the deeps. She walked among the tangle: twisted translucencies, shining chem lines, retorts, knots of cabling, a gurgle and rush of microbio diagnostics. I’m glad I’m not a chemist. Chilled electrons are simpler to move around.

“A few more minutes, Virginia. I’ll be right with you.”

Saul did not even look up as he jotted, thumbed his scanner, frowned. She strolled down one long lane, trying to read the indices on counters and follow the compact, involuted logic of the lab. Here Saul could dismantle genes like Tinkertoys, shuffle molecules like floppy cards. It always struck her as bizarre, how such innocent looking tubes and solutions could reach out, pluck human lives into new paths, seal off others. As if this sleeping machinery hid a monstrous, weighty force.

We keep doing that. Humans imbued their own devices with a separate presence and power, ceaselessly projecting their emotions onto inanimate templates. Illogical—and the worst sinners in this were the supposedly objective, dispassionate scientists.

Look how I shape my software to resemble my thought processes, she mused. Imprinting myself in JonVon’s chilled organic lattices.

Making tier way here this afternoon. she had been struck by how the expedition was like this—separate rooms, immensely powerful ideas sealed off from each other, all contributing yet each isolated. Men and women pocketed into cylinders and cubes and spheres. They moved through the silent, cramped geometry of the Edmund, eager to go down and burrow their own niches in another hollowed world.

She wondered if the crew would communicate any better once they were down in Halley Core. Many of them had been working during the entire year-long cruise out, but she had been sleep slotted for ten months. Before launch, funding problems had cut the staging schedule for the expedition down to the bone; there hadn’t been time to know or even meet most of the crew.

She had studied the siting plans for Halley Core. It looked fine as a schematic, a diagram, an Earthside blueprint—but soon now they would each live in a Euclidean maze, encased. The faint grumbling of the G-wheel only underlined their impacted artificiality. She felt deeply these insides and outsides, sections and barriers.

So to counter that, she had come here. Plucked up her courage, finally. Reached out.

She fidgeted down one lab lane, up another. Each moment was a partition, dividing a troubled past from a gaping, empty future—both huge stretches of time pressing in on the thin wedge of a nervous rickety now.

Stop this aimless inspection. Face what you came here for.

But it was hard to jump the hurdle, and brave the sheer blind drop beyond.

“Saul.”

He swam up from fuzzy depths. “Uh, what, yes?” He blinked lines etching around his withdrawn eyes. “Sorry…”

“What… what are you finding?”

Even as she said it she winced. That’s right—dodge away. Ask him about his work, for chrissakes.

“Something damned odd.” Saul shook his head, as if he half suspected an error. His pencil rolled along the grainy, stained calluses of his hand.

“What?”

“Contaminants, I think. Earth junk in the samples. That damned Quiverian…” He stopped, his gaze caught by something on the screen. “Just a sec, maybe this…”

Virginia watched on the magnifier as he guided microprobes to divide and extract tiny samples from several oblong, mottled masses. How he could tell one brown blur from another was a mystery. At his level, experiment became an art, unfathomable. Micromanipulators translated his minute movements into surgical grace, his touch tracing out the mad jumble of ancient crystals, the snakelike clench and coil of slippery, gaudy hydrocarbons. Deft fingers and a probing mind. Mozart and Picasso had been equally incomprehensible.

He worked steadily in silence, sucked back into his murky mysteries. Okay, take it easy, she thought. Don’t press. Not that you’ve been all that brave, eh? Anyway, males are slow when they have to switch hemispheres.

She relaxed and watched his “weather wall.” Each crewman’s contract gave him the right to choreograph his environment. Saul had chosen well. A metallic-blue river wandered down to an emerald marsh beneath a swarm of flapping white birds that skimmed the shimmering surface. The images were firm, precise n glistening leaped up where a bird dipped a wing into the water and slewed to a landing. Beyond, scattered stubs of islands dotted a pale summer day. New England, probably Massachusetts.

Yes, she had read that he had been at Harvard once. And summer, of course. Choose a time that brought a comfortable warmth, something to ward off the chill of ancient ice soon to surround them. It was late afternoon on the walls of the lab and the slow slant of sunlight proceeded. A storm front nuzzled at the horizon, winds whipped the velvet shadows that pooled beneath gnarled trees. She felt a reassuring heat from the scene, even though she knew it was her own wools that did the work. Saul wore a cotton two-parter, blue with white stripes, an ample Renaissance collar its only indulgence. She could see he was a man who cared little for clothes, would go naked if temperature and society permitted.

As she watched pensively, he shook his head irritably, gave an umpf and snapped off the screen.

“Done?”

“Yes, with nothing to show for it.” He drummed fingers on the desktop.

“What were you looking for?”

“Some contaminant I thought I saw. It was… no, nothing. Forget it.”

“You’re worried about something.”

He leaned back, let his face relax. “No… well, no more than usual.”

“We’re going to be. on First Watch together,” she ventured. “Plenty of time to work on our own research then.”

He nodded. “I’m looking forward to it. Sixteen months of peace and quiet carving ice and tending corpsicles.”

“Another few weeks, we’ll start slotting people.”

He nodded, distracted. Then he said abruptly, “I’m a poor host. Something from the bar?”

“You have alcohol ration left?”

“In this lab? I can make anything I want. I have my own beer, if you’d care to risk it.”

“Of course.” She felt a need to break through, to reach him. His face was complex, a slate time had written all over, the mouth and eyes at battle with each other. His eyes seemed to peer at something far away—a problem coming slowly into focus, perhaps—unrelenting intellect. His lips betrayed this concentration, though. They twisted into an ironic curve, yet were full and sensuous, with a hint of passion and power. The cool mind that ruled the eyes did not know of this lower, submerged force. The contradiction warred across his face, complex with stubble, pale here and mottled there, a shiny brow with a curve that caught a reflected yellow beam from the New England sunset. He popped caps from two long-necked brown bottles with relish, suddenly seeming like a balding and wiry tradesman.

Virginia bit her lip as they both sat. Now that she had braved the first moments and taken the step she had considered a hundred times, she found she couldn’t take her eyes off him.

“You’re here because of our conversation the other day, aren’t you?” he said. Suddenly his expression was gentler, opening outward from his self-immersion. His eyes met hers.

“Ah, well, yes.” She might as well attribute it to that.

“What was it your mother had?”

“I… Lupus.”

“Ah yes.” A brief pain flickered in his eyes. He leaned back in his webchair, put hands behind his neck, stretched in the light gravity of the wheel. “I remember those years. That one, we got a clean solution. No side effects—as you so clearly demonstrate. Um. You ever see a really bad case?”

“No. I read—”

“Not the same thing. Under the ’scope the cells aren’t tight little cylinders, y’know—they’re misshapen, meshugenuh, tortured things. The patient’s connective tissue clogs. Swollen joints. Repeated infections. Liver damage, early death. There’d been good detectors to warn parents if a baby had it, sure, but nobody cracked the real problem—the genetic fix-up—until we did. Sorry—until Simon Percell did.”

“You can take a lot of credit.”

He laughed. “My career in the last couple of decades, my dear, has depended on my not taking credit.”

“With us Percells… it’s different.”

He smiled wearily. And warily? she wondered. “You are, Virginia, an expression of how different a map is from the territory.”

She frowned.

“Sorry, I’m being opaque. Habit of mine. We charted all the DNA nucleotides long ago. Knew where everything was—a great map. Only we didn’t know what it meant.”

“My genes don’t carry the lupus—you knew how to do that. And the usual Percell enhancements are effective.”

“Obviously.” A grin.

She felt herself blushing at the compliment, rummaged for something to say. “We have all kinds of advantages…”

“True…” He was still pensive, reflecting on times she could not know. Yet, those days would not die, as long as there were Percells. And that legacy lived in every corridor of this expedition.

He sighed “But not true enough. Sure, we got the hemoglobin disorders, Huntington’s disease, all the easy targets. Just lop off a few molecules. Trimming. Pruning. Change the cryptogram and—presto.”

“I read that there are over two million people who owe you that.”

“Been dipping into the forbidden Percell underground newspapers?” he said with mock seriousness. “Yes, that’s right—you’re from Hawaii. Plenty of pro-Percell sentiment there still, eh? Who passed on your security clearance?”

“I’m so good, they had to let me come,” she said with a proud smirk.

“Bravo!” He applauded. “Bravo, indeed. And you are good—I looked in your file, back when Captain Cruz had me on the recruiting committee.”

“Really?” She was suddenly serious. “What… what’s in there? Did they—”

He waved a hand. “Nothing about your subversive ideas. Not a jot.”

Her eyes widened, her mouth formed a shocked O—and then she saw he was kidding. “Ah… oh.”

“They don’t care if you think Percells are just as good as—what’s the slang? yes—as good as Orthos are, you know.” His voice dropped. “Since they’re all so damned sure you’re not.”

She saw suddenly that she had been right—his pose before others was a mask. “They… do think that, don’t they?”

“I’m afraid so. Many of them, anyway.”

“Even though they let some of us go on this expedition.”

“Let…” he began, then shook his head. “They had their reasons.”

“But…

“Virginia, has it never occurred to you that getting bright, hardworking, potentially troublemaking Percells out of their hair might be a very attractive idea?”

“Of course.” She frowned.

“And isn’t some side of you glad to be rid of all that krenk… that Earthside bullshit?”

She had to admit he was right. When the Edmund had lifted free of Earth orbit, she had felt…released. “Well…ins some ways.”

“Such as?” He sat forward, apparently genuinely interested. The slanting burnt orange of the Massachusetts sunset struck his bald patch, yet he did not seem old, only wise and kind and quietly powerful.

“Well… my father, he thought I was special. That our family was unique, a kind of historic experiment.”

“Ah. A common mode.”

“I… I hated it.”

“Feeling special?”

“Being… different.”

“You’re not, really.”

“Tell them.”

“Your parents should’ve shielded you from that.”

“They… Listen. When I was eleven, I was the only girl in my class without nylons. So I went to the local Woolworth’s and bought a pair. I had no idea how to hold them up—I got the old kind, by mistake.”

“Your mother…”

“She died when I was ten.”

“Lupus.”

She nodded.

“So you were a tomboy. Surfing, basking in Hawaiian splendor.”

“Yes. It was beautiful, but… Well, my father raised me. I remember one day when I was playing catch in a T-shirt with the boys, I heard some giggles over my bouncing breasts. This was on Maui, where nobody’s especially reluctant to talk about such things. So I went back to Woolworth’s. The saleslady had to explain about bras—I didn’t even know what the sizes meant! Then, in seventh grade, I started wearing skirts instead of jeans, because the other girls were. A boy looked at my hairy legs and said, ‘I’m gonna get you a razor for Christmas:’ I could have died! The next day, I borrowed my father’s razor and cut my left shin so badly I still have the scar.”

“I see.”

She felt suddenly embarrassed. Somehow, all that had come out without her having planned it. “I wasn’t very good at those things. I used to tell myself it was because my mother died and there was no one to tell me. So I concentrated on math, on computers.”

“And if you hadn’t. you could be a perfectly happy housewife somewhere, children yanking on your apronstrings.”

She smiled impishly, crushing a sudden inner pain by old reflex. “To hell with that.”

“Precisely.”

Besides, I didn’t have that option, she thought. “There’s a quid for every quo.” That’s it—cryptic and ironic. Show him I’m not just a simple schoolgirl who became a computer whiz because of adolescent angst.

But Saul’s face had become pensive, his eyes reflecting some inward turning. “I love you all, you know.”

“You…”

His voice was very low. “All the Percells. You… you’re paying for our…”

“Your what?”

“Our sins.”

“But you’re not!Imean, we’re not! I—You did no wrong! It’s others who—”

He waved a hand, silencing her. “I’m sorry. I… sometimes I remember how it used to be. What we hoped for, worked for. That’s all gone now. That’s a major reason I signed on. To run away from a whole host of failures.”

“But you’re not—”

“No, let’s stop. It’s… those days are impossible to forget, but pointless to remember. Better to let them go.”

“Saul, I—I respect you so—”

But he waved his hands energetically in front of his face, banishing all talk. “Tell you what, I’ll get you a refill and… and…”

Abruptly, he turned aside and sneezed.

“Damn! Can’t get rid of this thing.”

“Take an anti.”

“I have.”

Another cross he’ll have to bear, she thought. Living in a snowball, sniffling all the time.

Percells didn’t have to put up with runny noses. The gene tailors, while they were splicing away anemia and lupus and the other target diseases, had trimmed the complex of coding molecules that had given viruses their free ride, and humanity a million years of colds and flu.

“Well then… let me make some tea.”

He smiled wanly, his steel-blue eyes still distant, thinking of something far back in a past she could not fathom “Yes, fine. My mother…she did that. Then came the chicken soup.” He laughed, but not his eyes.

CARL

He suppressed a guffaw. The crucial step, the insertion of the sleepslot modules into the head of the comet, didn’t seem at all like the climax of a dangerous, five-year voyage by sailship, a prodigious engineering feat, a modern marvel. Instead, it looked to him like the coupling of monstrous genitalia.

The slender slot tug Whipple glided forward, nose down. Stripped of its solar sails and antennae, it was the uniform ruddy color chosen to maximize its thermal balance during the years in flight from Earth orbit. The sleep-slot payload rode forward, its extra shielding against cosmic rays filling a bulging, rounded knob, slightly thicker than the main body.

Below, Shaft 4 gaped. The surrounding ice was freshly exposed from the scratchings and abrasions of mechs—creamy, virgin ice which had not seen the harsh glare of sunlight since the time the planets and comets first formed.

Carl started to chuckle and coughed to cover it. Over the hiss of suitcomm nobody could tell the difference, probably. He blinked, but the pornographic illusion would not go away. I must be a lot more tired out than I thought.

—Needs a li’l of three-degree realign at sixty azimuth,— Jeffers sent.

“Right. Got it,” Carl replied. Jeffers’s data was integrated as he spoke, and then Carl’s helmet screen leaped into activity. A graphics view turned, green lines against black ground, showing how the Whipple looked along all three axes. Then the desired view came, an overlay in orange cocked at an angle along two axes. Carl punched in corrections.

A cluster of higher-ups were watching by TV, he knew, and Ould-Harrad stood on the surface below, cold-eyed and critical. They would certainly send back an edited version in the squirt to Earthside. Plenty of eyes to catch a mistake. Watch Carl Osborn snag ninety-odd souls halfway in, maybe.

Carl shook his head. To hell with that. Just watch the vectors, do the job. Can’t let nerves scramble your synapses, as Virginia would say.

He fired four jets just behind the Whipple’s central engine housing. The pulsed ruby-red against the black. Each cut off in sequence as the orange image on his faceplate merged with the green.

—Cleared.—

—Here goes,— Andy Carroll sent. Andy sat forward in the small bubble cabin of the ship, and had nominal control. Jets flared a pale blue along the aft beams.

The Whipple glided smoothly in, clearing the yellow protective liners with ease.

—On the money!— Andy yelled. —Picking up the guide.—

The sleep-slot knob drove cleanly in, catching in the railings that would keep it from going astray once inside. Over suitcomm Carl heard shouts of celebration and even some handclapping leaking through from an open channel back in the Edmund’s lounge.

The sleep-slot module separated, descended. The sail tugs were as slim and weight-wise as classic nineteenth-century windjammers. Their slender, silvery frames carried sleep slots, supplies, and a robot crew—all in cylindrical modules fitted snugly along a tubular frame, the spine for the great spread wings that cupped the solar wind. Those gossamer sheets were now furled, awaiting humdrum service as mirrors for the surface greenhouses. That left the naked frame, a great beast now stripped by reductionist logic to a skimpy skeleton.

And somewhere out there the Newburn sails on, Carl thought about the missing fourth tug. Lost, a victim of the cold percentages.

—Reversin’ her!— Andy backed his ship out carefully. It would slip down a different path, into its own chamber. Jeffers now commanded the mechs inside to draw the sleep-slot module downward through nearly a kilometer of shaft, into the vault that had been prepared for it.

Carl turned up his bonephone: Beethoven’s Fifth Violin Sonata, the last movement a liquid rush of piano notes. A reward. Lugging big masses around was standard stuff, but it felt different when there were ninety lives at stake. He needed to ease off, relax. The main show was over, but he still had hours of work to go.

The graceful, fluid sway of chamber music seemed to Carl natural for working in zero G. He could never understand Jeffers or Sergeov, who listened to that raucous, heavy-handed Clash Ceramic stuff while they worked. He vectored down beckoning to the distant dot that was Colonel Ould-Harrad.

Carl slowed above Shaft 6 to accompany the African officer, who was space-able but less used to making speed through tunnels. A mistake could cram you into the wall with bone-splintering impact. It took years for Earthsiders’ bodies to really believe that lack of weight didn’t mean absence of inertia.

They shot downward. Fiberthread walls rushed past, illuminated by regular yellow daubs of electrified phosphor paint. Carl watched Ould-Harrad’s swarthy face for signs of some reaction, but the man kept his eyes intently ahead and said nothing. Carl felt a twinge of disappointment. He had lined this shaft himself, without mechs, putting in fourteen-hour days to meet the deadline. And a pretty job, it was. Damn-all if anybody’d say word one about it, though.

Of course, Ould-Harrad was an Ortho, and pretty hard-line about it, according to scuttlebutt. All during the voyage out the man had been distant, formal, his poker face giving away nothing. He clearly expected that young upstarts would remember their place. Not likely he’d be glad handing a menial Percell.

Carl shrugged and turned up the Fifth Sonata. Only after some time did it occur to him that they were, after all, failing face down in a shaft that dwindled away into the distance, the phosphors converging dots… Even in a micro-G, Ould-Harrad’s mental alarm bells were probably ringing.

“Hit the brakes, the vault’s only a few hundred meters ahead,” Carl sent.

—I see. Good-.- was the only reply.

They slowed as the tunnel flared into a roomy chamber, already partly lined with brilliant lime-green insulation. The sleepslot module was already descending from the intersecting Shaft 4, a stubby intrusion. It nearly filled the uninsulated half of the vault. Everywhere the primitive ice gave back glinting reflections of the sweeping lamps of men and mechs. Carl had helped hack out the rough-cut walls, using big industrial lasers. Seams of carbonaceous dirt and rusty conglomerates made curly, mysterious patterns on the broad stretches of black ice, like writing by some unseen biblical hand.

—Ahhh,— escaped from Ould-Harrad as he braked to a stop. Carl noticed that the man looked relieved. Maybe they should have gone slower.

—C’mon,— Jeffers called on open channel. —Got to get these coffins buried.—

Ould-Harrad’s clipped, authoritative voice was unmistakable. —I would appreciate you men not referring to the slots that way.—

—Yessir,—Jeffers said curtly.—You bet.—

Carl sent, “I’ll take the blue-coded mechs,” and locked his board on a dozen flitting forms. The slot-sleep equipment was nearly obscured by robotoids swarming around it, an army of gnats splitting off sections.

Sleepers would be stored in three widely separated vaults, to minimize chances that a single accident might cripple the mission. Technical teams—Computers, Life Sciences, Mechanical Operations—were evenly spread. The boxy slots were laid outward like the arms of a starfish from the central utilities spine. The lifesupport gear was a knobby backpack on each coffin—Carl couldn’t help but think of them that way, both from appearance and because the sleepers were as near to dead as you could get and still come back.

Each slot had to be fitted into hardplast nooks that protected them and yet allowed the interior to exchange heat with the nearby ice. The original idea had been to let the ice cool the sleepers directly, but Carl had seen the results of that at Encke. There was a lot of carbon dioxide or amorphous snow which could vaporize explosively, blowing valves and seals on the coffins. It wasn’t a snap to use volatiles in high vacuum. So the engineers had to rig buffers to save the sleepers from shudders and bumps and sudden, freezing death.

—Pack those Orthos in tight,— Jeffers sent on short-range comm. —Don’t want ’em feelin’ lonely.—

Jeffers was fitting hoses into place nearby, his transmission shielded from the others. Carl triggered a self-closing clamp, finishing off his own job, and kicked clear.

“Give it a rest. There’re are Percells in here. too.”

—Not very damn many.— This came from Sergeov, who drifted into view from behind a silvery heat-exchange sphere. The Russian spacer was quick, deft; as Carl watched, he flipped, caught a cable from a spaghetti tangle, and inserted it into a control cabinet.

The agility almost made you envy him. Almost. The Percell treatment had eliminated the blood disease Sergeov would have inherited from his parents… but it also took away his legs.

Unforeseen side effects.

Carl wondered how many times that cool, analytic phrase had made him bristle, his face flush, his hands knot into fists.

Sergeov had been one of the early, lucky failures—still alive. Such survivors stirred the first misgivings The great unwashed see Sergeov’s lost legs. A dirty little question wormed its way into their minds: What couldn’t you see? What about his mind? Was he normal? Was he even human?

If it was normal to be able to drink a full bottle of vodka and still easily balance the empty glasses on top of each other, five high—yes, Sergeov was normal.

Better than normal. He had gone directly into space, where legs were, in fact, a drawback. All that bulky muscle and bone were useless in freefall, demanding food and oxygen and time to exercise them. Leftovers from the struggle against gravity. Sergeov had lived in orbit from the age of ten, making top wages as an assembler. His arms looked like tree trunks; Carl had seen him juggle a hapless Ortho inspector like a helpless doll, back in Earth orbit. The man had mumbled an insult, and paid with five minutes of humiliation. Yet, Sergeov was not a Plateau Three advocate; he expended his energies in blanket, burning dislike of all Earthsiders.

“Stop yammering,” Carl said. “Come help me with these thermobuffers.”

—Is true, however,— Sergeov said. —All for good reasons, for sure. Percells work good, so they get into space. Deepa! Orthos think we’re garbage, so we stay in space.—

Jeffers put in, —An’ end up chauffeurin’ Orthos out beyond Neptune.—

Sergeov grinned. His hands-noticeably large, even through vac gloves—worked swiftly among the cables, deftly quick, free of the levered counterweight of dangling legs. —Da. Not prefer serving as workboy for Orthos.—

Jeffers said, —Damn right. When we could be doing our own work.—

Carl asked, “Such as?”

Jeffers whirled himself about with one arm, while the other fished free a short-bore laser. He thumbed it. A blue-white bolt lanced into the ice meters away.

—Hey!— Sergeov cried.

White fog exploded past them. It boiled away into the vault, thinning, but Ould-Harrad saw. —Hey! I ordered no quick-solder work in here!—

—Sorry.— Sergeov winked at Jeffers and called, —Was just a small one. Needed to refuse a socket joint.—

—These are people.—

—Am sorry.—

Sergeov grinned as he said it. Ould-Harrad was hundreds of meters away and couldn’t see the design Jeffers had drawn with instant, practiced ease in the ice.

“I didn’t know you were a Mars-boy, Jeff,” Carl sent.

A female flower enclosed by the Mars symbol—a graphic depiction of a dream. Once comets could be steered into the inner solar system, they could be harvested. Even easier, an artful nudge far out beyond Neptune could smack iceballs into the Martian plains.

Hammering Mars with cometary nuclei would build up an atmosphere, perhaps even get the volcanoes spouting again. Nature’s slow sucking would still. The parching march of aeons put to rout—a Promethean dream. Splitting a hard blue sky, flame-cloaked ice mountains would gouge the lands, rip the permafrost, and release more ancient ice below. Clouds, fog, then rain—weather unknown since the sun’s wan warming had boiled away the last mudflats in the spare Martian river valleys, billions of years back, during that false spring.

In a century or so, a suitably adapted human might be able to breathe on the surface. The idea was old, but some Percells had seized on it. They saw Mars as the one plausible location where genetically altered humans might truly have a place. Even though still dry and cold and roiling with strange storms, Mars could become a world where their descendants, genetically engineered still further, would be the norm, while Orthos would cough out their lungs in minutes.

—What do you think I work for?— Jeffers answered.

“That’s crazy,” Carl sent. “Terraforming’ll take centuries. No solution to our problems.”

—A Percell, he can expect to live in space—what? a hundred years? two hundred?— Sergeov’s broad, sweaty face beamed again with his inevitable smile.

Jeffers sent, —Throw in couple slot sleeps, we could all see it.—

“We’re not here to do that,” Carl said.

—Jeffers is just looking ahead,— Sergeov said simply.

“Too damn far ahead.”

—Don’t be so sure,— Jeffers said evenly.

Sergeov nudged Jeffers.—You be an Uber too? Two ideas not contradict, I think.—

Jeffers eyed Sergeov cautiously.—Maybe. Maybe not.—

Carl frowned. This was all going over short-range close comm, and he was glad of it. Ubers stood for ubernrenschen. Nietzsche’s supermen, evolution’s ordained next step. Planned. Designed. There would now be no slow blind stumbling upward, driven by nature red in tooth and claw. Many Percells thought they were the first step along a long, inevitable road.

Carl had known of Sergeov’s opinions, but it shocked him to see Jeffers flirting with them.

Sergeov persisted. —If Orthos say no to Mars terraforming, I say yes. Simple.—

—It’s right there in the physics and chem simulations, clear as anything,—Jeffers added.—Put mechs to harvestin’ comets out past Neptune, it’ll take a century. We could sleep right through it.—

Carl sent, “Sometimes a man can see clearer if he has his mouth shut.” He gestured at Ould-Harrad, who was jetting their way.

—Okay, let’s break off,— Jeffers sent.

—Is true, though. Think it over. First step to much more, maybe,—Sergeov concluded, launching himself away with a muscular shrug.

Ould-Harrad inspected the layout plans for the mechs, then left. Carl took advantage of the chance to get off and work by himself. He had never liked politics. And their wild talk had been disturbing.

He immersed himself in the sweet gliding grace of Beethoven. Moving through inky shadow and glaring yellow floodlight. pushing and towing, smelling the sour suit air, feeling the rrrrrrtttt of the countertorqued wrench vibrate up his arm, the sweaty pinch of his suit at shoulders and knees—Carl thought of California.

His parents had been driving him up the coast when he told them.

The four years at Caltech had gone by in a blur of golden sunlight and nights of study, weekend pranks and unending problem sets, labs and lectures and precious little love. He’d had no time for it. Sergeov was so sure that Percells were special—well, okay, Sergeov probably had to think that, compensating for what he’d never have. But Carl knew differently.

He had done well because he’d worked, dammit, not because he was smarter. At Caltech he had felt a growing kinship with all the men and women who had ever put in long hours in lonely rooms. Unlike soured drudges or inexperienced kids, he did not believe for a moment that creative people idled away their time and then, when the mystical spirit moved them, knocked out brilliant ideas in bouts of furious, fevered bursts of easy inspiration.

Doing anything well demanded endurance, steadiness, relentless drive.

Those he had. Brilliance, no.

So as his parents drove him up the coast he struggled with that inner truth. He had applied to Berkeley for graduate school in astroengineering and, against all his expectations, got in. They offered no scholarship, not even a teaching assistantship. That meant he was marginal. His father loyally mistook this for another symptom of the growing prejudice against Percell-made children.

Carl knew better. Universities are sluggish beasts unmoved by the tides of public bias. The admissions committee undoubtedly had looked at his 3.3 average and seen that it was attained mostly by good grades in labs and design courses. Math and physics had put him on the ropes more than once, groggy with complex variable integration and quantum electronics.

North of Ventura, his stepmother’s happy chatter bubbled over with enthusiasm he had always found a bit much. He had never been able to forget his mother’s slow death, and adjust to this new woman in his father’s life. So he had sat in the backseat and watched the scenery and tried to think. The tawny August hills fell away, revealing the blue denim of the sea. Route 1 slid by as he tried to explain to them his doubts. His stories of distant, intellectual battlegrounds sounded hollow when contrasted with the solid, enduring world outside. Weathered barns, their wood silvery from sun. Rows of eucalyptus, lush hillside orchards, spindly railroad trestles crossing gorges, minifusion generators sculpted into hillsides, cows standing as still :as statues in the inky shade of live oaks. All the unthinking richness of Earth.

Morro Bay was glassy when they stopped there for the night. His stepmother ooohed and aahhhed at a sleek alabaster yacht that swept by, out beyond the bay’s protecting spit of sand. Pretty, yes. But Carl liked the moored working boats better—oily, rusted, scaly and cluttered with gear. They had argued over chowder at a wharf restaurant, his father so agitated that he drank the chardonnay quickly and ordered another bottle, red-faced.

The next morning he awoke knowing what he had to do. Driving through the grassy foothills, turning inland to San Luis Obispo between stony low mountains, he said it—suddenly, clearly.

And now, remembering, he saw that it was brutal, too.

His father had shouted, You’re going to give up all this? with a sweep of a hand. Meaning Berkeley, graduate school, where Carl knew he would burrow into the books and never emerge alive.

Oh, maybe he’d get a master’s degree, and a reasonable desk job. With incredible luck, a doctorate.

But he’d have been a perpetual second-rate. And he’d have wasted years.

He remembered his father’s hand chopping the air, the outraged gesture taking in the hills beyond. You’re going to give up all this?—and that all had been, in the end, Earth itself.

Carl remembered it in grainy detail, despite the seven crowded years that had passed since. Years of learning how space really worked—not the geometric certainty of math and physics classes, where every problem had a pure solution in an orderly universe. Not the serene world of that distant, unattainable yacht. He had learned what space really was—grubby, tough, with plenty of problems that had no solutions at all.

It was a natural locus for Percells to gather, skating high above the clumping, festering masses who feared and despised them. Space held beauty, sure, but the places men had carved out for themselves in it were more like the rusty scows moored at Morro Bay, worn and smelly, dented and makeshift, working fine but looking like hell.

Around him, bulky masses glided by, spotlights poked the chilly gloom. Coffins nudged into sockets in the black ice. Beethoven’s violin sang to a rippling piano across the yawning silent centuries. Carl labored on, thinking of his long years spent in space, far from Earth’s green confusions.

SAUL

It was hard to remember that the hall was actually a great crystal chamber, carved out of the heart of an ancient ice mountain. Nowhere could be seen the dark glittering of carbonaceous hydrate, veined with shiny seams of frozen gas. Everywhere pink fiberthread and bright yellow spray-on sealant hid the primordial stuff of Halley Core.

To Saul Lintz it far more resembled some vast cathedral of kitsch.

The Great Hall was the heart of Central Complex—the ant farm of rooms sculpted here deep under Halley’s surface. Tunnels led off in the six cardinal directions, color-coded amber, lime, strawberry, peach, aquamarine…and a broad vertical avenue of orange—Shaft 1—fifteen meters across and rising straight up half a mile to the comet’s cluttered north pole.

Machines had scrubbed the atmosphere and warmed it, leaving only a faint, almondlike odor to greet people as they streamed into the Hall for the dedication.

Now and then, when my head clears, even I can smell it.

Saul blew his nose and quickly put his handkerchief away before anyone noticed. That was why he sat perched on an empty packing crate at the back of the chamber instead of closer to the speakers’ platform. He was stoked with antihistamines, but still his nose dripped and he felt perpetually on the verge of sneezing.

Drat Akio and his damn tame viruses.

He looked up at the vaulted ceiling. In the two days he had been underground, supervising the transfer of the bio lab to new, larger quarters, he had not yet gotten used to the strange perspectives here.

Across the chamber, the slot tug Sekanina lay like the frail skeleton of a dissected beast. Its cargo of machinery and supplies and eighty sleeping men and women had been taken elsewhere. At one end dangled the “fishing poles” that had helped control the vessel’s gigantic, gossamer solar-light sails, apparently the only machinery not cannibalized or stored away in great tents on the polar plain.

The hall slowly filled as men and women floated in from all directions. Here, nearly a kilometer into the core, the sensible gravity was so low that anyone dropping through the overhead, orange-colored tunnel took several minutes to fall to the floor.

Experienced spacers did not like long transits. Old hands pushed off at the tunnel mouth to hurtle across the gap in seconds, swiveling at the very last to land with flexed legs.

One young bravo—trying to show off, Saul supposed—had already miscalculated. He was being treated for a broken wrist in the side chamber down Tunnel F, where Akio Matsudo and his doctors had set up the main infirmary.

People arrived in pairs and trios. They gathered in small groups to chat or merely lie back on packing crates, catching a moment’s rest.

Next to the Sekanina, a small cluster congregated, the leaders of the expedition.

Miguel Cruz-Mendoza stood at least a head taller than the others—captain and guiding force behind the decade of preparation leading to this day. The soft-spoken Chilean spacer had distinguished streaks of gray at his temples, which only added to his charismatic poise. It was bruited about, mostly in jest, that he had pushed and lobbied and pressured so hard for this mission in order to take a great leap forward in time… and thereby get away from his accumulated mistresses and women suitors.

The idea wasn’t so preposterous, at that. Saul had never known a man better skilled with the ladies. Some of his enemies credited Cruz’s success to his friendliness with certain women senators.

No matter. The captain was also the sort of leader people would follow. Many had helped prepare for the Halley Mission; however, no one but Miguel Cruz could have made this day a reality.

The captain caught Saul’s eye briefly and grinned. They had come to know each other well during the development of the cyanutes and other environmental symbionts. Saul smiled back and nodded. This was a grand day for his friend.

Cruz turned back as Dr. Bethany Oakes said something to him. His laughter was deep and rich as he shared his second-in-command’s joke.

Saul did not know Oakes as well, but what he had seen of the strong-jawed, brown-haired woman had impressed him. As well as assisting the captain in administering the vast, complex project, Oakes was also head of the Science Division.

Near the leaders stood the section heads—all except Matsudo, who presumably was still treating his patient. Nick Malenkov or Dr. Marguerite van Zoon could have handled the minor emergency just as easily. Even Saul, rusty as his clinical skills were, could certainly have managed a simple splint.

But rank hath its privileges. Akio had been bored, lately. Accidents that weren’t instantly fatal had been rare. With this infernally healthy crew, there wasn’t much for a physician to do except oversee the sleep slots, and occasionally release challenge parasites to keep everyone’s immune systems up to par.

Physician, heal thyself, Saul thought. He had made up a special batch of dexbrompheniramine maleate, a long-obsolete antihistamine but one easy to synthesize, so that he wouldn’t have to prescribe for himself out of the expedition pharmacy and leave an inventory record.

He knew he was being a tad unethical, hiding this from Matsudo. But Saul had no intention of being sleep slotted over yet another blasted head cold. Not at one of the most exciting moments in the history of science.

More than a hundred people gathered on the shallowly curved floor of the chamber. Except for a score or so on watch duty elsewhere, all of Edmund’s crew were present—along with about thirty temporarily awakened slot sleepers, identifiable by their pale complexions and still slightly jerky movements.

A few people sat down out of habit, but most simply rested on their toes, knees bent and arms hanging before them in the almost fetal spacer’s crouch.

Captain Cruz and Dr. Oakes stepped up onto a platform set on the girders of the gutted slot tug. Cruz raised his hands and the low murmuring of conversation died away.

“Well!” The tall astronaut rubbed his hands together. “Anyone for a snowcone?”

The assembled spacers and scientists chuckled. In spite of all the diverse cultures and beliefs represented here, it was clear that nearly everyone liked and admired their commander.

Cruz warmed them up a little more.

“I’d like to thank you all for coming all these millions of miles to attend this meeting. I’ve called you up here from Earth to tell you that, alas, the mission has been canceled. We’re all to pack up and head for home tonight.”

That got them. The hall erupted in laughter and applause. Saul grinned and clapped as well. Cruz was a genius at the subtle art of morale—of drawing the best out of a group.

Of course, there was no way any of them were returning to Earth…not before the appointed seventy-odd years had passed. They were riding Halley out of the planetary system at thirty kilometers per second right now, swooping up and out of the sun’s deep gravity well. That streaking velocity had to ebb and die—and the great comet begin to fall again—before anyone here was, going home.

Caught up in his thoughts, Saul missed the next jest. But the reaction was the same. Laughing together, they seemed a happy crew. Cruz was being deliberately folksy, loosening the crowd while at the same time maintaining his aura of complete, relaxed control.

And yet even now Saul could see the divisions. The really experienced spacers, for instance, were mostly gathered over to the left. The scientific specialists in Oakes’s division tended toward the front. Behind them were spread out technicians and engineers from more than two dozen nations.

There were many small clusterings according to geography or native tongue. And nearly everywhere was the subtle but clear separation between the “Ortho” majority and the tall. handsome young Percells.

Of course there was some mixing, especially among the professional spacers. Saul saw Carl Osborn lean over and whisper something to the Ortho girl, Lani Nguyen. She laughed in a single high chirp and hurriedly covered her mouth, blushing. Lani looked up at Carl with shining eyes, but Carl had turned away again, his attention once more on his captain.

“Why have we come here?” Cruz asked, his fists on his hips, legs apart. Now that he had warmed them, he was gliding into a higher tone. “There are many reasons given. Philosophers speak of pure scientific research, of the great questions of the origin of the solar system which might be solved by understanding the most primordial matter in space.

“Others believe we are at Halley’s Comet because it is there!… Or rather, here.” He grinned. “And why not just go because it is fascinating to do so? This flying iceberg has been swooping down on us Earthlings for thousands of years, enthralling so many of our ancestors…” Cruz lifted an eyebrow, “and scaring the shit out of quite a few of them.”

Again, the delighted hilarity. Saul watched the Hawaiian contingent, eight men and women out of thirty sent by their vigorous, future-hungry land. They had put on bright, floral shirts over their long johns. Evenly split between Percell and Ortho, the group was a flamboyant mixture of types and colors. As they joined in the laughter, one head turned. Virginia Kaninamanu Herbert lifted her eyes and looked back his way. She saw Saul and smiled brilliantly. Saul winked back at her.

“… Search for new chemical compounds, or perhaps to be used in the terraforming of worlds, bringing life to our sister planets which were less bounteously endowed than our beloved Earth.

“Maybe some of you volunteered for all that promised duty pay—mostly for seventy-five years’ sleeping on the job.”

Cheers, this time. Whistling approval.

Cruz spread his hands.

“But there are two special reasons why we have come here, so far from home, on a mission that will separate most of us permanently from all family and acquaintances.

“First, and I’ll be frank with you, many on Earth are looking to this mission—with its many members of genetically altered extraction—as a test of humanity’s ability to rise above superstitions and prejudice. For a hundred years, people of good will have been fighting to wean our species of the most deep-seated tribal reaction for all—that fear of otherness that has caused such hatred and horror since time immemorial…”

Since time immemorial… Saul closed his eyes, remembering Jerusalem.

“…Will achieve a great thing if we prove to those on Earth that so-called Orthos and so-called Percells, living and working together on a long and dangerous mission, can rely on each other simply as fellow human beings, and bring home great discoveries to benefit all mankind.

“The same goes for the many national and ethnic groups represented here. We are emissaries from the twenty-first century into the future. For seventy and more years, people back home will know we are up here, cooperating for the greater good.”

Cruz let the words settle over them. Saul saw that many of those present were looking at their feet, suddenly uncomfortable, as if they were not sure they were worthy of this trust.

“And of course there is also the fun stuff.” Cruz grinned and rubbed his hands together. “We came out here to test a lot of technological toys! Collecting comets into accessible orbits may forever unlock the door to space. The new toehold on prosperity mankind has regained, after the Hell Century, will be secure for all time.

“And if we demonstrate dramatically that sleep slots work well for over seventy years—as all the data indicates they will—we’ll have established that humanity need not be locked into the solar system. The stars, the very stars themselves, will be ours.”

The words hung in the chilly air, above the hum of the air fans.

And Saul saw glowing belief on many faces present. Carl Osborn’s heroic jaw jutted in dedication to his captain’s goal.

Well, maybe it’s partly stubbornness, too, Saul thought sardonically. When Carl played chess, it was with a methodical tenacity that admitted no defeat until the bitter end. But no, Saul thought, looking at the light in the young man’s eyes. He believes in Miguel’s dream. And I guess I do too.

The feeling was obviously shared by a lot of the spacers, both Percell and Ortho. This was the passion of those who longed for Plateau Three… the stepladder to the sky.

Still, there were others. They kept quiet, but one could read the signs. This crew, after all, had not been recruited entirely from the ranks of idealists.

Why did a man or woman volunteer to go into dangerous exile, far from everything familiar? For many, including Saul, the choice had not been altogether voluntary.

He saw Marguerite van Zoon, standing beside Akio Matsudo at the entrance to F Tunnel and the new infirmary. The French Imperium had given her the option of “volunteering” for this mission or seeing her entire family imprisoned for lese-majeste.

Saul had last heard that her husband had gone to Indonesia and slotted himself to await her return. It was some small solace, he supposed.

And then there was Lieutenant Colonel Suleiman Ould-Harrad. Powerful family ties had gotten him into this mission, instead of a Mauritanian dungeon. But the black spacer seemed less than happy to be here. He stood over to the right, with Joao Quiverian and some other folk from the equatorial lands of the Arc of the Living Sun.

Percells and Orthos, Northerns and Arcists, liberals, moderates, and even a few fanatics; Saul was certain it was pretty much the same among those still in slots. Cruz and Oakes were inspirational leaders, and they would get the best out of the colonists, but Saul did not expect this long voyage to be entirely trouble-free.

Nothing ever is, Saul. Exile is not the same as escape.

Captain Cruz continued with a hearty tone.

“And now I have a surprise for all of you. Many of us had high hopes for great scientific advances on this voyage, but I’d wager none of you expected that within weeks of arriving we would already have written a new chapter in the annals of human discovery.’

Saul saw the audience stir. People looked at one another. A wave of shrugs and confused looks showed that the secret had held for the last three days of frantic tests, experiments, and double-checks.

Saul took out his handkerchief and blew as quietly as the nose his parents had given him would allow. He knew it might be his last chance for a while.

Cruz grinned at his audience, milking the suspense for all it was worth. He held up his hands and the crowd quieted again.

“I certainly don’t want to hog the show, or steal anyone’s day in the limelight…”

Oh, no, Saul thought. He had asked Cruz not to do this.

“… So let me just call up the man who has made this epochal discovery, whose name will, within a week, be the toast of the solar system. Come on up here, Saul Lintz, and tell us what you’ve found!”

Sigh.

Saul pushed off from the packing crate as scattered applause rose from various parts of the hall. After the first stumble caused him to drift above the floor for a few seconds, he had to endure being passed from hand to hand by those more experienced in microgravity.

Along the way he saw that much of the applause came from certain groups— Matsudo and Malenkov, who had helped in the analyses, from the Hawaiians up in front, from some of the Percells…

There were some among the African and Latin contingents who looked aside and lowered their arms, unable, like him, to forget Jerusalem.

Someone put her hands under him and pushed hard. He went sailing, without a bit of spin, in a smooth arc that landed him right beside Dr. Bethany Oakes. Good shooting, he thought as the small woman swung him around to face the audience.

“Don’t worry, Saul,” Cruz whispered to him. “You’ll get your space legs yet. Your problem is you’ve spent too much time in that damned wheel.”

Saul shrugged. “Some of us are too old to change, Mike.”

Cruz laughed and gestured that the “floor” was his. Saul gingerly slid a foot forward. He looked out over the assembly.

“Um, I’m sure you’ll all recall…”

“Louder, Saul!” a thickly accented voice called out from the back of the hall. “You don’t have to whisper to prove to us you’re not a loudmouthed Levite!”

Gasps rose from the crowd and several dark faces seemed suddenly to go pale. Saul recognized Malenkov’s shout and wave from the back of the room. The grinning Russian bear had the tact of a tornado, but Saul smiled.

“Sorry. I’ll try to speak up.

“I was about to say that I’m sure you’ll all recall the fantastic array of organic compounds that the expedition to comet Encke found while they were testing out the techniques needed for this mission. Many of those compounds were totally unknown until then, and led to some revolutionary changes in industrial chemistry.

“In fact, one of our lesser goals here is to see if nature has cooked up any more wonderful polymers and agglutinates for us, perhaps as valuable as Enkon and Stannous-Clathride have become.”

Directly below the platform, Joao Quiverian frowned. He had discovered those compounds, on that earlier mission, so in a way he was responsible for some of the motivation to explore and “exploit” comets.

“But one of the most exciting discoveries at Encke was that the core of that aged, nearly dead comet contained an abundance of chemicals best called ‘prebiotic’… accumulations of purities, pyrimidines, phosphates, and amino acids nearly identical to the sort of mixture modern biologists believe made up the primordial `soup’ that led to life on Earth. It was hoped, when we set off on this trip, that by studying a large, younger comet, we might, well, shed some light on the way things were on our homeworld four billion years ago, when we all began.”

Saul cleared his throat, and hoped the raspiness in his voice would be attributed to general hoarseness and excitement. Ten rows back or so, among the colorful Hawaiians, he saw Virginia Herbert smiling up at him. The admiration in her eyes was pleasant, if a bit disconcerting.

Down, boy. Don’t imagine more’n is there. No doubt she looks on you as some sort of surrogate dad.

“Well,” he resumed. “Dr. Malenkov and Dr. Quiverian and I have studied one of the latest cores collected by Dr. Otis Sergeov—”

“Don’t be modest, Saul.” Malenkov interrupted again. “You did it! You get the blame!”

This time, at least, people laughed and applauded. Saul smiled. Thanks, Nicholas. Deep inside he wondered if the Russian wasn’t really right… if blame might someday be the right word. Look at what had happened to Simon Percell, whose name should have gone down alongside Galen’s and Schweitzer’s. Dame Fame was a fickle bitch.

“… Uh, well, with the help of those gentlemen I was able to isolate…”

Oh, come on, Saul, he chided himself What would Miriam think if she had lived to see you now, standing here stammering, when you have a chance to make an announcement like this!

Saul straightened his back, almost losing his footing in the process. He looked out at the audience and borrowed one of Miguel Cruz’s gestures, spreading his hands apart.

“The signs are strong. The specimens are unambiguous. No contamination could explain what we have found. We’ve worked for a week to be certain it is nothing brought from Earth.

“How it got here, nobody can imagine as yet. How it survived or evolved, we haven’t a clue. But what we do know now is that we appear to have stumbled on what mankind has been looking for ever since our first explorers stepped onto another world, nearly a century ago.”

He smiled. Let them make of it what they will…

“For the first time, ladies and gentlemen—for the first time we have found definite signs of life beyond Earth.”