The Heart of the Comet

VIRGINIA

The great, tumbling ice mountain hurtled outward into the void. Behind it, smaller and fainter with every passing watch, the Hot fell away into the eternal blackness.

Briefly, the sun’s blazing furnace had scrubbed and gouged and broiled away at the snowy worldlet—had cracked and charged its temporary atmosphere, sending waving flags of ionized gas flapping in the interplanetary breeze.

But then quick summer passed. The flames were left behind again, still bright, but growing more harmless hour by hour. The savage exuberance of perihelion passage was fast fading from memory.

Autumn was marked by a gentle fall of dust. Tiny bits, carried away from the surface in the waning blow of escaping gas, had never quite reached escape velocity, even from the comet’s feeble pull. Gradually, they drifted back again, laying a dark, talclike patina over the icefields and rocky outcrops. The flickering snake of the plasma tail had already vanished, and now the foreshortened dust tail—so like shimmering angels’ banners not long ago—dissipated as the ancient comet streaked past Mars and on, toward the orbit of Jupiter.

Virginia found it beautiful. The dark regolith was laid bare, here and there, exposing a slumbering icy substrate. Although a thin coma of shimmering ions still hung overhead tenaciously, the vault already showed more stars than the dark, tropical nights back home.

I’ll bet the view is even more spectacular in person, she thought. One day I really must go up to the surface myself.

She could feel the soft webbing holding her to her link-couch, in a cave laboratory deep under millions of tons of primeval matter. But otherwise it was almost as if she were up on the comet’s Surface, in person. The holographic images brought her a nearly perfect sensation of being out on the ice.

She was wearing—teleoperating—a Class III surface mech, moving its spindly, spider legs as she would her own, looking with its swiveling eyes, feeling the faint brush of drifting gas molecules as a wind on her face. Her fingertips moved gently in their waldo grips as she sent a chain of mental commands to the host mech on the ice, making it turn.

The method had first been tried back in the late twentieth century, and had seemed quite promising at the time… until several famous disasters led to near abandonment of direct mind-machine interfaces. It turned out to require a special kind of personality to control a mech in this way, without letting random thoughts and a hundred human reflexes interfere, sometimes catastrophically. This had been discovered the hard way, during those early, naive applications to aircraft and factory equipment. To this day, spacers like Carl Osborn tended to distrust the technique, preferring voice and touch controls.

That was then, though. This is now.

One of the reasons for her presence on this mission was the fact that such extensive use was to be made of mentally controlled robots for the first time in decades.

Vasha Rubenchik is a real genius, Virginia thought as she deftly rode the mech over a small rise. The Russians were idiots to exile him out here, whatever his political opinions. I’ve never felt a mind-to-robot link this good before.

Too bad Vasha was already in the slots, or Virginia would have praised him for deftly tailoring the neuroelectric and holographic connections so well to her specifications. This alone was almost sure to win patent royalties for both of them, when the data were sent back. The boodle would accumulate in their accounts while they slept through most of the seven and a half decades ahead.

Although money wasn’t her top priority, Virginia had seen how useful it could be, especially when one wanted to work in areas frowned upon by the powers that be.

She could hardly wait until things had settled down a bit and there was free time to try some of these new techniques in experiments with JonVon.

As if summoned, a voice hummed along her acoustic nerve.

I AM PREPARED TO ENGAGE IN NEW PROBLEMS WHENEVER YOU WISH, VIRGINIA. THE MISSION MAINFRAME IS USING ONLY 15% OF MY CAPACITY, RIGHT NOW… WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO ASSUME A SIMULATED PERSONALITY?

Oh, great, she thought. All I’d need, while I’m controlling a mech out on the surface, would be to let you construct Olivier, or O’Toole, or some other old movie heartthrob… and. have them come charging around, blowing in my ear.

She had chosen pre-vid actors to use in personality-sim experiments partly out of romantic atavism, and partly because they were less familiar to people these days—better to use in blind Turing tests on unsuspecting subjects. The simulations had fooled almost everybody, on Earth, even though they still were nothing like what she was sure they could be.

OR I COULD BRING FORTH SHELLEY. YOU LIKE HIS POETRY.

Virginia subvocalised clearly, crisply:

Not now, JonVon. Mother is busy. If you haven’t enough to do, helping the colony mainframe, go to some of those secondary problems I assigned you.

VERY WELL. I’LL CONTINUE SNEAKING THROUGH THE COLONY RECORDS AND SNOOPING WHAT PEOPLE BROUGHT ALONG IN THEIR PERSONAL WEIGHT ALLOTMENTS. YOU EXPRESSED CURIOSITY ABOUT THAT.

Virginia hesitated, then agreed. Okay. You do that. Just don’t leave any traces.

Of course it was a bit unethical to use her special tools and skills to snoop into other folks’ private matters. But then, Virginia had always believed people tended to try to keep too much secret.

Anyway, it broadened the number of people to think about. The dozen crew members still warm and moving about were hardly enough for even minimal gossip over the sixteen months of First Watch. In the need to conserve consumables, everyone else had already been put into cold sleep, leaving the first shift to apply finishing touches to the habitats and other facilities.

Well, Ginnie, you volunteered to be on First Watch. You knew it would be one of the busiest.

Yes, but there are opportunities, as well. Later, she thought. Later, after things have settled down, I’ll have my chance. Long, delicious stretches of work time.

Her mech finished its slow scan of the surface as the mouth of Shaft 2 came into view.

Scarred, scratched, and littered, the north polar region looked nothing like a pristine remnant of Creation Crates of supplies lay tethered to the ice or bound up under fibercloth “tents” for later use. Debris lay everywhere.

Farther off stood six high, peaked pyramids of dark tailings from shaft excavations, crudely separated into heaps of primordial nickel-iron, platinum and iridium-rich ores, and carbonaceous gunk… much like Alberta tar sands. At some point later, long after she had returned to the slots, the watch crews would start processing the piles into useful things, like Nudge Driver housings.

To take us home again. Not for the first or last time, she wondered what Earth would be like when they returned. If all their grand schemes would turn out to have mattered. Would she find Hawaii, Earth, recognizable? Friendlier? Or would it be an alien world, altered beyond recognition?

Hmm. Thank heavens she was too busy right now, or she might be tempted to record that bit of doggerel. Still, perhaps something could be done with it.

SHALL I STORE OR ERASE IT, THEN, VIRGINIA?

She started, then subvocalised quickly, JonVon, I thought you’d signed off. Those were private musings.

A brief pause told of vigorous cross-correlation checks.

PRIVATE MUSINGS—REFLECTIONS—FANTASIES…

Enough! And JonVon was instantly quiet.

Irritated, Virginia took hold of her thoughts and concentrated on maneuvering the mech back toward the work site. The spider’s legs swung, one at a time. Surface vibrations translated into sounds so she “heard” the mech’s feet crunch across the dark powder.

During the early work, so much vapor had been churned out here that some of the gases actually condensed again, instead of escaping into space. Sparkling snows had flash-frozen around the heat-and-gas-release ducts leading up from Central. Broad, rainbow-colored flows spilled over the feet of the Shaft 2 portal.

The airlock itself was more than just a drab, functional construct. Far from that, Virginia saw it as a work of art. Structural braces had been press-formed in high, faery arches. The footing anchors looked like gnarled gargoyles’ fists, gripping the ancient stuff of Halley.

Only a few crucial parts were made of precious refined metal, salvaged from the robot freighters. The supports and body of the building were cleverly sculpted from refrozen, crystalline, water ice.

It was one reason why Virginia liked working out on Quadrant 2, where Jim Vidor had been in charge of the construction crew. The man was an artist.

“We build the best when we are forced to improvise,” Virginia said softly to herself.

A carrier wave cut in, followed quickly by a woman’s voice.

—What was that, Virginia ? Did you say something?—

Virginia ’s head turned a little too quickly, causing the mech to slew awkwardly as it struggled to follow. At last a slim, spacesuited figure came into Virginia ’s field of view, standing over a row of dark shapes tethered to the ice.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Lani. I was just admiring what Jim and his guys did in melt-carving this airlock.”

Lani Nguyen’s spacesuit had been trimmed of its heavy armor, now that summer had passed and dust pebbles were no longer being blasted outward by subliming gas. A white cloth tabard covered the suit’s chest area, depicting the head of a smiling unicorn—a symbol that would identify Lani to workers too far away to make out her face. Right now the sharp sun reflected in her opaqued visor, anyway, hiding her soft, half-Asian features.

—Yes, pretty. But not entirely safe, in my opinion. Next shift, Jeffers is supposed to break out the factory gear and start processing some of that iron and carbon stacked out here. I’ll sleep a lot quieter in my slot knowing there’s a real stress-filament hatch up here, capping the air in.—

Virginia sighed softly. “Yes, I suppose so. Still, I hope they leave some of these crystal structures in place. It would be a shame if the only marks we left were scars on every inch of this little world.”

She heard Lani sniff but politely withhold further comment.

Virginia knew that, to a spacer, talk of “preserving nature” was nothing more than Luddism. It was all very well to try to save what was left of poor, depleted Earth, but to apply such ideas to the vast resources out here struck spacers as thickheaded.

Dumb or not, though, a majority of Earthlings felt that way. And Virginia was not sure, quite yet, if she disagreed.

She walked her mech back over to the stacked equipment and helped the Amerasian girl unload a new crate of fibercloth tunnel liner. Carl Osborn was due up here in a little while to work with Lani on a new link from Shaft 2 to Shaft 1. Lani had asked Virginia to come up—in proxy, of course—to help whip a balky autonomous mechanical into shape for the upcoming operation.

This mech is working just fine, Virginia thought. The model’s certainly smart enough to have done Lani’s bidding without my direct control. I wonder what her real reason was for asking me up here.

Together they pushed the crate toward the gaping airlock doors, providing fingertip support for the bulky cargo against Halley Core’s faint tug. It was then that Lani spoke again, in a voice of labored casualness.

—As long as you’re up here, Virginia, I want to thank you for helping arrange to put me on First Watch.—

Virginia started, and nearly dropped her end of the crate as they lowered it to the floor of the airlock.

“Uh, you’re welcome, Lani. I—I don’t really think I made much difference, though.”

That was certainly the truth. Three weeks ago, while a hundred temporarily awakened men and women scrambled about like ants preparing for the long winter, Lani had hinted something to Virginia about influencing shift scheduling. She wanted to remain awake on the first year-and-a-half detail, after nearly everyone else was cooled down.

A number of crew members seemed to share this belief, that Virginia had some sort of a secret back door into the mission mainframe computer aboard the Edmund. Some had made even more blatant requests. She had been politely, noncommittal to them all. People took that sort of answer better than an outright refusal.

To be honest, in all the running around, Virginia had forgotten about Lani’s shy entreaty until now.

They had to push down on the crate to set it against the other equipment, Halley’s pull was so molasses slow.

—I’m really grateful. I just couldn’t go down there to sleep. to pass so much time… with my mind in such a spin. There are things… things I have to work out.—

Although she had half-turned away as she spoke, Lani’s face was now visible under her helmet visor. The young woman could easily have been Hawaiian, with her faintly Eurasian features and healthy, taut skin. Right now, though, Spacer Second Class Nguyen seemed troubled, her mouth working as she sought words to express herself.

Well, it’s only to be expected, Virginia thought. They told us back on Earth that we would all have to take turns being each other’s therapists, ministers, listeners. And then they loaded the expedition down with exiles, cripples, and refugees.

Like me. She sighed. Be honest with yourself, Ginnie, are you any less confused than this poor girl?

She waited, and at last Lani spoke again.

—Virginia, I was wondering. Um, what do you think of the Birth and Childhood Laws?—

Virginia was glad that a mech couldn’t show her sudden surprise.

“Well, uh, they don’t seem all that fair… though I guess there are arguments on both sides. I don’t suppose you like them much, Lani. After all, you’re a…”

—A spacer. Yes. —Lani nodded. —My parents were California Techno-Liberals. They told me stories, ever since I was a little baby, about how mankind’s future was out in space. How someday humanity would move out here and get rich and happy and generous again. Only the dreary stay-at-home types would live on Earth.—

Virginia shifted uncomfortably. The mech responded with the same pelvis cant.

“Your parents were right, Lani. Space is saving humanity. Even reactionaries and Arcists know that. Why do you think Hawaii invested so heavily in this expedition? Those dreams will come true, someday.

“I guess it’s just that the Hell Century is still fresh in everyone’s memory. That’s why so many countries are so suspicious. Space has to serve Earth first, until the recovery is complete. Don’t worry, though. I’m sure you’ll live to see your Third Plateau.”

The mech’s vision system adjusted to the shadows. Through the other woman’s faceplate she saw Lani’s head shake.

—Probably too late for me, though. I’ll have to go live on Earth to have my babies, and no male spacer will give up the Black to stay dirtside with me.—

There it was, laid out like an open wound. Virginia ’s palms felt clammy on her waldo controls. If there was any subject she would prefer not to discuss, this was it.

She said with feigned lightness, “Isn’t that an exaggeration?”

Lani looked up. Her dark eyes were sad.

—Look at the figures, Virginia. All spacers store sperm or ova in banks on Earth. Most breed by proxy… except those who are Percells, and can’t find surrogate parents for their offspring. They’re even worse off than us Orthos.—

Virginia felt a wash of savage irony. At least the girl had something to store away. She had a ticket into the future.

What have I, but my machines? Virginia thought.

“The radiation levels you live in make that necessary, don’t they, Lani?” A truism, of course.

Lani shrugged.

—If they’d let us build real space colonies, instead of just factories and life-support huts in orbit, we spacers could marry and raise families together. As it is, those women spacers who go home and reclaim their plasm have to stay there with their children. Nearly all of us have to marry Earthers, since no man like Car… since hardly any man of space would give up the Black without a fight.—

Virginia tried to pull the conversation back into the abstract, where she was much more comfortable. “That’s a tough situation, Lani. But the laws themselves…:”

—The Birth and Childhood Laws are a crock! You know they’re just reactionary measures against anything new and frightening to the masses! They don’t want to lose control of us out here! They’re terrified of change!—

Virginia quashed her first reaction—to tell the girl not to teach her grandmother to suck eggs. What, in all the world, had a healthy Ortho girl to teach her about life? About bitterness and the dark shadow of persecution? There was only one man out here Virginia cared to listen to, or who had the right to say anything on those matters.

Something of this must have been conveyed in the host mech’s six-legged stance. The spacesuited woman straightened up and shook her head.

—I’m sorry I shouted, Virginia.—

“That’s all right, Lani. Come on, let’s get that last crate. You know that hell hath no fury like a petty officer confronted with a job undone. We want to be finished before His Nibs, Spacer First Class Carl Osborn, arrives.”

Lani laughed, but finished with a sniff and a shake of her head. Virginia reached out delicately with one manipulator arm and touched the spacesuit’s insulated sleeve. The other woman nodded and they moved pack tent under the stars to fetch the last crate.

They had tugged the hulking container halfway back to the airlock structure when a light fanned forth from the lift doors following a spurting ivory cloud of released gas.

A tall, bulky, spacesuited figure emerged. Virginia recognise Carl Osborn from his languid, graceful movement along the guide cable even before she could make out the name-chop on his suit’s tabard.

—Hello, Carl, —Lani sent.

“Right on time, I see,” Virginia added.

Carl stopped abruptly.

—Virginia ! Are you up here? Well, well, just couldn’t keep away from me, could you?—

He bowed to her mech. —Nice day for a stroll on the surface. You should tell me, next time you plan to come up.—

At last Carl turned and nodded to his teammate.

—Hi, Lani. Careful with that end, it’s drooping.—

—Oh. Sorry, Carl. I’ll get it.—

Actually, Carl should have addressed the living person before speaking to the one who was present only in waldo. Lani Nguyen’s helmet had opaqued under the bright glare of the sun, so Virginia could not make out the girl’s reaction. But she had her suspicions.

“I’ll leave you here with Heaven’s Gift to spacedrift women, Lani,” Virginia sent. “I’m sure he’s capable of doing good work, if watched carefully.”

Carl’s back was to the sun, so his faceplate was clear. Virginia saw him blink and hurry to speak.

—Why don’t you come along, Virginia ? We’ve been running into some interesting sintered and recrystallized formations as we dig deeper into the core. They’re unlike anything we’ve encountered until now.—

Virginia had to admit that, even as she found them overeager and embarrassing, Carl’s attentions nonetheless pleased her. The man was so damned attractive… in the movie hero sort of way.

If that type of hero had been what she was looking for… but no, it wasn’t. Not in this life. Not right now.

She made the mech execute an imitation of a curtsy. “That sounds exciting, Carl. I’ll inform Saul Lintz. He and Joao Quiverian are the cometologists on duty, this watch. I’m sure they’ll be eager to see your pix and get your samples.”

Carl frowned sourly. That obviously wasn’t what he’d had in mind.

“See you around, Carl. Good luck, Lani.”

She engaged the release procedure, allowing the mech’s onboard systems to take over as her own teleoperated presence flowed back into the deeply buried laboratory where her body lay. The images faded, but before they departed completely and the lights came on, she saw that Carl still watched “her”… and Lani Nguyen watched Carl.

CARL

Their torches were blue blades of light cutting the seething fog.

“Hold steady. It’ll clear in a minute,” Carl sent.

Lani Nguyen sank a spike into a crusty chunk of water ice for stability. —What an eruption! It must have been bottled up in there a billion years.—

They had been finishing off a fresh tunnel. Mechs had done the initial work a week before, roughing it out, but it was better for humans to do the mop-up; mechs had an odd way of leaving dangerous knife-edged ruts.

The two of them had been using their lasers on low fan mode, trimming and scouring away jutting ice. The occasional boulder they had to chip around, or boil loose with lasers on tightbeam. Then they would nudge it back to the nearest tunnel intersection, where a mech would add it to the dumpster.

Lani had been prying at a chair-sized rock when Carl said laconically, “Remember Umolanda.” She had nodded, moving carefully, tugging—and suddenly it had sprung free, under pressure from behind. Pearly fog spurted forth.

Lani fruitlessly fanned at the vapor. —You figure it’s another aluminum-melt vault?

So far the expedition had found fourteen pockets, each containing vapor and even a little liquid. Carl peered through the hole.

A bubbling pool simmered at the bottom of a wide, spherical room. Fog rose from it in gouts and gusts. Multicolored steam still poured out frothing. “Damn! Looks like soup’s on.”

Lani frowned prettily. —Primordial soup, yeah. Lintz and Malenkov are all ga-ga over it.—

“Keeps em out of, our hair”

—I’ll bet Quiverian’s having nightmares over those two finding all sorts of juicy stuff about his comet.—

As he watched, she brushed at a splotch of gooey purple on her sleeve. —Eccch. God knows what this stuff is.—

Carl grinned. Lani preferred the austere simplicity of space work, the Newtonian mechanics of straight lines and known vectors; of sun-scoured steel and bare, clean surfaces. Not the murk and splatter of tunnel work.

“Isn’t it wonderful, what creation can do with just a few simple molecules?” He kept a poker face. He had been feeling a bit odd ever since meeting Virginia ’s mech on the surface hours ago. The mech and Lani had seemed engrossed in a heart-to-heart and had clammed up right away on his arrival. Maybe he could tease Lani into telling him what was bothering Virginia.

—It’s not funny, Carl. This gunk could get into a joint, stiffen it up.—

“It’ll evaporate.”

—Yeah? So how come it didn’t boil away four billion years back?—

“It’s been under pressure.”

—But everything must’ve frozen down after the early days.—

“Probably. This was just a flying iceberg for billions of years, out beyond Neptune. But back when the solar nebula condensed there was a lot of aluminum 26 in Halley; Chem Section reported finding the decay products, remember?”

—Oh yeah, residue from the same supernova that triggered formation of the solar system.—

“So they say. Anyway, that aluminum-isotope decay melted these chambers. Might’ve kept things percolating long enough to cook up those exotic chemicals and prelife forms Lintz found. I dunno.”

Lani widened the opening with a pick. —Then when Halley got bumped into its present orbit, the sun warmed up these hot spots again? Waves of heat every perihelion summer?—

Carl shrugged. “Must’ve.” He couldn’t think of a way to maneuver this conversation over to Virginia ’s secrets.

—Last year’s heat from the sun—that must still be seeping down through the ice, adding just enough to keep these local hot spots liquid.—

“Right. Malenkov and Vidor measured the temperature wave.”

The fountain sputtered, died. Cottony clouds swirled, thinned, escaped down the corridor behind them and into the oblivion of space.

“Let’s have a look.” Carl knocked a last rock out of the way and wriggled into the chamber beyond. He fanned his torch around—and gasped.

Crystalline facets sprouted everywhere. Points gleamed ruby red, emerald, burnt orange. Wherever he turned his helmet lamps, refracted light came back in brilliant splinters.

—A crystal palace,—Lani said softly as she followed. —How lovely.—

“The colors!”

—Concentrations of metals? Magnesium? Platinum nodules? Cobalt? The pinks, the purples!—

“Here, take some pictures. Our suit heat alone might melt it.”

—Think so?—Lani handed him her torch and moved away, unhooking her camera. —Look, I can see images of myself in the big crystals. They must be a meter across easy.—

Carl picked his way gingerly, walking lightly on his toes. The peaked pyramids of delicate arsene blue looked particularly dangerous. They worked in skinsuits, thin and flexible enough for difficult jobs, derived from the same woven chain molecules as the corridor liner. Still, a really sharp edge could slice through.

Carl peered ahead, squinting against the rainbow ribbons of light that seemed to focus on him. He remembered an optics problem from Caltech, over a decade ago. If you were inside a reflecting sphere, what would you see? How many images? The natural impulse was to start adding up reflections of reflections of reflections, ad infinitum. The true answer was that you’d see only one image.

Not here, though. Every refraction fed others, giving a myriad swarm of tiny technicolored Carls. They moved as he did, insects of every color hovering in a cloud beyond reach.

Dizzying. Thousands of Lanis, each earnestly working a camera. Between them was a dark spot. He gave a small push and glided over to it.

“Hey. Some kind of fracture here.”

—Careful of these sharp ones, Carl.—

“Yeah.”

He flipped slowly and brought his head down into the hole. “Looks like it goes on.”

—Very far?—

“Dunno. Some runny brown stuff back in there. Looks wet.”

—Yuk. Leave it for the bio boys.—

“Check.” He righted himself. drifting lazily over a glinting field of steepled crystals. “Hey, it’s lunchtime.”

—Let’s eat here.—

“Could get good hot chow back at sleep-slot one.”

She grimaced. —And unsuit just to get inside? Roast pheasant with chestnut sauce wouldn’t be worth having to wipe up this mess an extra time.—

They tethered from the nominal ceiling and broke out food tubes. “Even self-heated, this stuff is pretty bad,” Carl grumbled.

—It’s worth it to me, just to be away from the others.—

“Yeah, know what you mean.”

Their ration was stored in their backpacks, heated there and available by sucking on a tube that emerged near the chin. Eating was not an elegant process. Lani had a curious natural daintiness that made her turn away for each gulp of the light, aromatic broth. She floated with her arms and knees tucked in gracefully, an economical cross-limbed Asian sitting posture, more elegant than the usual spacers crouch. Carl smiled. She was a hard worker, lean and lithe, with steady, remorseless energy.

—I enjoy getting off by ourselves.—

“Uh-huh.”

—Particularly in such a lovely, well… jeweled palace.—

“Right. Damn pretty.” Carl wondered vaguely about Virginia.

—Do we have to tell anyone about it?—

“Huh?”

—Couldn’t it be a place… just for us?—

“Uh, why?”

—To get away. We could come here and bask in the light and, well, have time to talk.—

Carl didn’t feel comfortable with this turn of the conversation. “Look, somebody’d find it fast enough. I mean, we’d have to leave a port exit in the insulation, to get back in here ourselves.”

—Not if we disguised it some way.—

Carl struggled for a reply, some technical reason why it wouldn’t work. “You mean, mark it as a pressure hatch? Something like that?”

—I suppose so.—She studied him intently but said no more.

After a long pause Carl spoke again. “Somebody’d notice. It’d be just like Samuelson to come by, check on us. Pop the seal and make the discovery for himself.”

—You think so?—

“Sure, he’s a straitlaced, um, type.” He had barely stopped himself from saying a straitlaced, by-the-book Ortho. Lani was an Ortho, too, but one of the good ones.

—I suppose we should report it to Planetary.—

“Yeah, Quiverian’ll blow his buttons.”

—Still… I would like to have, you know, a retreat.—

“Plenty of volume in Halley—almost three hundred cubic kilometers.” He couldn’t imagine wanting to spend time sitting in an ice-walled hole, even if it did get you away from the rest of the dozen people in the First Watch. Better to go outside if you wanted that. Have the whole solar system to look at.

—Well, perhaps later, then. We could do it all ourselves, without the mechs.—Lani looked at him with a doelike, expectant gaze. Carl glanced away nervously.

“I dunno. Might have to insulate it.”

Unless he could steer the talk to Virginia, he wanted to deflect conversation away from personal things, to keep their relationship friendly but strictly professional. He started talking about the insulation problem, how much worse it was here than on Encke.

Humans liked temperatures around three hundred degrees Absolute, but some of the frozen gases boiled away in a furious phase transformation around a hundred degrees. Even a casual brush from a skinsuit would bring an answering puff of gas. Maintaining that two-hundred-degree differential had meant developing flexible, layered insulators. The merest breath of air would evaporate the very walls from an uninsulated chamber.

There would always be some boiloff, so the tunnel system had to let the vapor escape toward the surface, where it vented to free space. At the same time, controlled harvesting of the ice was the key to the expedition’s success. The biosphere needed a flux of water, gases, even the metals and grit contaminating the comet. So some of the boiloff was recovered, filtered to keep the cyanide level down, and cycled back into the habitats.

Without a virtually labor-free system to supply fluids and gases, there would have to be more people awake and working. That, in turn, would put more demand on the biomatrix, which drove a spiral of costs. This was the fundamental reason why living inside Halley Core was essential. As usual, profit and loss had the final say.

Keeping locks and ports from leaking heat to the nearby ice was tricky, tedious labor that Carl disliked. He belabored this point for several minutes, not because he liked to gripe, but because he couldn’t think of any other way to keep control of the conversation. At last he wound down. There was a long, uncomfortable silence.

—I was hoping we could find some time alone together, —Lani said simply, though she blinked several times.

“I… yeah, I got that.”

—You have felt it?—

“Well…”

—I have known you three years now. Long enough to learn how special you are.—Her eyes were large, black, and as deep as a pool. She was being direct and clear and it obviously took an effort of will not to look away. He could see that she had rehearsed this.

“There… there isn’t anything so great about me. I like space work. It’s my life, same as you.”

—We have much in common.—

“Yes, we do.”

—In the long times we will spend on watch together perhaps…—Her gaze faltered.

“Look, I think a great deal of you, Lani.”

—I am happy of that.—But her face had lost its pensive, focused look. Her certainty was fading. And there isn’t a dammed thing I can do about it, he thought. There’s no way I can give her the answer she wants.

“But, I mean, I don’t… really… think of you that way.”

She stiffened. —Oh.—

She isn’t any better at talk like this than I am. She misses my hints. So I have to say it straight out and that hurts her. Damn! “You’re… a great teammate, sure as hell you are.”

Her long eyelashes batted several times. The thin, broad mouth twisted ruefully. —Thank you.—

“God, I don’t mean to… to brush you off or anything.”

—There is no need to be concerned. You are speaking the truth, as you must.—

“You really are attractive, too, I don’t mean anything like that.”

Now that he thought about it, she was quite good-looking. Serving a sixteen-month watch, she’s thinking about pairing off. They all would be. Still, he simply had not thought of her as more than a co-worker. Why?

Somehow, she simply wasn’t his type. No instant attraction, no zip.

Or was that a habit he had picked up—rejecting nearly all women if he didn’t get a buzz off them immediately? Carl avoided Lani’s gaze, took a draw on his feed tube. Even on his Earthside holidays, he had always been careful to keep affairs sharply defined. Groundlings liked the pizzazz of space; there were plenty of groupies. It was easy to let them know he was interested in two weeks of sex and laughs and fun in the sun, period. Sometimes he’d been tempted to keep a woman’s number, give her a ring next time he was down… but once back in orbit cool ambition ruled. He never called.

Opportunity favored the prepared mind, as the old cliché had it, but opportunity in space also favored the uncommitted soul. If a long mission came around, those with family ties found it hard to go. And the Psychological Review Board took that into account, lowered your rating. They claimed otherwise, but everybody knew the truth. All that went into his calculations. And sure enough, the big chance—Halley—had come around, vindicating his strategy.

Then too, Lani was an Ortho. Likes should marry likes.

Virginia, now, she was smart, sexy, and a Percell. Plenty of zip there. Best to stick to your own kind. Except for holidays Earthside, he had followed that policy ever since his teenage randiness wore off and he had time to actually think. There were enough Percell women in space to keep him occupied.

As much as he tried to take a middle ground in the Ortho-Percell conflict, his personal life was something else. And while it was smart for a Percell to maintain that everybody was the same, that didn’t mean you could ignore human nature. He was sure that even after the stupidity of the Ortho governments Earthside had run its course, the human race would eventually have to split. The Orthos would always be edgy with Percells—that was natural. Better the two breeds kept their distance—by making space mostly a Percell domain. Cross-breeding wasn’t going to solve anything, just worsen it.

“There’s no reason we can’t work together, be friends.” He held out a gloved hand toward her.

She grasped it tightly. Through her bright blue skinsuit he could feel an intense, clutching desire in her. Her body gave away what her face had concealed. Gently, he released her hand.

—I… had hoped.—

“I, I can see…”

—There will not be many of us awake on each watch.—

He frowned. “Yeah. We’ll have to work out the rotation.”

—Yes. It will require… public discussion.—She sniffed, made to brush her nose with her hand, and stopped when her glove touched her helmet. She had to use the drip catcher behind the glassine plate. —I…—

Carl felt miserable. To have her weeping over him, when all this time he’d never even thought of her that way. He hated things like this, where you discovered you had been a callous deadhead without even knowing it. As though other people were tuned into frequencies you weren’t picking up.

Beneath this consternation there was also a small current of delighted pride. The old ways were still strong enough to make a man pleasantly surprised by an unexpected overture. He would never tell anyone, of course, but maybe, years from now, he might drop a hint to Virginia…

Lani sniffed again. Her eyes closed and she sneezed loudly, the outgoing choooh! booming almost painfully in his ears.

She recovered, blinked, and gazed bleary-eyed around her glittering crystal palace, indifferent now to its beauty.

Carl realized ruefully that she had not been weeping over him at all. She had already put aside her failed overture and was concentrating on more immediate matters.

Lani had a cold.

SAUL

Saul blew his nose and quickly put away the handkerchief.

The hectic weeks of Base Establishment had diminished into the long, hollow quiet of the First Watch. And as this damned cold of his lingered on and on, he found himself more and more avoiding Nicholas Malenkov and the big Russian’s skeptical medical scrutiny. Saul knew it was only a matter of time until Malenkov said something about his perpetual sniffle.

He wasn’t sure what Nick would do if it didn’t get better soon, but Saul did not intend to be slotted. Not for a while, at least. There was simply too much to do.

He pinched the sinuses above his nose. The momser antihistamines had him in a perpetual state of half-dizziness these days, but that simply couldn’t be helped.

Saul blinked at the pastel walls of the weightless lounge—designed to supplement the cramped recreational facilities of the centrifugal wheel. It was a barren, empty scene. Except for a few chairs and cabinets, the only finished area was here, near the autobar. It would be years before the lounge looked anything like the schematics called for in the Grand Design.

Flimsy readouts lay scattered over the chart table in front of him, except where a portable holo unit projected a cutaway view of the nineteen-kilometer-long prolate spheroid that was Halley Core.

Only at the top of the display, near the north pole, was there a sparse, spaghetti tangle of tunnels where humans had made their inroads.

Too much real estate to ever really know. And yet far too little to make a home.

The man across the table from him coughed politely.

“I’m sorry, Joao,” Saul said.

The tall Brazilian comet expert resumed what he had been saying before being interrupted by Saul’s dizzy spell.

“It’s these caverns, Saul.” He inserted his hand into the computer-generated image and executed an intricate little finger flick. Although there was nothing more material in that space than air, the machine read his intent as if he were turning a page. Cutaway layers peeled back to show new tunnel traceries to the north and east, linking a number of oblong cavities.

“I believe I have figured out how the chambers got here in the first place,” Quiverian announced.

Saul looked back and forth from the display to Quiverian’s sallow, patrician features. His Roman nose enhanced the impression of a bird of prey. The image fit, the man was so unpredictable, excitable. Saul chose his words carefully.

“I thought that was already decided, Joao. The comet formed out of the primordial solar nebula, peppered with a lot of short-lived radioactives from a nearby supernova. Beta decay warmed parts of the interior, forming the cavities, while the outer shell—exposed to space—remained cool, a protective blanket around the molten regions.”

Quiverian waved his hand impatiently. “Yes, yes, that old theory. Aluminum 26 and other short-lived elements must surely have created some molten channels, for a time.”

“I’d started trying to develop a biogenesis model based on that idea. But now you say it’s no good anymore?”

Quiverian edged forward eagerly. “Radioactives can’t have provided sufficient heat for all the melting we’ve observed! And they don’t explain the extent of fractionation we find, either!”

“Fractionation?”

“The degree to which elements and minerals were separated from each other by some dynamic process, forming these ore bodies we’ve found everywhere. Saul, the radioactives theory just couldn’t explain that! You see? That is why I started digging around the literature for another method, another way it might have happened.”

Saul stood closer to the table. “Well, it sure sounds interesting, Joao. I was just telling Nick Malenkov that there didn’t seem to be enough—”

“Bear with me a minute, Saul.” Quiverian held up a hand as he shuffled through a pile of readouts. “There is something I want to show you. I have it here somewhere.”

“Take your time, Joao.” Saul shrugged. For now he was content to enjoy a momentarily clear head—the almond-flavored air was, for once, fresh in his nostrils. He watched the computer’s slowly rotating depiction of the comet’s nucleus.

Seismic studies had filled most of the three-dimensional map with a vague gray and white tracery, showing in blurry outlines the locations of many of the major faults and cavities. Still, essentially all but a small fraction of the rough globe remained mysterious—a realm to be explored over the long, quiet watches ahead. Less than five percent of the volume, centered on the north pole, was at all well known.

Piercing the north rotation axis was a narrow orange line marked SHAFT 1, which dropped a kilometer straight down to an ant colony of chambers labeled CENTRAL CONTROL COMPLEX—including this lounge and most of the science labs. That shaft continued inward another two kilometers or so, terminating, at last, less than halfway to the center of Halley Core.

Along the way, Shaft 1 met a series of horizontal tunnels, starting with red-colored “A” near the surface, passing green “F” here, where they now stood, and ending in yellow “N.”

The pattern was a lot less neat elsewhere. Several passages opened into big caverns that the spacers had discovered the hard way. Three huge chambers now held the fore sections of the slot tugs Sekanina, Whipple, and Delsemme, and the majority of the sleeping colonists. Another, near the surface, now held the Edmund Halley’s nearly reassembled gravity wheel.

The computer-generated graphics were good, showing even the field of storage tents scattered among the hummocks up on the north pole. A finely detailed model of a partly dismantled torch ship hung in miniature near the tiny, glittering Shaft 1 airlock, tethered to three mooring towers.

Saul shifted forward and saw that two tiny dots moved about near the Edmund Halley—infinitesimal human shapes … Captain Cruz and Spacer Tech Vidor were running inventory and writing up a task list for the next dozen year-and-a-half-long watches. The computer showed them at work, going over the ship in detail.

He imagined that if he climbed onto the table and peered up close, he would be able to make out the name-chops on the two spacers’ suit tabards, and maybe watch them gesture to each other.

Saul was used to computer representations in his work. He routinely “dove” visually into the cellular lifeforms he was studying. Still, he found this display marvelous. Anywhere within reach of the main computer’s scanners one could zoom in and see animated versions of the dozen active crewmen… reduced to stereotypes by the machine’s automatic privacy editor. Likewise, the private quarters were black cubes strung out along Tunnels E, F, and G, impervious to the exquisite simulation.

Spacers were used to living in enclosed volumes. In fact, to them all this room must seem wonderful. But to the civilians, like Saul, the colony looked a lot like an ant farm.

A fine lot of troglodytes we’ve become. Regular kobolds.

And yet I can’t see anything wrong with Miguel’s arrangements. Everything is moving along according to plan.

Knock on wood. Saul rapped the side of his head lightly, and smiled.

Even the predictable furor over his discovery had been less bother than expected. The communications time lag from Earth had let him stack media interviews together. The more hostile or sensationalist questions could just be “lost in transmission.” Saul saw definite advantages to making major discoveries far away from the madding crowd.

Now, if only he could figure out how it happened that primitive prokaryotic organisms were found frozen under the surface of an ancient ball of ice! Nobody had any idea how the tiny creatures had gotten there, let alone how they had lived.

“Found it!” Quiverian announced. He snatched up a flimsy sheet. “As I was saying, I was at a loss to explain all the signs of past melting we see here… until I came across a whole series of citations having to do with inductive heating during the sun’s T Tauri phase!”

“I beg your pardon?” Saul balanced forward on his toes, leaning lightly against the table.

Quiverian’s lips pursed. “Oh, they wouldn’t have included much stellar physics in your second-hat training, would they? Well, let me see if I can explain. T Tauri is the name of a certain very new star in the constellation of the Bull; a whole class of objects was named after it. Scientists have been studying them over a century. They’re a phase really, in the development of a young star. Our sun must have passed through the stage, early in the creation of the solar system.”

Quiverian laced his long fingers together and looked out into space, as if he was reciting from memory. “The most interesting feature of a T Tauri star is its truly incredible stellar winds—fluxes of hot protons and electrons, blown away from a star by sonic force and by electrical—”

“I know what the solar wind is, Joao,” Saul said mildly.

The other man’s eyes seemed to flash. “Good! But what you probably do not know is that during the sun’s own T Tauri period the winds must have been many thousands of times greater than they ever get now. And this particle current carried a truly magnificent magnetic field.”

Quiverian looked at him expectantly. But Saul could only shake his head. “I’m sorry, I don’t get it.”

The Brazilian shrugged in frustration. “Ignorant biologist! Can’t you see? The early protoplanets and comets all passed through this great magnetism as they circled round and round the newborn sun. Like wires turning in a great generator! Eddy currents! Resistance!”

“Ah, mazel!” Saul clapped his hands together. “You would get inductive heating.”

Quiverian sniffed. “So they did teach you something in Haifa, after all. Can you see now? Do you understand?”

Saul nodded. His mind was already racing ahead. “The newly formed comet’s surface, exposed to space, would remain cold… an insulating blanket. Even if most of the interior were molten water, the heat wouldn’t escape.”

“Right! Of course it works only under certain conditions. You need a very large comet, like Halley, and lots of salts or free electrolytes, as we have found here:”

Unconsciously, Saul lifted all his slight weight off the floor by stretching his hands against the table. His body was tense from too much lab work and too little exercise. Perhaps soon he would have to accept Mike Cruz’s offer to teach him spaceball.

“How long does this T Tauri phase last?”

“A few million years. Not very long. But long enough to create these deep chambers we found! And with all that electricity running around, it’s easy to see how so many compounds got separated into thin veins all over the core!”

Quiverian clearly had a right to be elated. The man had envied Saul his discovery and attention in the Earthside press, but now he had reported an achievement of his own. It would doubtless be a sensation, especially in the Brazilian papers.

“Congratulations, Joao,” Saul said sincerely. “This is really tremendous. Can I have this copy of your reference list to look over?”

“Take it. Take it. I have already sent a preliminary report.”

Ideas were fizzing like sparkles of gas in Saul’s mind. “I think this will help me in my own studies, Joao.”

“I’m glad. But you know, this is going to require a very complex computer simulation. I don’t want to request Earth assistance until this thing is better developed.

“Can you help, Saul? You are good at that sort of thing.”

Saul shrugged. “As a dilettante, I guess. But one of the greatest experts is on this very watch crew with us, Joao. Why not ask Virginia Herbert?”

Quiverian looked uncomfortable. “I do not think this Herbert woman would be very cooperative. Her type…” He shook his head, letting the implication hang.

Saul was pretty sure he understood what the man meant. He had heard it before.

“Their kind has always been a problem.”

“Their kind…”

Quiverian shifted nervously. “These Percells are a closed, uncooperative lot, Saul. I don’t think she would be willing to help a scientist from my country.”

Saul could only shake his head. “I’ll talk to her and let you know, Joao. What do you say we meet here again for lunch, tomorrow. And we’ll include Nicholas in the discussion.”

He was grateful when Quiverian merely nodded moodily and sighed. “I shall be here.”

As Saul left, the planetologist was staring at the slowly turning holographic glow, his sharp features bathed in colored shadows. It occurred to Saul, then, that Quiverian was not looking particularly well.

The fellow really ought to get more sleep. It might improve his outlook on life.

An hour later, Saul was at work in front of his own display, mumbling instructions into a subvocal mike and fumbling with the computer grips, struggling to keep up.

Ideas were coming faster than he could note them down, let alone integrate them into the new model. Every time he explored one aspect, a whole vista of unexpected ramifications would leap out at him.

It was the true creative process—a sort of divine, nervous transport—as painful as it was exalting.

But he could almost see it. There it was—flickering like a willo’-the-wisp—a light glimpsed across a fog-swirled swamp. A theory. A hypothesis.

A way that a mystery might have come to Comet Halley.

Saul had sorted through terabytes of raw data the expedition had accumulated about the comet, tracing ingredients as they might have been stocked in the sun’s early pantry. They were all there, but the right kitchen had been lacking.

Joao Quiverian’s references seemed to offer the crucible Saul had been looking for.

The T Tauri phase…Saul mused. In its infancy, the sun was an unruly child. In those days, the star’s breath had been charged and hot.

So there had been electricity—great. But how much, for how long?

There were hydrogen cyanide and carbon dioxide and water—as must have saturated the primitive atmosphere of Earth—so the basic amino acids would have formed quickly. But the next steps would be harder.

The three-dimensional network of interrelationships on his central display grew more and more unwieldy, a towering, tottering edifice built up from tacked-together assumptions.

“Ach! May your goats chew on cordite and then give you copious milk!”

He cursed the machine in Arabic, a more satisfying tongue for such purposes than English. His fingers felt like clumsy sausages, and the arcane math he had brought in from the astronomy papers danced just outside of reach. He couldn’t quite integrate the equations into the overall scheme he had in mind.

For one hour, two, three, he pushed away at it. But the damn thing just wouldn’t gel.

Saul tried brute force, pulling in block after block of external memory, more and still more parallel processors to iterate the problem. It was far from an elegant approach…more like looking for a house in the dark by sending a herd of elephants stampeding into the night, hoping to learn something from the sound of splintering wood.

I’m doing this all wrong. I should go and have a beer. Listen to some Bach. Tune the wall to show a Polynesian sunset. Let it sit.

Saul drummed his fingers.

Maybe I should ask for help.

He sat there in the web-chair, weary not so much in the body as in the mind, in the heart.

This was the only joy left in his life, the quest for mysteries. And still he felt like a small boy—frustrated and vexed—whenever Nature seemed to want to wrestle with him, to make him wheedle and cajole her secrets out of her, instead of surrendering them easily, without a fight.

How many of life’s pleasures are painful in the actual process? Miriam, forgive me, but you always knew that I loved Life, Nature, just a little more than you and the children, didn’t I?

And here I am, getting cranky because my oldest love won’t put out again.

Saul blinked and sat up. The sudden movement sent him hovering over the webbing, but he hardly noticed.

What in the…

Unbelievably, something was happening on the display right before his eyes. A ripple of change.

It started off in the upper right quadrant of the computation. All at once, elements had begun to grow fuzzy around the edges. Indistinct, random bits jostled one another. Then, impossibly, the Gordian knot of logic began unraveling!

At first he thought the entire mess was falling apart of its own inertia.

Then he changed his mind.

Minnie, mother of pearl…

Out of chaos, simplicity was taking shape. Out of ugliness—beauty!

It was like watching a solution precipitate into a gorgeous, growing crystal. Wonderful… yes. Too wonderful.

Something or somebody was intervening, he decided. And Saul quickly realized something else: that this whoever… or whatever… was clearly a lot smarter than he.

Equations cleaved, as if sliced by RNA nuclease. The pieces fell apart, while he stared. They arrayed themselves in stacks, row by row, piling neatly into a glowing pyramid of logic. And at the apex…

Saul breathed rapidly as he looked at the culminating formula. He could feel his own pulse pound.

“I’m sorry I interfered without asking permission, Saul. But you were stomping all through the data system by the time I noticed. Sooner or later you were bound to set of alarms.”

Saul found his voice.

“That’s all right, Virginia. I… I’m grateful for the help.”

There was a brief pause. Then a holo-unit display to his left came alight and Virginia Herbert’s face wavered and smoothed, a replica in rich color that still hinted of salt breezes and tropical sun. Her long black hair flowed over her shoulders, slightly puffed, as if it had been hurriedly brushed just moments ago.

“I’m glad you’re not angry with me for butting in.”

“Angry!” Saul laughed. “You saved one of us, either me or this obdurate machine!”

Virginia smiled. “Well, it’s a relief to know I did the right thing. Actually, that’s pretty complicated stuff you’re dealing with there, Saul. I can’t pretend to understand any of it. I’m just a glorified numbers jockey.”

“I disagree.” Saul shook his head firmly. “You are an artist.”

Virginia ’s olive skin darkened perceptibly. Her “Thank you” was barely audible. Saul shared a long smile with her.

Virginia ’s eyes darted. “Um, if you’d like, you could come on down here and we’ll put JonVon to work on your problem. He’s a stochastic processor, you know. And I happen to believe that makes him a lot more applicable to the kind of problem you’ve got there than these old parallel precision machines.

“I’m sure we can whip up a simulation to make that one there look like a stick figure cartoon.”

Saul nodded. “Only if you let me bring a bottle, Virginia. I have a feeling we’re going to need it.”

“Done!” she said gladly.

As Saul was getting up though, a stretched image of Virginia ’s arm reached out across his desk—like an India-rubber man—to tap with one finger at the glowing, throbbing line of gold lettering at the top of the tall pyramid of data.

“What is that anyway, Saul? Is it something special?”

He shrugged. “Well. I guess you could say so, Virginia. It’s the chemical symbol for something called a purine base. A rather simple one, really, called adenine.”

Virginia withdrew her ghostly, representative hand. “Well, I hope it’s important. But whether it is or not, I’ll bet we’ll be taking this a whole lot farther. I have a feeling for these things, you know.”

She smiled brilliantly.

“See you down here in a few minutes, Saul. VKH out.” Her image vanished.

Saul stood still for a moment. “Yes, dear,” he said at last to the presence she seemed to have left behind. “I do believe we are going to take it quite a bit farther.”

VIRGINIA

MOLECULAR STRANDS, LIKE MULTICOLORED STAIRCASES…LIGHTING FLASHING IN THE DARKNESS…

At the simulation’s finest scale, the molecule was little more than a stylized ladder put together from standard pieces—bright, slivers of blue, green, and red—amino acids, phosphates, and simple sugars linked like ill-sorted parts of an intricate jigsaw puzzle.

The chain seemed to twist and writhe as it tumbled in a churning stream. A tracery of silvery lines stitched out electric currents, crackling unevenly through the salty fluid.

Shiny golden radicals smacked into the growing polymer. Most bounced off again in sudden flashes of light. Occasionally one knocked a fragment loose into the flow, diminishing the molecule, leaving a hanging, ragged corner. A little more often, the colliding chunk found a niche with the right shape, and stuck.

As the polymer grew, the scale of the scene enlarged, as if a camera were drawing back. A new strand joined the first, then another, twining together in a jumbled mass. The cluster fell toward a great ocher wall that loomed from below, a rusty plain pocked with jagged holes.

The edge of one of the black openings caught the molecular skein, one end draping into the gap. The cluster tipped for a few seconds, then toppled inside.

“It’s a clay… something like montmorillonite, I believe. Notice how the chain slips right into the open latticework. Only a few of the shapes being synthesized in the open stream will be able to enter this way.

“It’s an early step in the long process of selection. Some theories say it happened this way on Earth lone ago. At last the molecules are sheltered from the tumbling give-and-take of the electrified stream. Only certain radicals can get at them in there… and the shape of the cavity aligns the molecules just so. The buildup—slow and chaotic beforehand—begins now in earnest.

“Funny it being a clay, though. I would have expected it to be.something like iron oxide. But see how the peptides actually seem to catalyze the growth of new clay layers? Amazing. I’d forgotten about that!”

Virginia let Saul ramble on, sharing his excitement but too busy to reply unless he asked a direct question. Right now it was a challenge just integrating all the diverse elements in his complicated program.

She was used to bright pictures and vivid simulations anyway. No, what impressed her was the intricacy of this world of molecules and currents, of clashing atoms and chiming balance. It was a maelstrom of tiny tugs and pulls computed in a eleven-dimensional matrix space, and still the diversity of forms amazed her.

The screen showed only the most superficial part of it—the averaged sampling of JonVon’s stochastic correlator. It was the math, down below, that really kept Virginia occupied. Only occasionally did she look up to see how the images were coming along.

Right now the simulation was following the developing molecules down into their new home. They nestled into crannies in the complex clay latticework, leaving a central passage through which fresh material entered from the outside. New pieces were added, and old ones discarded as dross to float away. The shape of the still-growing chain kept changing, now as a simple helix, elsewhere doubling back on itself, switching handedness left and right.

Saul commented again.

“I’m cheating a bit, here, for the sake of speed. We’ve set up initial conditions and are letting huge numbers of simulated molecules ‘evolve,’ leaving it to your wonderful machine to pick out the most successful line out of billions… coaxing the most promising to do the best it can under these conditions.

“We’ll see if a nudge here and there can take this primitive thing and give us…”

Virginia found her job growing easier, now that JonVon’s expert system was picking up the basic rules of this game.

Or was it because Saul was getting better at his end?

They lay next to each other on a broad, web-hammock in her laboratory, each linked by cable to the intricate hardware/software unit. For Virginia it was a familiar experience, wearing a delicate induction tap and playing her fingers lightly like a pianist on the pattern keys. Saul, on the other hand, was more awkward with his controls. The bulky cortex helmet he wore lacked the compact deftness of her specially designed link.

Yet, he was getting over his clumsiness quickly. And his excitement was contagious. His subvocalised thoughts arrived directly along her, acoustic nerve.

“This is wonderful, Virginia ! Far; far more than a mere simulation program, this construct of yours explores possibilities!”

“JonVon’s processor is bio-organic, Saul. A matrix of pseudo-proteins in a filament mesh. Back home they dropped that approach years ago, because its point-error rate is pretty high. In fact, you’re treated like some sort of nut if you even talk about it, today.” She hoped none of her bitterness carried over into her words.

“Hmmm. More point errors, sure. But you can pack so many circuits into a tiny area that it doesn’t matter, does it?

Virginia felt a thrill. He understands.

“That’s right, Saul. A stochastic processor works with probabilities, not discrete yes-or-no answers.”

“It’s like the way Kunie describes the operation of the human preconscious! Have you read any of Kunie’s work?”

Virginia laughed. Aloud it was a soft chuckle. In their heads, the sound of bells.

“Of course I have! I couldn’t have gotten this far without that man’s ideas on the creative process. But I’m surprised you’ve heard of him, Saul. Conceptual heuristics isn’t anywhere near molecular biology on the library shelves.”

There was a pause as Saul’s attention returned to the simulation. He nudged a particularly large molecular cluster out of one of the gaping clay tunnels before it could jam the flow of fresh material, a minor interference for the sake of this early trial.

“I knew Kunie, Virginia. His family gave me a place to stay after the Expulsion…”

The “walls” of the simulated latticework throbbed slightly, and Virginia moved gently to stabilize the model against further interference by Saul’s emotions. Without letting on, she created another pathway for his feelings—away from the model and into a small side nexus where they might be buffered, studied… touched.

“Was that when you started working with Simon Percell?” she asked. History had never been her specialty. And Virginia knew that there had been more than one “Expulsion” from the land called Israel.

“Good lord, no.” This time it was Saul’s turn to laugh. The tone resonated in the little buffer like low cello strings.

“The Levites were still a small fanatic Jewish fringe in the Judean hills, and their Salawite friends were nothing more than a bunch of seething Syrian exiles, back when I worked with Simon in Birmingham.”

While JonVon kept the simulation going, Virginia was attempting to trace the tendrils of Saul’s pain, more vivid than anything she had ever experienced in a human-to-human link before. But then Saul changed the subject again.

“We sure could have used tools like these, back when Simon and I were working on the gamete-separation problem,” he subvocalised. “All we had then were kilobit parallel processors, gigabyte memories, and inferential sequencers that took days to analyze a single chromosome.

“But they were good times.”

Virginia felt moved by his intensity, even as she focused in on it, enlarging the channel capacity and sensitivity of the link. Saul was easier to probe than any subject she had had before. Except, maybe, for the littlest children.

And for some reason it was not unpleasantly disorienting, this time. To the contrary, it was pleasant, if a little frightening. The man was… well, strong.

“Go on, Saul. The simulation’s running well. I’d like to hear more about those days. You started telling Carl and me about your early work on cures for sickle cell and Lesch-Nyhan syndrome and lupus.”

“Cures!” Saul laughed, and the cellos were joined by a bitter choir of cymbals. “Yeah, I did. Fortunately, most of our later efforts worked better. Some of the early `successes’ were only partial.”

Virginia knew that. She had already gone into the expedition’s records and expunged all trace of her own infirmity. Of course, it couldn’t affect her duties in any way—in fact the authorities would likely approve of it. But she had erased the data anyway. It just wasn’t anyone else’s damn business.

Virginia smoothed down her own emotions and concentrated on solving the mystery of this oddly open channel to Saul’s subsurface feelings. I’m learning more today than I did in a year, back home, she thought.

She felt JonVon’s central presence pull up alongside, imitating her actions, learning by “watching” how she played the channels, adjusted resonances. Smoothly, at her command, her machine surrogate slipped in to take over. Soon she was able to pull back for a minute and check the biology simulation, their ostensible reason for being here.

It surged on, piling intricacy onto complexity. Now the scale had zoomed back again to enclose an entire field of lattice openings, each with its own fringe of huge, blue-white molecules waving out into the electric stream, like cilia around gaping mouths.

She tried to keep the conversation going. “But you weren’t with Percell when…”

“When he made his fatal error? Those poor monstrosities? No. Perhaps I should have been. I might have done more good than I did by going back to Haifa to join the struggle. By then it was too late, of course. The old Sabras and the kibbutzim had risen, and been crushed by the Levites and their ‘peacekeeping’ mercenaries. Miriam and the little ones…”

The sudden wash of feelings was overpowering and direct. Virginia ’s eyes fluttered and teared as she remembered scenes of grisly horror…seemed almost to see burning settlements, forests in flame… felt the thalamic surge of anguish and guilt.

Furious, she commanded JonVon to stop creating these images. The machine had no business interfering like this!

I am only enhancing, Virginia,

JonVon announced coolly over their private channel, dryly delivering news that stunned her even more than the glittering scene of a temple rising on an ancient hill. Virginia ’s mouth was suddenly dry. But…

I am not interpolating or simulating any of this. Amplified, these are direct images from the subject.

Her hands clenched and unclenched spasmodically, forcing the machine to automatically disable her fingertip controls. Her breath came in ragged, audible gasps as the truth struck hard.

“He nalulu ehaeha!”

Distantly, she felt the waldo gloves being pulled from her hands, her shoulders lifted in strong arms.

“Are you all right, Virginia ?” Saul was speaking aloud. “I didn’t mean to come on so strong. I thought you did this sort of thing all the time.”

She blinked, looking up at his concerned face. “Y-you knew what I was up to?”

He laughed. “Who wouldn’t, with you and your cybernetic familiar skulking around at the edges of my mind, poking and probing?”

He shook his head. “Honestly, Virginia, what you’ve done here is astonishing. It felt… direct! I Thought-to-thought contact. It’s been in so many stories and films, even after Margan supposedly proved it impossible, years ago, but…”

Virginia was still numb. “It is. It’s supposed to be… impossible, I mean. I use JonVon to mediate, to guess and pattern, to simulate. But I never expected…”

Now Saul’s expression was serious. “You mean that was your first time?”

Virginia had to smile. “Yes, my first. But don’t worry, Saul. You were a perfect gentleman.”

That did it. He rocked back and howled, and she joined in. They laughed together. The tension seemed to evaporate and for a long moment neither of them seemed to take any notice of the fact that he was still holding her.

This feels so good, she thought at last.

“Hmmm?” he said, tapping his helmet. “I only got a little of that, but I’m pretty sure I agree with whatever it was.”

She looked up at him. “Oh, Saul. I’d known you had a sad life. But it’s different feeling it, almost remembering it myself.”

Yet another image flickered at the edge of vision, a woman. She was no great beauty, certainly—mousy dark hair framing an ordinary face—but her smile was warm, and there was a brimming glow. Behind her were two smaller faces, a boy and a girl.

Miriam? Your children?

Yes. A pain softened by time. Love undiminished.

And in her own heart, another pain, still fierce. Love unanswerable.

“You don’t hate me… for what the gene treatments did to you?” Saul asked.

Virginia looked up quickly and met his eyes. She shook her head. “I did, long ago. You and Simon Percell. Then I met some of the other Percells… those for whom your lupus cure worked completely.

“I studied. I learned that without the treatments I would have been stillborn or horribly crippled… not merely—lacking. It was just the luck of the draw that I…”

“It’s all right.” Saul drew her near and she closed her eyes. “We both still have our work now. Good work. And that does give us a piece of the future too, Virginia.”

“Yes, our work… and maybe a little more.” She felt warm. Virginia lifted her face to him. Saul had to push aside the wires of his helmet in order to kiss her.

I’ve never done anything like this while linked, before. She thought amid the tidal swell of feeling. I wonder what Jon Von will make of it.

Above them, unheeded, the simulation had panned back again, taking in a wall of clay and a salty, electric-bright current.

Bright shapes had begun emerging from the rust-colored crevices. They flitted about in the hot stream—now coated and armored against the battering molecules—and set out into a multicolored world, consuming one another, growing, and making little replicas of themselves.

CARL

At first he thought it was nothing important.

Carl wiped the green and brown gunk off the distillation pipes and moved on. The gas-gathering zone of Shaft 3 was a long dark tunnel, its phosphors giving everything a lime-green cast.

The plumbing looked okay—magnetic motors humming, pipes gurgling, a smell of rotten eggs from the sulfur compounds. Excess vapors were condensed here from the miles of tunnels now threading Halley Core. Bioinventory showed a surplus of useful fluids and was talking about storing it. The boiloff would probably lessen as the more-volatile ices were used up, and also there would be less heat-making activity during the long cruise out. Everything looked pretty damn good.

But there was brown sticky stuff in the filters. Shit. It’s everywhere. Carl cleaned them carefully with a water jet and flushed his covered bucket into the outbound tube—one-way flash vaporization that dumped directly into free space.

This odd-looking mess wasn’t supposed to be here. Prefilters should take out the big stuff and sift it for useful solids. These backup filters should catch impurities and crystallize them.

Maybe there was something special about this particular sticky stuff. He filled a sample bottle—the bio types nagged him incessantly for traces of anything odd—and kicked off toward sleep slot 1. Malenkov should have a look at this.

Cycling through the big lock into Central Complex, he realized that he missed Jeffers. The founding crew were all safely slotted now, making things a bit lonely for the First Watch. Captain Cruz had made him senior petty officer, which merely meant he roamed more than the others, checking—but the minor honor pleased him.

He liked working alone, anyway—gliding smoothly and surely through the locks and shafts with Bach or Mozart weaving in his ears. Maybe I’m a natural hermit, he thought. I wonder if the crew selection people could tell that from their psychoinventory tests. He had hardly seen anyone these last few days.

When he entered the aft port of Life Sciences the first thing he heard was loud talking.

“He goes in now! I make no compromises,” Nikolas Malenkov’s gravelly voice cut through.

“I want a sample to study,” Saul persisted.

“I have taken samples.” Malenkov put his hands on his hips and leaned forward menacingly. “Epidermis and fluids only.”

“I’ll need more than that to find out what—”

“No! Later, we revive him, maybe! When we know what killed him. If you take samples from internal organs, that will make it harder for us to bring him back later.”

Carl frowned. “Hey, what’s—”

Saul wiped his nose with a handkerchief, ignoring Carl, and said, “You can’t cure him unless you know what killed him!”

“You have smears from throat, urine, blood samples—”

“That might not be enough. I—”

“Hey!” Carl cut in. “Will someone tell me what’s going on?”

Malenkov noticed Carl for the first time. His expression suddenly changed from tight-lipped rage to sad-eyed dejection. “Captain Cruz.”

Carl felt suddenly lightheaded, incredulous. “What? That’s… But I saw him just two days ago!”

Neither of the two other men spoke—there was still steam in their argument. Virginia said quietly, “He had a fever yesterday and went to bed. When Vidor went to find him this morning he… would not waken. He died within an hour. Apparently there were no other symptoms.”

“Fever? That’s it?”

“It doesn’t seem he ever woke up.”

The shock of it was only now penetrating, filling Carl with a sensation of falling. Commander Cruz had been the center, the heart and brains of the entire expedition. Without him…

“What… what’ll we do?”

Malenkov mistook Carl’s question. “Sleep slot him—now. There is yet little or no neural damage.”

Dazed, Carl said, “Well… sure… but I meant…”

Saul said, “I still feel we must have more data to study these cases—”

“We are not certain how long he ran a high temperature. Any more time, he risks brain damage.” Malenkov waved a hand brusquely in front of Saul, erasing any objections. “Come.”

They all went numbly to the hub of the sleep-slot complex. Carl was stunned. He tried to think, chewing his lip. The sociosavants had written extensively about how small, high-risk enterprises had to have a clearly superior, Olympian leader to avoid factionalism and weather hard times. A Drake, a Washington. Without the leader…

In the sealed prep room Samuelson and Peltier were running checks and planting diagnostics around a body that was already wrapped in a gray shroud of web circuitry. Miguel Cruz-Mendoza’s face was calm, and still projected a powerful sense of purpose.

Wisps of fog laced the air as the workroom dropped in temperature. Malenkov spoke to the two laboring techs through a mike and the party watched the last procedures of interment.

“So you’d authorized slotting even before our little argument,” Saul noted calmly.

“I wanted you should see my logic. While Matsudo is in slots, I am responsible for health of the whole expedition,” Malenkov said stiffly.

“Indeed you are.” Saul’s voice carried only a dry hint of irony.

“I hope we can bring him back soon—very soon,” Malenkov said. “Damnation! At the very beginning!”

Virginia said gamely, “We’ll all pull together. Of course, we’ll have to…”

“Pick a new commander,” Saul finished for her. “That’s obvious— Bethany Oakes. She’s next in line.”

Carl nodded reluctantly. Another Ortho. All the senior crew were. And Oakes wasn’t even a spacer.

They watched in silence as Peltier and Samuelson rolled the commander’s body into a sleep slot and opened the valves to feed fluids. The tube fitted snugly into a broad wall of similar nooks, gleaming steel certainly wreathed in gauzy fog. So much like death, yet it was the only hope of life to come. It they could figure out what had killed him. If.

Malenkov sighed. “We should have some ceremony. But there was no time.”

Saul said, “And perhaps it’s not such a good idea to assemble everyone in one place.”

Still numb, Carl thought, Miguel Cruz wouldn’t want a stiff little ritual. Some of us’ll get together and hoist a few for him later. The captain would understand that.

And maybe that might dull the pain, when numbness turned to grief.

“Dispersal, yes.” Malenkov nodded silently, frowning. Carl realized they were still talking about what had killed Cruz and whether it was communicable. “Osborn here can adjust job schedules until we thaw Oakes.”

“I am going back to the lab,” Saul said. “I want a full dress review of the lab results.”

“I think not,” Malenkov said stiffly.

Carl saw that Saul was already half-lost in thought about paths of inquiry to follow, checks to make. Saul did not reply at once, but gazed off into space, toward the slot cap that had closed on Cruz. Then he turned slowly to Malenkov. “Ummm? What?”

“Is your turn, Saul.”

“What?”

“This death makes me more firm.” Malenkov bunched his lips together, whitening them, his jaw muscles set rigidly.

“We risk exposure to you even by this talking.” Malenkov gestured brusquely. “Into a slot.”

“That’s ridiculous.” Saul looked irked, as if Malenkov were pursuing a bad joke. “I can help. Hell, if some of my suspicions are true—”

“You are not so big and essential,” Malenkov said stiffly. “Peltier, she knows the immunology well—”

“I insist—”

“I will not risk you dropping dead, my friend.”

“Nicholas, I don’t have whatever killed Miguel Cruz!”

“Look at you—eyes red, nose running.” Malenkov gestured. “You have something. A microbe caught in your lab, could be.”

Virginia stepped to Saul’s side and felt his brow. “You’re hot,” she said.

Carl watched sourly as she put her hand on Saul’s face with unselfconscious intimacy. He looks damned sick to me. Malenkov may be right.

Virginia asked quietly, “How long have you been this way?”

“Days, off and on,” Saul said dismissively. “A cold, that’s all it is. Some fever.”

Malenkov said, “We cannot be sure.”

“I think it’s just a leftover from Matsudo ’s last damned bio challenge. Which doesn’t mean I’m Typhoid Mary.”

“The commander died in hours,” Malenkov said curtly.

“Not from anything he caught in my lab. He hasn’t even been near it.”

“Could catch it directly from you,” Malenkov said.

“Exactly! Then why am I still alive? Use your head, Nicholas. You need me to help track down his killer!”

“It is to save your own foolish life!” Malenkov shook his fist at Saul, tensing his whole body.

“Saul, you must.” Virginia urged, tightness skittering through her voice. “We can’t let you risk yours—”

“No more!” Malenkov shouted. His bulk made the command imposing. The chamber was of hardened plastaform and cupped the sound into a resonant, rolling boom. “No more!”

I knew he’d start browbeating if he ever got a chance, Carl thought. Let him get away with it now and we’ll be taking orders from him forever. I’ve seen guys like this before.

Part of it, though, was simple resentment over anyone giving orders when his captain was barely cold.

“You’re not commander,” Carl said mildly, suppressing his initial urge to raise his voice. “Life Support comes next in the crew chart, as I remember, and this falls under the category of a space emergency. I’m acting officer.”

All three looked at him with surprise. Scientists—they never look beyond their own fiefdoms.

Malenkov hesitated, glanced at the others, then nodded. “True… for now. Bethany Oakes, we can thaw her soon, however.”

“Go ahead.” Carl shrugged. Then she can play these power games with you and I’ll drop out.

Saul said judiciously, “That seems reasonable.”

Carl could not help but smile sardonically. You bet it is. I just saved your ass from the slots.

“I… agree,” Virginia added, but Carl saw conflicting emotions play across her face. They were so obvious to read. If Saul was slotted she would lose him for a year or two. But if he died…

Virginia and Saw Lintz? Carl was stunned. He couldn’t even think about that, right now.

“We’ve got other problems.” he stammered only briefly as he hurried on. “I came in to report some stuff clogging the filters in Shaft Three. We’d better deal with that, and soon.”

Malenkov said, “I still do not see why Saul—”

“Because we need every hand, that’s why!” Saul erupted.

Malenkov’s face compressed, his cheeks bulging, an adamant set to his jaw. “I do not agree.”

Carl said flatly, “Complain to Oakes.”

Malenkov abruptly jerked open the hatch. “One thing I have authority to do! Saul should keep away from all of us. I will not be in the same room with him any longer.”

Saul began, “Come on, Nick, you—”

“I am still chief of medicine!” Malenkov said angrily. “I log you as quarantined!”

“That’s—”

“No contact! You work in your own lab, alone. Enforce this, Carl Osborn, or I shall speak to Earth of this!” Malenkov pulled through quickly and slammed the hatch after himself. The others looked at each other.

“You know he’s right,” Virginia said angrily.

“Like hell I do. Thanks for stepping in like that,” Saul said to Carl. “I’d forgotten what the line of succession was. Organization charts aren’t my kind of thing.”

Carl shrugged. “I just knew damned well that nobody’d set it up so Malenkov came next.”

Saul chuckled, and Carl smiled on the surface, though underneath he was in turmoil. He wondered whether he had in fact done the smart thing. He didn’t know enough about medicine, of course. He had simply followed his instincts. Years in space had taught him that that wasn’t usually a good idea.

What would the Commander think? He still wasn’t used to the idea yet. I never wanted to be in charge.

Virginia took Saul’s arm, chiding him about being up and about when he should be in bed. Carl felt a sudden pang of jealousy.

“Hey, he’s quarantined now, you know.”

Virginia frowned at him, but Saul nodded. “Carl’s right. I’ll crawl home by myself.”

If I hadn’t opened my mouth, he thought, Saul would be on his way out of our lives right now.

Maybe it hadn’t been so bright to speak up, after all.

On the other hand, Saul didn’t look like he’d last that much longer, anyway. And if they slotted him when he was near death, the fellow wouldn’t be coming back real soon, either.

He blinked as this thought surfaced. What are my real motives here?

It hurt even if he moved his eyes…

Throbbing aches, a muggy dullness filling his head, a dry rasp in his throat. I haven’t been hung over like this since I was twenty. That wild wine-tasting in L.A…

He sat up in total blackness, feeling the rustle of crisp sheets, and it all came back.

The Hawaiian woman, Kewani Langsthan, had come up with a big bottle of fiery coconut brandy to help Carl, Jim Vidor, and Ustinov violate Malenkov’s rule against gatherings, and drink to Captain Cruz’s memory. Whoever heard of Hawaiians holding an Irish wake?

He realized dimly that he had deliberately, stolidly gone about getting drunk. And even as he did, he knew it couldn’t blot out that awful despair, only daub it over.

Sometimes the only way to pay tribute to the dead was by a rousing, gut-busting ceremony of demented excess. About half the crew had reached the same conclusion.

But something else had happened … He tried to remember, failed.

Okay, fine. It was my off-duty time and I used it as I deemed appropriate, as the regs say. I just don’t have much talent for big-time carousing. Now I pay the price.

As if in reply, a lancing ache ran through his stuffy head. He reached out for the light and instead touched a soft thigh.

Oh yes. All at once she had seemed maddeningly attractive, witty, sympathetic …

“Umm?” Lani murmured. “Carl?”

He tried to speak, had to clear his throat. He swallowed painfully and croaked, “Ah, yeah. G’ morning.”

She switched on a dim nightlight, throwing their shadows against the walls of her snug little room. “You… look awful.”

He tried a grin. It felt like a crack had split his face. “Better than I feel.”

Lani’s broad, frowning face seemed none the worse for wear. “Can I get you something?”

“No, I’ll just sweat it out.”

“I have some B-complex and Soberall. They can dampen the effects.”

“Well… okay, let’s see what science can do. He knew the line sounded hollow, but he felt instinctively that he should keep things light. He could only dimly recall how he’d ended up here, what was said. My subconscious has gotten me into trouble again, he thought ruefully.

She flipped the covers aside and glided nude across the room, lithe and unembarrassed. Lani fished in a medical compartment and returned with five pills and a bag of water. He took his time swallowing, trying to figure out how to handle this.

He remembered being suddenly angry with Virginia —that’s what had started it. He’d had some of the deadly mai-tais Langsthan had brewed up and the Saul Lintz came on a screen nearby, just tuning in to see what was going on. Yeah, that must had done it. I’d been making sense until then, but ol’ smug Saul looked skyward and gave us that indulgent look of his and I got damned mad. At him, at Virginia …

“Better?” Lani asked quietly.

“Uh. Marginal.” He lay back on the sheets, dimly aware that he was naked.

She hung in the air over the bed, folded into lotus position, slowly descending. “You should get more sleep.”

“Uh, I…What time is it?”

She smiled slightly, as if she guessed his intentions. “It’s nearly ten.”

“Oh…I’m on watch soon.”

“You have to return to the living first.”

“I’ll… be okay.” Actually, he felt even worse. He couldn’t think straight. He had never been in a situation where he honestly didn’t know whether they had made love or not. Damned unlikely. I’ve never been much good with a skinful in me.

“You’re wondering,” Lani said, the faint smile playing on her lips.

“Ah… yeah.” She was always one move ahead of him.

“Let’s say your motives were pure.”

“Huh?”

“We talked for a long time and you said you wanted to see my wallworld.”

“Your…”

She uncurled and tapped a command plate on the bedpad. The room immediately leaped into being around them.

“Ow!”

“Oh, sorry. I’ll tune down the light.”

It was the crystal cavern. She had gone back there, carefully shot the many angles, captured the myriad facets. Brilliance refracted and glinted everywhere. Miraculously, she had managed to assemble views without any reflection of herself or her equipment, so the shining cavern was a vision no one could ever see in person. It was better than reality. Then she had arranged her room so that furniture and appliances occupied dark areas of the cavern, enhancing the effect.

“It’s great. Everybody else uses Earth scenes.”

She shrugged. “I can get that National Geographic tourist stuff anytime.”

Even through his logy blur he was impressed. And slowly he remembered their conversation, how she had seemed witty, warm, bristling with ideas. He had never noticed that before, never given her a chance, really…

“So I came to see it…”

She nodded, eyebrows arched in amusement. “And passed out.”

“Oh.”

“I thought you might not appreciate having people see you being hauled unconscious through the tunnels, back to your bunk.”

“I guess not.”

She blinked, bit at her lip, and then said carefully, “I… liked the way we talked last night, Carl. We’ve never really had a chance to say very much to each other. Not since the first weeks.”

“Yeah,” he said uncomfortably. “Been busy.”

She said firmly, “I know you won’t let go of Virginia right away.”

“Let go? I haven’t got her.”

“Let go of the hope, then.”

He nodded sourly. “Right.”

“Not immediately, I know that.”

He looked at Lani as if seeing her for the first time. She was different than he had thought. Maybe…

But Virginia…

“There’s no rush,” she said, seeming to know exactly what he thought. All my emotions must be written across my face, he realized uneasily.

“I… Maybe you’re right. I’m so damned confused.”

She leaned forward and kissed him daintily on the lips. “Don’t be. Just do the work and leave little things like love and life for later.”

He had to smile. “You’re making this a lot easier for me than I deserve.”

“I want to.”

“I…”

She put a silencing finger to his lips. “Shush. You don’t have to be civil, not with a hangover like that.”

He showered—she had installed her own equipment, even arranged a projection of the crystal cavern inside the stall—and dressed. She kissed him goodbye, and before he had fully registered their conversation he was making his way to the suit-up room, shaky but ready for duty.

He was already at work before the hangover cleared and he felt the sudden weight of depression descend again. Ever since leaving Earth, he had worked with single-minded determination, never questioning. But now he couldn’t keep his mind oft bigger issues, problems he could see coming in the days ahead. There was nobody tie could trust to take care of that, not any longer.

Carl felt a yawning emptiness, a foreboding.

Captain Cruz is gone. It just doesn’t seem possible. What in the frozen hell are we going to do?

SAUL

It should not have been possible.

Saul stared at the patch of green and brown in the petri dish. It didn’t take a lab regimen to know he was looking at something that just shouldn’t exist.

Standing in a relaxed, low-G crouch, Spacer Tech Jim Vidor peered over Saul’s shoulder. Strictly speaking, the man wasn’t even supposed to be here. The decon mask over his mouth and nose were sops to the official quarantine Saul was under.

Saul took a fresh handkerchief from the sterilizer and wiped his nose. After two days, when it seemed his body was in no great hurry to flop over and die from this tsuris of a cold, the isolation order had lost some of its original urgency. To spacers, disease was an abstract threat, anyway. Far more real to them was the trouble they were having with gunk getting into everything from air circulators to mechs, threatening the machinery that kept them all alive.

Nevertheless, Saul motioned for Vidor to stand back—for the same reason he had kept Virginia away, in spite of her mutinous entreaties.

Nick Malenkov might be right, after all. Anything could happen, when Halley was able to come up with things like this on the dish before him.

“The stuff was growing in the main dehumidifier, way up where Shaft One intersects A Level, Dr. Lintz. I showed it to Dr. Malenkov when I got back down here to Complex, but he’s busy full time in sick bay now that Peltier’s keeled over. He said you were the grand keeper of native animals on this iceberg, anyway, so I brought it to you.”

No doubt Nick assumed you’d use a mech messenger, Saul thought. Every few hours a mechanical knocked on his door, carrying a thermos of soup and a tiny note from Virginia. Maybe those little packets were the real reason his dammed bug hadn’t gotten any worse.

Working with his gloved hands in an isolation box, he used sterilized forceps to tease apart a clump of red and green threads, lifting a few onto a microscope slide. The unit whirred as probes crept forward into position. This thing that couldn’t exist obviously did exist. It had to be examined.

Naturally, Malenkov would not be interested in looking at anything as macroscopic as this. As Shift-1 physician, Nick’s chief concern was the strange and terrifying illness that had appeared out of nowhere, killed their leader, and now had another victim prostrate in sick bay.

The “thawing” of Bethany Oakes and half-a-dozen more replacements had been delayed by discovery of brown slime in the warming bins, which had to be cleaned laboriously by hand. The resumed unslotting was now keeping the Russian medic too occupied to bother with anything so large—and therefore “harmless” —as threads blowing in a faraway tunnel.

Saul, exiled to his own lab, had little to do except analyze the tissue samples taken from poor Miguel Cruz and the new patient… and deal with queries from a worried Earth Control. Mostly, he had a broad-spectrum incubation program under way, from which he couldn’t expect results for at least another thirty-six hours.

“Have th’ tests told you anything at all about what killed th’ captain, Doc?”

Saul shrugged. “I’ve found signs of infection, all right, and foreign protein factors, out little more definite than that.” He had come to realize, at last, that he would probably never track down the pathogen, or pathogens, without a lot more data. He needed to know more in a basic sense about Halley lifeforms.

If Nick wouldn’t let him near the patients, then he should be looking elsewhere! What Saul wanted most was to get out into the halls and see for himself… to collect samples, build a data base, and find out what had killed his friend. But this damned quarantine…

He turned his head and lifted a tissue before sneezing. His ears rang and his vision swam for a moment.

Well, at least Jim Vidor didn’t seem to feel in much danger, visiting a presumed Typhoid Mary. He had backed away at the sudden eruption, but as soon as Saul’s composure returned, the spacer stepped back up to look over his shoulder.

“Got any idea what it is, Dr. Lintz? This new stuff was clustered all around the inlet pipes on B level, and I’m afraid it may turn into as big a problem as that green gunk, if it plugs up the dehumidifier.”

Nick and I are scared by the tiny things… microscopic lifeforms that kill from within. But spacers have other concerns. They worry about machines that get clogged, about valves that refuse to close or open, about air and heat and the sucking closeness of hard vacuum.

“I don’t know, Jim. But I think…”

The screen whirled and a tiny cluster of threads leaped into magnified view. Saul cleared his throat and mumbled a quick chain of key-word commands. Abruptly, a sharp beam of light lanced forth, evaporating a tiny, reddish segment into a brilliant burst of flame. One of the side displays rippled with spectra.

“Nope. I guess it can’t be a mutated form of something we brought with us, after all. It has to be native.” Saul rubbed his jaw as he read an isomer-distribution profile. “Nothing born of Mother Earth ever used a sugar complex like that.” He wondered if it even had a name in the archives of chemistry.

Vidor nodded, as if he had expected it all along. Innocence, sometimes, leaps to correct conclusions when knowledge makes one resist with all one’s might.

Saul, too, had suspected, on seeing the stuff for the first time. For it looked like nothing Earthly he had ever seen. But he had found it hard to really believe until now. Microorganisms were one thing he could rationalize that, particularly after seeing JonVon’s wonderful simulation of how cometary evolution could occur. Primitive prokaryotic microbes, yes. But how, in God’s perplexing universe, did there ever get to be something so complex… so very much like a lichen, deep under a primordial ball of ice?

I never really believed Carl Osborn’s story of macro-organisms out in the halls, he confessed to himself. I guess I just pushed it out of my mind, denigrating whatever he had to report, answering hostility with hostility. Instead I kept busy doing routine stuff, studying microbes, ignoring the evidence that something far larger was going on here.

Of course, Carl had not exactly cooperated, either. They had not seen each other since that fateful morning in the sleep slots. And Carl had never sent the samples Saul had asked for. Small wonder he had been so glad when Jim Vidor took the initiative.

“For want of a better word, Jim, I’d have to call this thing a lichenoid… something like an Earthy lichen. That means it’s an association creature, a combination of something autotrophic—or photosynthesizing—like algae, with some complex heterotroph like a fungus. I’ll admit it’s got me stumped. Though. Nothing this complicated ought to—”

“Do you know of any way to kill it?” Vidor blurted. His eyes darted quickly to the screen, where the fibers slowly moved under intense magnification.

Suddenly Saul understood.

Vidor is an emissary. Carl couldn’t get any useful help out of Malenkov. Of course he wouldn’t come right out and approach me. Not as angry as he is over Virginia.

Another wave of dizziness struck and Saul gripped the edge of the table, fighting to hide the symptoms.

Maybe Nicholas is right. Maybe this isn’t just another flu bug. Perhaps I’m already a goner. If so, isn’t Carl right too? What have I to offer Virginia, other than, maybe, a chance to get infected if I ever do get out of quarantine?

What right have I to stand in between Carl and her, if I’m doomed anyway?

Oddly, the idea that he might really be dying made Saul’s heart race. He had supposed himself free of any fear of death for at least ten years. But now the mere idea made his skin tense and his mouth go dry.

Incredible. Did you do this for me, Virginia? Did you give me back the ability to feel fear? Fear of losing you?

It was a wonder. Saul became aware again of Jim Vidor, eyes blinking down at him from above his mask, and smiled.

“Tell Carl I’ll make a deal with him. He gets me loose of this fershlugginner prison, so I can go out and see what’s happening in person. In return, I’ll do what I can to help keep gunk out of his pipes. Even if all I can do is swing a sponge with the rest of you.”

Vidor paused for a moment, then nodded. “I’ll tell ’im, Dr. Lintz. And thanks. Thanks a lot.”

The spacer spun about and whistled a quick code, so the door was open by the time he sailed through into the hallway. Saul watched the hatch close. Then he looked back up at the tangled bird’s nest of alien threads on the screen.

A part of him wondered if it was morally legitimate to go looking for ways to fight the indigenous lifeforms that were causing the spacers such grief. After all, Earthmen were the invaders here. They had arrived from a faraway world as much different from this one as Heaven supposedly was from Hell. Nobody had invited the humans. They had just come—as they always did.

As we have always meddled, eh, Simon?

Saul shrugged. The little moralist voice was easy to suppress, as was the fear that he was dying. He would fight, and he would live. Because for the first time in a decade he had someone to fight and live for.

That’s right, he thought ironically. Blame it on Virginia, you buck-passer.

He stopped to wipe his nose, then dropped the handkerchief into the sterilizer. Saul popped another cold pill into his mouth.

Smiling grimly, he reached forward and turned up the magnification.

“Okay, buster. You’ve got me curious. I want to find out all about you. If we’re going to have to fight, I want to know just what makes you tick.”

He put the Tokyo String Quartet on the vid wall, recorded by cameras and pickups only feet away from the famous chamber group. They played Bartok for him as he twisted dials, spoke into a recorder, smiled grimly, and occasionally sneezed.

VIRGINIA

See the mechs dance, see the mechs play, Virginia thought moodily, halfway through a reprogramming. God, I wish they’d go away.

It had been hours on hours now and the jobs were getting harder. She lay stretched out, physically comfortable but vexed and irritated by the unending demands. She tried out a new subroutine on a mech filling her center screen. It turned, approached a phosphor panel. Careful, careful, she thought—but she did not interfere. A mistake of a mere centimeter would send the mech’s arm poking through the phosphor paint, breaking the conductivity path in that thin film, dimming the panel. The virtue of phosphors lay in the ease of setup—just slap on a coat of the stuff, attach low-voltage leads at the corners. and you had a cheap source of cold light. The disadvantages were that they had little mechanical strength and tended to develop spotty dim patches where the current flowed unevenly. A mech could bang one up with a casual brush.

Which this one proceeded to do, as she watched. It tried to spot the growing green gunk and wipe it away with a suction sponge. Partway across the panel, though, the arm swiveled in its socket and dug into the phosphor with a crisp crunch. The radiance flickered, dimmed.

Damn. Virginia backed the mech away and froze it. Then she plunged back into the subroutine she had just written, trying to find the bug that made the mech arm screw up at that crucial step.

—Virginia ! I need five more in Shaft Four, pronto! —Carl’s voice broke in.

She grimaced. “Can’t have them! All full up.” She kept moving logic units around in a 3D array, not wanting to let the structure of the subprogram slip away. Just a touch here, a minor adjustment there, and—

—Hey, I need them now!—

“Shove off, Carl. I’m busy.”

—And I’m not? Come on, the gunk is eating us alive out here.—

“We’re overextended already.”

—I’ve got to have them. Now!—

It was hopeless. She punched in a last alteration and triggered the editing sequence. On a separate channel she sent, “JonVon, take a look at this. What’s the problem? I’m too dumb to see it.”

PERMISSION TO INTERROGATE MECH AND ADJUST ONBOARD SOFTWARE?

That was a little risky; JonVon was great at analysis, but had not had much experience working directly with mechs. What the hell, this is a crisis. “Sure.”

—Virginia ? Don’t duck out on me.—

“I’m here. I feel like a short-order cook, trying to switch these mechs around. Between you and Lani and Jim, there’s no time to reprogram these surface mechs for tunnel work.”

Carl’s voice muted slightly. —Well, sorry, but I’m facing a bad situation here. This stuff is spreading fast—must be more moisture in the air here. We may have to clean them out in vac. That’s tougher.—

“I know, I know” Carl always patiently explained why he needed help, as if she simply didn’t understand.

She switched to another channel, surveyed the situation near Lock 3, and issued a quick burst of override orders directly through her neural tap to stop an overheating valve from melting a hole in the vac-wall. Then back to Carl: “Look, I can’t do it right now.”

—How come?—Was that a petulant, irritated tone? Well, the hell with him.

“Because I’m up to my ass in alligators!” she shouted, and broke the connection.

It felt good.

CARL

It began with a high, thin whistling.

Carl was working at a pipe fitting—cursing the green gunk that made it slippery—when he heard the sound, at first just a distant, reedy whine. He was far out along Shaft 3, near the surface lock, and assumed that the single, persistent note came from somebody working further in, toward Central.

He was alone because they were so low on manpower. Carl had been working with one of Virginia ’s reprogrammed mechs, but avoided that if possible. It got in the way of the job when the machine spoke with her distinctive lilt.

The first awakenings were due to “thaw out” next Tuesday, and he hoped that would help with the chores. The gunk was slimy, foul, and persistent; he hated it.

And those damned threads that get caught in the air vents. Maybe Jim Vidor’s right, I should let Saul out of quarantine, have him study this stuff up close.

If he had been with a partner he might have been less meditative, and heard it sooner. The sound kept on while he tightened up the joint with his lug wrench, the rrrrrttttt rrrrrttttt rrrrrttttt sending vibrations up into his shoulders.

Carl lifted his head. He felt a breeze.

There was always circulation of air in space, driven by booster fans if temperature differences didn’t give enough convection. But not this far from Central, not a steady feather-light brush past his ears.

He stopped, listened. The same steady note. It came from below, downshaft, toward Central.

Then his ears popped.

He reeled in his tools and pushed off, all in one smooth uncoiling motion. A burst from his jets and he plunged inward. Phosphors dotted the shaft with pools of yellow-green light every hundred meters; automatically he used them to judge his speed, to keep from picking up momentum he wouldn’t be able to brake. Smears of green gunk covered some of the phosphors, growing on the wan energy they put out.

He passed tunnels that ran horizontal, 3B, 3C, and 3D, but the sound wasn’t coming from them. Coming toward 3E, he slowed because the whistling was getting louder and a steady suction was trying to draw him downward. Carl had always hated high-pitched noise and this was now shrill, grating. He was searching for a split seam in the insulation but wasn’t at all ready for what he found.

Worms! He blinked, stunned.

Purple snake-like things oozing, wriggling. Moist, slick, waving slowly, ringing 3E’s entrance. It was like a living mouth calling with a cutting siren wail, the wind moaning and tugging and sucking him toward the beckoning purple cilia that eagerly flexed and yearned and stretched out toward him—

He fumbled at his jets and pulsed them hard, backward. Wind swirled by him, sending his tool lines streaming away, tearing the wool cap from his head, ruffling his hair. He twisted and caught a handhold in the shaft wall. The noise was deafening now and he knew he was getting rattled by it.

What the hell—!

He ripped open his emergency pocket and fished out a plastisheet helmet. It took a long moment to tuck it into the O-ring seal in his skinsuit. I haven’t practiced this drill in a long time.

It caught. He pulled the FLOOD bottle tab. The bubble expanded with a reassuring whoosh of air. That provided some sound insulation, but not much. Not enough.

“It’s at Shaft Three, Tunnel E,” he sent over the emergency channel. “Three E, Three E, Three E. Bad. Whole area around the collar is ruptured.”

A faint voice called in his bonephone, —… can patch with spray foam? Got some on its way.

“I doubt it. Something… something’s broken through. This sure isn’t just a rip.”

Carl bit his lip. He didn’t know how to describe it. The team would take only a few minutes to get here, but the shaft was losing torrents of air.

The purple…things…must’ve broken through to a crevice leading up to the surface.

He launched himself across the shaft. The wind blew him several meters before he hit the far side and managed to hook a temporary clip into the insulation. He hung on and watched the nearest of the purple worms twist and pulsate, rivulets of ocher sweat running down from the pointed tip. The wind blew the drops away, sucking them back into the gaping hole that ringed the base of the worm.

The horrible thing bloated, contracted, bloated again—each time prying the insulation wider, admitting more of it into the shaft. The nearest was at least a meter long and visibly growing, convulsing in a slow agony of swell and clench, swell and clench. Its maw glittered with what looked like crystals of native iron.

They’re after the green gunk, he realized as the worms pressed against the layers of mosslike growth within their reach. They seemed to absorb it directly. They’re grazing on the stuff!. And sucking threads out of the air.

Around the aluminum and steel collar of 3E’s entrance Carl counted thirteen of them. He played out some line and the howling gale sucked him down, toward one of the eyeless, slime-sweating things.

Carl clenched his teeth. He was breathing bottled air now but he’d swear he could smell it—cloying, thick, humid, like ripe, moldering leaves.

He unhooked his laser cutter, thumbed it to max, and fired at one. The beam drove a thin red line straight through it… with no significant effect.

He made the next bolt last longer and sliced the thing off a few centimeters above the base. A spray of purple-red whipped away into the wind. The top wobbled and fell aside, then tumbled slowly away.

More fluid seeped from the wound and then it began to film over. As Carl watched the thing began growing a thickening crust. The new matter had a rich, glossy purple skin like an eggplant. Then it began to thrust outward, sideways, outward again—onward, into the shaft, the wound only a momentary interruption.

Carl felt the hair rise in prickly fear along the back of his neck.

—… it like now? Repeat, can’t pick you up, want to know…—

The rest was lost. Carl could see no one in the shaft. Where were they?

He pulled his patch gun from its holster on his left calf. It was intended for small work, but he couldn’t think of anything else to do.

To get closer he played out another meter of line, then hastily drew some back in as the burgeoning thing waved his way. Could it sense him? Without eyes or any visible organs? Maybe his body heat. He wasn’t going to take any chances.

The patch gun spat a wad of yellow gum at the hole. It splattered over the opening, spreading quickly as the long chain molecules grasped for the maximum surface area to bond. The suction bowed it inward but the yellow patch held.

For almost a minute. Then the worm butted against the cloying yellow film, wrenched, flexed—and shook it free. The wind tore at the loose edge. It flapped futilely like a ragged flag.

“We’ll need the big stuff,” Carl sent. “Bring all we got.”

—… can’t hear… any other measures… take to be sure…—

“Yeah. Seal all locks. Everywhere.”

—… don’t under… we’re sending all…—

“If we run out of sealant, the locks are our only backup.”

And if that fails, he thought, we’ll have to live in suits.

Ten minutes later, that didn’t seem so unlikely.

Only Lani and Samuelson and Conti were available to help right away; crew was stretched thinly everywhere. Lani was a spacer, quick and smart, but the other two had been pressed into jobs they didn’t know.

They worked as fast as possible. Chopping the tendrils was simple, but more pushed in before the sealant could harden. Carl and Samuelson discovered that to make any progress at all, they had to get close into the tip in the insulation and clear out the whole area, cutting all the way back to the ice.

—Got to slice it clean away,—Samuelson said. The large man licked his lips nervously. —Damnedest stuff I ever saw.—

“Watch out there with that torch, you’re close to the ice.” Carl had to hold Samuelson on a rope to keep the man from being sucked directly against the hole. The team had rigged a set of linchpin stays and lines to keep the howling wind from plucking them off the shaft walls. Now the shrill, hollow shriek slowly dulled as the air in Shaft 3 finally ran out.

Carl shouted. “Don’t get to close!”

Too late. Samuelson’s big industrial laser had finished off the purple stuff, all right—and then hit a vein of carbon-dioxide ice, vaporizing it instantly. A gout of steam shot out of the hole and blew Samuelson away, spinning.

“Lani! Slap that sealant in now,” Carl sent. He released the line, letting Samuelson get clear. It was going to be messy around there in just a second.

Lani maneuvered at the end of a tether, holding the snaking blowline in both hands. —Here goes.—

Sticky yellow sealant spattered over the cleaned holes. Carl and Conti played fan lasers on it at the lowest setting, to flash-dry it.

Lani worked her way around the collar of 3E, shooting thick coats of yellow over the rents. Here and there it buckled from pressure, but she quickly spewed more on to reinforce the barrier.

—Not supposed to use it this way,—Conti sent. —Too thick. We’ll run out.—

Samuelson returned, velcro-climbing the walls to rejoin them. —Anything thinner, she’ll crack right through.—

—There’ll be none left.—

“Cut the crap,” Carl said sharply. If you let a crew bitch they lost concentration and didn’t give their best to the job.

Lani called, —I’m done.—The steam petered out.

The sudden silence was startling. Carl cast off from the shaft wall, able to hover now that the sucking draft had stopped. There was hardly any air pressure left. “Maybe that’ll hold it.”

Samuelson sent, —What the hell was that?—

—Something that grows in the ice,—Conti said.

— —Come on, in ice?—Samuelson asked sarcastically.

—No other way possible,—Conti said flatly. —Perhaps they get through cracks? Through softer snow veins? This is not any terrestrial form!—

—But so big,—Lani said. —What Saul found were mostly microorganisms, correct?—

—Yeah,—Conti added. —And the green gunk and the threads, they don’t chase you around, last I heard.—

Samuelson laughed. —These ’uns are bigger all right.—

“And strong. It breaks through insulation,” Carl said.

They hung in the near-vacuum, staring at one another. Samuelson kicked off the wall and gestured upward, where splashes of phosphors dotted away into a long V with perspective. —Could happen anywhere in th’ shaft.—

Carl shook his head. “It came through close to the collar, nowhere else. What’s special about this spot?”

Conti said, —Something about the collar, where it fits to ice?—

“We’ll have to check every collar, every intersection.”

Samuelson said, —Damn right. We better collect all the bits of it that got blown into this shaft, too.—

“Good idea,” Carl sent. “Let’s get to work.”

They spread out through the shaft and nearby tunnels. Carl snagged several drifting purple glops and stored them in a plastic carry bag. Blobs of jelly floated free or had stuck to walls. It was sticky and left a smear on whatever it touched. He kept a running commentary to Central, describing the lifeform to Malenkov. Saul Lintz came on, peppering him with questions. He had no idea how to answer. Saul demanded samples immediately.

“We’ll all have to get decontaminated before returning to any pressurized zones, I’m sure of that,” Carl said.

—Well, do the best you can. I’ll get some sample bottles to you.—

“I’ll make do. Don’t let anybody into this section.”

—You think it’s that dangerous?—

“Damn right.”

He broke off and kept searching. His team spread around, checking intersections for signs of buckling. Something was nagging at him but he had no time to stop and think. The purple chunks had drifted far and wide and he had only a few people to retrieve them all.

At the tunnel leading horizontally to Central, Samuelson found a purple tip just sticking through the plastaform. He called Conti and the two of them took a sample.

They were careless.

When Carl got there a few minutes later, both of them were slapping patches on themselves and yelping with startled pain Through their faceplates each looked surprised, white-faced, eyes big and jerking around.

“What happened?”

—I snagged this piece and it got away from me,—Samuelson said. —Conti grabbed it and it… ate through his glove.—

There was a big, awkward patch on Conti’s right hand. “I suppose you brushed the piece with your arm?” Carl asked.

—Yeah, and the damned thing stung me.—

Conti’s face was twisted into a self-involved grimace of agony. —Getting’ worse.—

“Samuelson, take him. The two of you go to the emergency entrance lock. I’ll call Malenkov and let him know you’re coming.”

—Wh…what you think it is…doing? —Conti asked.

Eating, Carl thought, but kept it to himself. “Get to the doctors.” He gave them both a push inward. “Hurry!”

In the next hour Malenkov sent him reports on their condition. The purple thing had eaten through fiber covering their suits, probably reacting to it as potential food. —Maybe it just likes long chain molecules,—Malenkov had suggested. Once inside, it burned the skin. Some probably had gotten into the bloodstream. Conti and Samuelson reported a spreading, dull ache. They were sedated and under observation.

Carl warned Lani and kept searching. Nearly an hour later he suddenly had an idea.

“Saul! Lintz! You there?”

The cross-link clicked and hummed, and then, —Yes.—

“This purple stuff is light, moves easy. Most of what we cut away got sucked into the holes.”

Carl visualized the alternating layers of inert material and vacuum that made the wall insulation. Beyond the insulation was a full two centimeters of helium, intended to isolate the wall from ice. It also provided a route for boiloff to swarm upward to the surface and escape. “Where’s this shaft’s venting go?”

—Shaft Three vac line funnels everything from sleep slot one to the surface. That’s not my department, though. You’d better ask Vidor.—

“No, listen. We always think of boiloff escaping upward, right? But the wind we had here, it was strong.”

—Yes. We lost a lot of air.—

“Point is, that air gusher was big enough to blow some back inward.”

—Maybe. It’ll leak out pretty fast, though, even… Oh, I see. You’re worried about…—

“Right. The purple stuff. It’s been carried by the air back toward Central.”

—There are storage vaults along there, and…—

“Right.” Carl hesitated, then decided. “Saul! I’m overriding Malenkov during this crisis. As of now, you’re out of quarantine. Shanghai Quiverian and anybody you can find. Get down to Three J. You bio guys better think fast. I bet these things’ve got into sleep slot one.”

SAUL

Saul blinked wearily through a double-antihistamine haze as he finished wiping the last green traces from the edges of the filter unit. Reduced from high science to scut work, he thought grumpily. Mama took in washing to send her little boy to college—to do this?

Of course his real “mama” had done no such thing. She had been a colonel in the Israeli army, a hero of the ’09 liberation of Baghdad, and probably would have approved of her intellectual son’s being forced to use a bucket and mop, from time to time.

Still, the ironic fantasy amused Saul, so he nursed it. He gritted his teeth and pounded the filter back into place. Thirty years of education, and a half-billion-mile trip into space—all to be a janitor. It confirmed his long-standing belief that there was, indeed, such a thing as progress.

At least the present crisis appeared to have taken him off the pariah list. Every hand was needed to fight the Halleyform infestations, and few begrudged him an occasional sniffle.

Done, at last.

Saul sealed his sponge inside the bucket and stripped off his gloves. He looked over the rows of coffinlike sleep slots, foggy from internal chill and condensation, each showing a dim, hibernating form within. For two days he had been down here in the chilled chamber, trying to keep the infestations out of the slots.

Beyond the rows of sleepers, a workbench lay strewn with bits of glass and electronics torn from a half-dozen gutted instrument panels. A tall form stooped over the clutter.

“You about finished with those lamps, Joao?” Saul called. “I promised them to Carl soon.”

The sallow-faced Brazilian shook his head and muttered sourly, “I have only unpacked and mounted four bulbs since you last asked, Saul. Give me time!”

Quiverian obviously did not like being dragooned into doing “Stoop labor” out here in sleep slot 1, where it was cold and dangerous. Saul had been forced to go down in person to Central and drag the man away from a long, rambling, time-lag conversation with an Earthside planetologist colleague. Until then, Joao had behaved as if the total mobilization had nothing to do with him.

First job had been to go over every inch of the sleep-slot chamber, cataloguing infestations. Then had come long, grueling hours of scraping, wiping, disinfecting. The air-circulation inlets had fouled with the threadlike lichenoids, nearly choking off a whole row of lots. Except for one brief sleep period, the two men had been at it nonstop for almost forty hours.

Thank a merciful heaven Virginia ’s mechs report few problems in the other two sleep slots!

At last, when Quiverian had seemed on the verge of rebellion, Saul had put him to work assembling the hydrogen lamps, an easier job than stoop-and-swab labor.

“If you’re in such a damn hurry,” Quiverian groused, “why don’t you wake up lazybones over there. Put him to work doing something more useful than snoring and warming the whole cave with his electric blanket!”

Saul glanced at the recumbent form of Spacer Tech Garner, lying on the fibersheath floor in a dark corner. Garner had been on duty for four days straight. The man was just catching a few hours’ shuteye before going back out to join the battles once again. In comparison, Joao’s work here had been a holiday.

“Leave him alone, Joao. I’ll take the first four lamps and test them. You just keep working on the others.”

He paused, then added, “Only please, Joao, be careful, will you? Try not to break any more of those bulbs. It’s a long trek back to the supply store.”

Quiverian shrugged. “First you say to hurry, then to be careful. Make up your mind.”

Saul realized the man would wear him into the ground it he remained here. “Just do the best you can.” He picked up a set of the spindly beacon lamps—meant to flash navigation/location reference to astronauts working on the moon or asteroids. He had an idea they might be useful in another function, here.

We’ll see if they’re any good against a form of life that lives in space.

He set forth in a low glide toward the entrance to Tunnel J, an amber-colored exit from the great chamber containing sleep slot 1. Right now the place was eerie with the lights dimmed low. The vaulted recesses seemed deeper, more mysterious, like naves in an ancient tomb. Fibercloth rounded the edges, but the vast cave was still an irregular hole deep under the ice. One didn’t dwell on how many tons hung overhead, in the kilometer or more to the surface.

At the center of the chamber floor, casting shadows in the light of a few active glow panels, the fore end of the slot tug Whipple lay at the center of five isles of casket-shaped containers—the individual resting places of more than a hundred hibernating men and women.

If we lose this battle, will any of these people ever see light again? Will they breathe, and laugh, and love?

Saul wondered, Does any of our desperation penetrate, and disturb their slow dreams?

It was dark as a sepulcher in here. It was also getting damn cold.

The lights were dimmed to save energy. The fusion pile had been damped two weeks ago, when all but fourteen humans had been cooled down, and everybody expected a long, quiet, boring watch ahead. Now there wasn’t the manpower to supervise a fully stoked reactor. Every hand was needed in the passages, in the utility corridors, or in sick bay.

Anyway, light was one of the things that attracted the lichenoids and the purple things. That and heat, and air, and food…

I guess it’s no accident we like the same things. The biggest difference is that the Halleyforms only experience spring briefly, every seventy-five years or so, when the heatwaves come migrating down from the sun-warmed surface. They’re built to act, and act fast, to take advantage of the sudden season.

Saul was still mystified by the abundance of types—by the complexity of the forms that fed on the green, algaelike growths. They violated the tenets of modern biology by existing at all.

But he was practical enough to stop muttering “Impossible!” to himself after a while. Later, he could try to discover an answer. Right now. he had to find ways to stop them.

He was getting better at low-G maneuvering. Still, his feet got in each other’s way on alighting near the open Tunnel J hatch.

Fortunately, there were only a few entrances to sleep slot 1. Tunnel J was the critical one. Only a few hundred yards down that way, and up one level, Carl Osborn and his tired crew were wearily scouring away the green Halleyform variants the spacers had taken to calling “gunk”… trying to rid a critical passage of the food supply grazed on by the horrible purple worms.

So far, liberal doses of certain antiseptics and synthetic herbicides seemed to be doing the trick… for now, at least. But we can’t rely on that forever.

Carefully he laid down three of the lamps and eased the fourth into position just past the open hatchway, in the tunnel proper. He had to hunt for the right electrical socket, and found it at last, partly hidden under a filmy cobweb of multicolored threads. These had to be brushed aside with his boot before he could plug the unit in and set the timer.

“Hello. Testing.” He tapped the little headset microphone that extended from under his wool cap.

“Lintz speech-routing to Spacer Osborn’s headset, please connect for conversation.” He knew there were more economical ways to ask the main computer to link him to Carl—he had seen the spacers chirp routing instructions in less time than it took to do a good hiccup—but he had forgotten the correct protocols. This way, at least, the machines were sure to understand.

A short pop, then a hissing carrier wave.

—Lintz, Osborn. What’s up, Saul?—

The reply in his left ear was spare, to say the least. But spacers were like that. Terseness didn’t necessarily mean anything.

“Carl, Joao Quiverian and I have finished checking out sleep slot one. Destroyed twenty-three infestations. Can’t be sure we didn’t overlook a few minor ones, but the slots don’t appear to be in immediate danger anymore.”

Saul quashed the tickling sensation of a threatening sneeze. He spoke quickly.

“I took an hour and went up to the surface to rummage through the storage tents, to see if there was anything we might use. There were a couple of dozen halogen-hydrogen space-signal lamps that gave me an idea. I figure we can place some at critical passage junctions and set them to bathe an area, at intervals, with intense ultraviolet. Who knows? It might slow the beasts down a bit.”

There was a pause before Carl answered again.

—Sounds reasonable. But we don’t want to blind or burn anybody.—

Saul nodded. “I thought of that. Brought down goggles and sun salve for the hall gangs. Also, I tore apart an unused mech-controller board and pulled out some type-five malfunction alarms… you know, the ones that go brrr-ap! brrr-ap!”

The carrier wave came on again, suddenly. It sounded like coughing until he realized Carl was laughing at his rendition. He grinned.

“Anyway, an alarm will go off a minute before each lamp is triggered. Both will stay on for five minutes on the hour.”

—Good enough. Where’ll you set ’em up?—

“At the entrances to each sleep slot, just outside Central, and along Shaft One. I’m not sure if we have enough power or bulbs to do more, so—”

Carl interrupted, —Fine, Saul. But I want to try them on something else, first. I’ll send Vidor and Ustinov down to pick up the goggles and half-a-dozen lamp.—

“What’s up?”

There was another brief pause. Then Carl confided.

We’re about to mount an assault on the purples that have surrounded the power plant. Maybe your idea will help there.

“Uh, I sure hope so.”

—Yeah. Anyway, give Garner a few more minutes, then wake him. Tell him he’s to come back with Vidor. We’re going to need every hand on this one. Osborn out.

The carrier wave clicked off. Saul stood very still for a moment, shaking his head.

The power plant. I had no idea.

No wonder Virginia had been so terse the last time he had called. He’d felt like a silly teenager, wondering if she still loved him, because she had blown him a hurried kiss and hustled him off the line.

She probably had her hands full right now, preparing mechs to help Carl. If any of a dozen conduits leading into or out of the pile were clogged by organic matter, it could trip an automatic shutdown. That, in turn, could mean the end for all of them.

He ought to give the lamps a brief test before sending a set to Carl. No sense in burdening the man with a clutter of useless equipment if the things wouldn’t do more than give the Halleyforms a suntan. Saul slipped on a set of goggles and bent to turn on the timer.

The sudden brrr-ap! of the tiny alarm made him jump, even though he was ready for it. Then came a faint pop as the lamp suddenly filled the amber tunnel with sharp, actinic light. Even under the goggles, Saul blinked and had to turn away.

When he next looked, he realized that something funny was going on. All at once every surface appeared to be coated in a shimmering haze. The walls themselves seemed to ripple and crawl, like the fur on a caterpillar’s back. At first he thought it was an optical illusion—an effect of the weird coloration and glare. Then he realized.

There’s Halley Life everywhere! It’s impregnated into the fibercloth, and now it’s fleeing from the lamplight.

The fuzzy ripples swept back in waves. Nearby, Saul saw the air begin to fill with a fog of fine dust—killed organisms, he supposed—floating free of the walls and settling with glacial slowness towards the floor. Trying not to inhale any of it, he wafted bits into a sample bag and sealed the container tight.

The, as abruptly as it erupted in brilliance, the lamp shut down. The noisy alarm quit without an echo and suddenly all was dimness and quiet. Saul pulled off the goggles, blinking as he warred for the spots to fade.

His bonephone crackled to life.

—Lintz, Vidor. Saw your glare all the way down at Shaft Three, Doc. Is it safe to come in now? Carl wants Garner and those lamps right away… like yesterday.—

“Uh, yeah.” He shook his head. “Lintz to Spacer Vidor. We have lamps and goggles and fresh coffee for you guys. Come on in, boys.”

He turned and skip-launched himself back into the irregular, vaulted chamber. Through the frosted sides of the slots, the sleepers were still silhouettes. Status lights on each casket made the center of the dim hall glitter like some phosphorescent Christmas tree, or a giant, glimmering starfish at the bottom of the ocean.

Ninety packages, waiting to be opened. Someday. If we make it.

The several-times-delayed unslotting of emergency replacements was reaching a critical stage in sick bay, where Nick Malenkov was all alone, now. One med tech had died of a purple bite, and Peltier, the other, had succumbed to some raging infection yesterday. At this rate it was a good question whether the “unthawing” crew would find anyone alive to greet them when they awakened.

No. We will succeed. We must.

He passed the bench where Joao Quiverian still muttered to himself, piecing together lamps and bulbs with snaillike deliberation. Later, Saul knew, he would have to personally check all the lamps himself.

He made sure the coffee maker was full, then gathered up his own spacesuit.

They’ll be needing all the help they can get, even if Malenkov has declared me an invalid. I may not be able to fight as long and as hard as these youngsters, but even a middle-aged alter kocker like me can hold up a lamp and squeeze a spray bottle in a fight like this.

Funny thing about that. Although he was weary—and in a perpetual haze from the drugs that kept his sinuses clear—in some ways Saul had never felt better. His digestion, for instance—there were no faint twinges anymore, and his knee joints no longer grated and vibrated as he moved.

Weightlessness and calcium deconditioning, he decided…or maybe it’s just that somebody loves me again. Never, never underestimate the effects of morale.

He almost stopped to call Virginia then. But of course he would get his chance to talk to her when he joined the others at the power plant. She would be there, at least in surrogate, controlling up to a dozen mechs, doing the work of ten men.

Perhaps he would have a chance to wink at one of her video pickups, and make her smile.

He had just stepped into his suit—and was reaching for his tabard decorated with a DNA helix—when voices over by the entrance told of the arriving spacers.

Vidor and Ustinov shot through the opening in graceful tandem. Tired or not, pride wouldn’t let them skim walk or pull along the wall cables. The two men twisted in midair and landed in crouched unison not more than two meters in front of Saul.

“Where’s Ted?” Joseph Ustinov asked tersely. The bearded Russo-Canadian took quick note of the direction Saul indicated, and headed out past the stacked packing crates toward the dim corner where Spacer Garners electric blanket was a radiating ball of warmth.

“Got that Java, Doc?” Vidor asked Saul, grinning. The young Alabaman seemed to have thrived in the adversity of the last week. Days of combat in the halls had brought him out of the depression of having been the one to find Captain Cruz slumped over his sleep-webbing, almost dead.

“Sure, Jim.” Saul handed him a bulb of hot, black coffee, and began filling a thermos for Carl and the others. “There are fresh sandwiches over in that bag. I’ll help you fellows tote the lamps and goggles, and show Carl how—”

A shrill, horrified scream seem to curdle the air.

Hot coffee spilled out in globby spray as Saul whirled. Across the dimly lit chamber, Spacer Ustinov tumbled in midair, still rising toward the ceiling and sobbing as he shook a clublike object in one hand.

Someone or something had startled him into leaping skyward with all his might. Whatever it was had scared him half out of his wits, for the man was gibbering, transfixed on the thing he held.

As Saul and Vidor stared, Ustinov cried out again and threw it away. The object arced through the chilled air, curving over gently in Halley’s faint gravity, and struck a packing crate barely meters from Joao Quiverian’s workbench.

The Brazilian scientist jerked back, first in astonishment and then in revulsion when he saw what had bounced within close reach. A delicate bulb shattered into power in his left hand.

There, dripping ocher onto the lime-colored fibercloth floor, lay a dismembered human arm. Impossibly, the grisly limb seemed o be still twitching.

Things, Saul realized, sickly, were crawling out of the hunk of flesh and bone. Purple things.

He grabbed the wide-eyed Vidor by the collar and pushed him toward the stacked equipment. “Get goggles and a lamp!” he told the spacer quickly. “They’re our only weapons here. Joao! Rig an extension to that outlet! Quickly!”

This time the Brazilian didn’t argue. Vidor fumbled with the cords binding the lamps while Saul squeezed a spray of scalding coffee at a purple that was about to duck out of sight behind a sleep slot. A whistle escaped the thing as it retreated back into the open.

“Dammit, Doc!” Vidor cursed. “I gotta teach you how to tie proper knots!”

Saul started to answer when he glanced over his shoulder. “Oh damn,” he moaned. “I’ll be right back.”

“Where are you goin’?” Vidor cried out.

By then, though, the die was cast. Saul had crouched and leaped off into open space.

Vidor was really the one more qualified for this sort of thing. But right then he was tangled up in lamps and cords. Saul had been the one to see Ustinov begin to fall again, and realize that the man was still sobbing and unaware of where he was headed. Even Halley’s gravity wouldn’t allow any explanations or delay.

Ustinov ’s suit was a lot more sophisticated than Saul’s. But the incoherent spacer didn’t seem about to use his jets, or anything else, to keep from falling back toward the tattered ruins of Spacer Tech Garner’s electric blanket, now awrithe with waving purple forms.

Everything was happening in slow motion, or so it seemed to Saul, who spoke quickly into his communicator.

“Lintz routed to Osborn and Herbert. Mayday! Purples in sleep slot one! Garner’s dead. Mayday!”

The two floating men drew toward each other, one rising, the other descending microscopically faster with each passing moment. Saul turned away after one glance down at what awaited the falling spacer. It was more than his stomach could bear.

Oh God, please let me have done this right.

But no. Saul realized that his trajectory was too low! He would pass under Ustinov. It looked as if there was nothing in this world to prevent the man from dropping back into the spreading, pulpy mass.

Suddenly, he was as near as he was going to get. “Ustinov, wake up!” he shouted. “Stretch out!”

The man might have understood, or maybe it was just a spasm. But a booted foot kicked forth and struck Saul’s outstretched hand stingingly. He fumbled for a grip and the momentum exchange sent him rocking over. The cavern whirled as he held on for two seconds, three, and then was kicked free by Ustinov ’s next jerk.

Was that enough? Did I divert his course? Or am I Maybe on my way to meet a crowd of purples up close myself?

The floor came up toward him. Everything might seem to happen in slow motion; but he had to land with energy equivalent to his takeoff, and he had taken off in a hurry. His right shoulder struck hard, knocking the wind out of his lungs in a burst of pain.

He rolled over onto his hands and knees. It took a moment to blink away the dizzy whirling, and another to catch his breath. Then he saw Ustinov, lying only two meters away, moaning, shaking his head, and apparently unaware of the small, crawling things that wriggled toward his warmth from only a few feet away.

Saul gasped for breath and put everything he had into scrambling toward the man, racing to get there first. He lunged, grabbed the folds of Ustinov ’s insulsuit, and fought for traction to drag him backward.

“Don’t move any farther, Dr. Lintz!” It was Vidor calling out to him. “There are two more behind you! The electric blanket must’ve shorted out. The ones not eating Garner are fanning out across the floor now.

Saul had never before felt this way toward any living things—even the fanatics in the mob that had burned down Technion. Right now, though, he wished looks really could kill. He stared at the horrible things closing in on him from all sides, and knew what loathing was.

He gathered the quivering Ustinov into his arms. What is wrong with the man? I thought spacers were built of stronger stuff than this.

My God. I’ll bet he’s been bitten!

Ustinov wasn’t heavy, of course, not in Halley’s gravity. But he massed nearly the same as he had on Earth, and that made the Russo-Canadian’s inertia and bulk awkward. Still dizzy and disoriented, Saul knew he wasn’t ready to jump out of here holding this unwieldy burden.

It was one thing or the other, though. Jump or throw. He crouched.

“I’m tossing him to you! Get ready!”

“No! Wait! I’ve almost got a lamp—”

“No time!” Saul insisted. He uncoiled, heaving with all his might. The helpless man flew out of his arms, sailing over the writhing mass that had erupted through the fibercloth floor in search of heat.

It was a good throw, but recoil sent him drifting backward. He craned to look. Clearly, he was going to land between two of the pulpy, hungry heterotrophs.

Strangely, part of him was less concerned than curious. It was his first chance to look at one of the higher Halleyforms up close and not already pickled for dissection. The nearest one tracked him waving a pulpy maw rimmed with red, glittering needles of primordial nickel iron. There was no face, per se. But he could sense the thing’s regard.

Probably track by infrared, he thought.

They were odd creatures indeed. Though perhaps no less odd than those worms that live down in deep, undersea vents, back on Earth. They, too, dwelled in total darkness, under immense hydrostatic pressures, living off sulfide-transforming bacteria. Lord, thy handiwork never ceases to amaze me.

Marvelous, yes. And mysterious. But ugly was ugly, and death was death.

He fumbled at his waist for something to throw, to change his trajectory, but the belt loops were empty. All he accomplished was to set himself turning awkwardly, still drifting toward the creatures.

No doubt he could squash any number of them in his bare hands, but he had no wish to tangle with them if he could help it, not after Samuelson and Conti had suffered such agony from their poisoned wounds.

Saul writhed around, catlike, somehow bringing his feet to the fore. His left boot caught and the right stabbed out at an awkward angle to compensate, striking a waving, grit-lined orifice. There was a sick, squishy impact as he skidded and began to tip over again.

“Jump, Saul!”

It was his chance. But as he bent his knees, pain lanced up his left ankle and that leg gave way. He swerved to avoid falling into a crowd of open-mawed worms, and in so doing tripped.

The slow-motion illusion helped as he landed on his fingertips and somehow walked across the floor on his hands—hopping from arm to arm to avoid the damned things. There was no other way. If he stopped to turn over or gather his strength, they would get him.

At last, there looked like an open space ahead, where he might flex and really push off…

“Saul!” someone shouted. “Shut your eyes!”

He heard a loud, grating noise.

Oh great! Just when I need to see where I’m going!

His eyes squeezed closed at the very last instant. The last thing he saw was a dirty, segmented mass of pulpy mauve tissue turning toward his heat, bringing forth a round glittering of sharp, primordial stones.

Then the world disappeared in brightness. Saul cried out and his arms convulsed as he pushed away from the floor, drifting off in the direction of who knew what. He wrapped his arms over his eyes and rolled up into a ball, hoping his spacesuit would protect him when he next landed among the ravenous creatures.

The ratcheting sound groaned louder in counterpoint as another lamp joined the first from a new angle. The brilliance could be felt as heat on his skin. Saul couldn’t open his eyes enough even to seek shelter from the beams, designed to be visible across thousands of kilometers of open space, against the diamond-bright stars.

He hit the ground again and rolled to a stop against something hard. Saul tried to keep still, not to move, and imagined himself an icicle.

—Saul? This is Virginia. Can you be more specific? What’s the matter? All of a sudden my remote pickups in sleep slot one have gone out.—

Another voice broke in, —Lintz, Osborn. On our way in. Four with sprayers and torches. E.T.A. two hundred seconds.—

Saul realized then that it must have been no more than a couple of minutes since he had reported the purple breakout. Time had telescoped. The cavalry was coming, but would he last long enough for help to do any good?

Over to one side he heard Spacer Vidor mutter surprised oaths, then shout into his own mike.

“Carl, Jim. Intense UV sends them into retreat! They dissolve if they can’t get out of the light fast enough!”

Saul lay curled in a ball, but his breathing came easier. If only…

There was a loud pop, and the level of hurting brilliance penetrating his tightly closed lids suddenly cut in half. There was cursing, then Vidor spoke again.

“One of the bulbs just blew, but I don’t think it matters any more. They’re all dead or fled. Hang on, Saul. I’ll bring you a set of goggles.”

In a moment Saul felt a hand on his shoulder, and a shadow blotted out the remaining sunlike brilliance. Gratefully, eyes still closed, he lifted his head and helped Vidor fit the covering over his upper face.

“Congratulations, Saul. Damn fine weapon.”

He blinked through tears and blue entopic spots to see the young spacer offer his hand. He reached up and accepted help getting to his feet.

“Uh, thanks.” But he was remembering how few bulbs there were in inventory. Three were gone already. We’re going to have to come up with better tricks than this. We can’t work in goggles all the time, for one thing …

The two men picked their way in low hops past shriveled purple husks over to a charred hole in the yellow floor covering, where the remains of Spacer Garner had tumbled—along with the ill-chosen electric blanket—into a narrow crevice. It was a flaw in the cavern that no one had thought anything of when the chamber was selected and covered over.

“They don’t dig through solid ice!” Vidor sighed. “We thought they might—that they could strike from anywhere at all. What a relief.”

Saul had only been staring, appalled, at the jumble of human remains scattered down a steep crack in the ice. Young Vidor was made of tough stuff.

“They move through low-density veins, then?”

Vidor nodded. “We’ll have to look for more of those and melt ’em shut. I know just how to do it.”

Virginia’s shown me pix of some of his sculptures, Saul remembered. Jim Vidor was a whiz with ice. If anyone could figure out how to seal the chambers, he would.

There came the sound of voices from the Tunnel J entrance. The spacer turned. “I’d better go take the guys some goggles, or shut that lamp off.”

Saul followed. Nothing more could be done for poor Garner, anyway. “Don’t forget the salve,” he called. “You and I are going to get fierce sunburns, as it is.”

In spite of the pain in his ankle and the tremor of a fading adrenaline rush he felt good. An atavistic part of him seemed thrilled at having passed through the last few minutes and survived. Action had it’s points. There were some things one could not get in a lab.

With his goggles on, Joao Quiverian looked like some great nocturnal creature. “You had better look at Ustinov,” he told Saul. “He’s in pretty bad shape.”

Saul nodded. “I’ll go get my bag.”

“If he’s got the same toxins in him that got Conti…”

“There are things I can try. But I’ve got to act fast. Help me, Joao.”

Even if I can’t save him, maybe this time we’ll be able to slow the chemical reaction down enough to slot him. Perhaps someday we’ll have an antidote.

The sole remaining lamp burned on, accompanied by the incessant ratchet of the alarm.

Under the glare, Saul picked up his black bag and took up again, after so many years, the practice of medicine.

VIRGINIA

She scrolled up the lines written yesterday and tried to view them dispassionately. This was her break, and writing poetry seemed a better way to spend it, a quicker mental exit from the grinding relentless mech labor, than slurping up coffee in the lounge. Particularly since there’d probably be nobody else there; anyone not working was surely floating in exhausted sleep.

Crew were supposed to log most of their sack time in the wheel, where centrifugal pseudogravity could mimic the subtle flows that avoided zero-G imbalances. But you got more real rest in Halley’s weak field. The survivors found isolated cubbyholes free of the green gunk and caught what sleep they could on the spot.

The struggle was less panic-driven now, but still critical. They had managed to drive the infestations away from the slots and power stations. By fusing the ice behind the most critical spots, they had denied the things an easy route back.

She should rest, sleep… but sleep wouldn’t come.

The hell with the outside, with grim reality. She plunged into her poetry.

“Um,” she reflected to herself. “Artistic, no. Therapy, maybe.”

CERTAINLY IT REVEALS THE GENERAL TENOR OF YOUR THOUGHTS.

Blue-green letters floated in the holo zone above her.

“JonVon, this is private! I should’ve disconnected.”

SORRY. I DO NOT KNOW HOW TO TELL THIS.

“Common sense should—right, that’s not a characteristic I’ve worked on, have I?”

SOME OF MY SIMULATED PERSONALITIES KNOW RULES, BUT I HAVE NO BASIC UNDERSTANDING OF "COMMON SENSE". PERHAPS IT IS NOT USEFUL IN DAILY WORK?

“No, there just hasn’t been time… never mind.”

MATTERS SEXUAL REQUIRE COMMON SENSE?

“When you’re dealing with humans, yes. Actually, it would be better if you remained silent. Nobody thinks machines have anything to say about sex.”

THERE ARE PSYCHOANALYSIS PROGRAMS I CAN CALL UP, EXPERT SYSTEMS WHICH HAVE A DISTINGUISHED HISTORY OF DIAGNOSING—

“No, JonVon! Just let me get on with my poetry.”

MAY I WATCH?

“I can hardly keep you from reading my doggerel, can I? It’s in General Manuscripts.”

I CAN CONCEAL RESULTS IN MY OWN BANKS.

“Good idea, actually. I don’t want anybody blundering into this file.”

She stared at the screen. JonVon’s intrusion had made her self-conscious. She had never been so overtly sexual in her writings before, and she felt her passion was an intensely private thing, for Saul only. In Hawaii, men had regarded her as somewhat prudish.

So you’ve always been a little shy about it… so what? You have to overcome that!

She frowned at the poem. Age-old custom dictated that love poems should be written in flowing ink on thick, luxuriant, creamy paper… not glowing letters in open space. Well, the hell with that. Let’s see… my thighs aren’t thick, actually… is that part worth saving for the alliteration?… skip that and try something else …

She stopped, her heart thumping.

SYNTACTICAL STRUCTURE—

“Shut up!”

Virginia unbuckled from her couch, threw aside the link coupling, and launched herself for the doorway.

STORE COMMAND?

“Shove it, for all I care!”

She moved quickly through the corridors, the long glides between kicks seeming to last forever. It would take only a few minutes to reach Saul’s lab—impossibly short, considering how unreachable he had seemed to be, how much she had missed him.

Just before the turn down Shaft 1, which would take her to him, she ran right into Carl Osborn and Jim Vidor, coming down the hall without their helmets on. Both their suits were scratched and blotted with chemical stains. Vidor’s face was puffy, unshaven, and his eyes seemed to drift far away. They were towing a body in a shroud.

“Who…

“Quiverian,” Carl said. “He’s gotten too sick. We can’t wait any longer, or he’ll die.”

“Hi ho, hi ho,” Vidor said with thin humor, “it’s to the slots we go.”

Virginia clung to a handhold. “We… we’ll have to unslot someone.”

“Right,” Carl said worriedly. “We’ve got six almost thawed. Want to decide who’s next?”

“No, I…” She knew she should help, but… “I’m going to see Saul.”

“He’s still off limits except for real necessity,” Carl said stiffly. He stopped his slow kick-glide rhythm and let the body come to a halt. Vidor compensated awkwardly on his own side, looking tired.

“You guys see him. He works beside you all!”

“Sure, but we aren’t intimate with him. You an I both know what you’ll do—”

“Mind your own damn business, Carl!” She felt her face flush.

Carl turned away, obviously trying to keep in control. “Malenkov said Saul’s to be on at least semiquarantine—”

“I don’t think that means anything anymore, now that Malenkov’s dying. Saul is our doctor now.”

“I think it’s a bad idea to risk—”

“Carl, I’ll take my chances.”

“Stay away from the rest of us, then,” Vidor said sternly. “Lintz is an okay guy, but I don’t let him come too close. You touch him, same applies to you.”

Virginia was startled. She liked Vidor, but the man’s face was a stiff mask now, hostile and wary. He tugged at the comatose Quiverian’s tow-line and started it moving again. But his usual deft sureness was gone and he seemed to be having trouble keeping the forces acting through a single axis. He looked as clumsy as a groundhog.

“Don’t worry, I will,” Virginia said angrily. “Maybe I’ll just quarantine myself, too!”

She kicked off and sped away, not bothering to look back. Hell, Vidor looks worse than Saul. Then she put her irritation behind her as best she could.

When she entered the lab, Saul looked up in surprise. In the enameled lab glow his haggard, gray face lit with joy. She knew she had made the right decision.

“You really shouldn’t risk…” he said without much conviction.

She bore down on him.

The hell with poetry, she thought. I’ll take the real thing.

CARL

Jim Vidor wasn’t being much help.

He coughed into his hands, leaning against the wall of the sleep-slot prep room. Vidor was pale, with the same pasty mottling and strange stiff sheen that Quiverian had developed less than two days ago.

Carl finished fitting the nutrient webbing around Quiverian’s body and attached the sensor tabs. Everything looked right, but he went over the whole chemline and circuit layout again. You couldn’t be too careful. One bad connection and they died on you. The monitor computer should pick up errors, but the moment you started relying on the backup systems, well, that was the beginning of the end as far as he was concerned.

As the crisis went on and on, Carl increasingly found himself being meticulous, his way of compensating for fatigue.

“Blood pH stabilized. Metabolic Q-10 on track. Might as well file him,” Carl said.

Vidor nodded, eyes runny, and shuffled forward to help. Together they maneuvered the body into the slot, sealed it, and attached the external hoses. The banks of filled containers in the prep room formed a sphere around them, so they worked under a frosty dome. Cottony clouds drifted lazily in the air currents over their heads. These slots had flown out on the Sekanina and had tricky hose connectors. Somehow nothing ever gets completely standardized on a mission, Carl thought moodily. Then you spend years tinkering and retrofitting.

“No ceremony this time?” Carl said.

“Don’t feel like it,” Vidor agreed.

They were all too worn down to keep up the niceties. “Go on, get some rest,” Carl said kindly. Not that he really thought it would do much good.

He logged Quiverian into the over-all monitoring programs while Vidor left, moving as though his joints were sore. Same as Quiverian, Carl thought. But neither of them got that brown rash that grew all over Samuelson. Different symptoms—or different diseases?

Not that it mattered all that damn much, now. At this rate they’d all be gone inside a week.

Which meant he had to start some more unslottings right away. Now.

They were at a crucial point. The six thawing in sick bay would not be enough to keep Halley Core running, not while they recuperated. If the diseases felled Virginia, Saul, himself, Lani… the expedition would fail. Unattended, the slots would malf one by one. Halley would become an endlessly orbiting cemetery of frozen corpses.

He thumbed in his Priority control code and set to work. Some simple systems had to be warmed up, calculations made, drug inventories drawn on. Carl had some experience with the procedures from the Encke mission. He worked as well s he could, referring to the manual whenever he had doubts. Saul Lintz could advise him if absolutely necessary… even with rusty skills, Saul was still the doctor. But…

But what? Yeah, I know—I don’t want to call him. I don’t care if I never see the bastard again. And I know it’s just childish jealousy, too. But that doesn’t make things any easier. Just the opposite, maybe.

It was a good idea to get this practice himself, anyway. In a few days he would probably be slotting Saul. I hope Virginia doesn’t catch whatever he’s got.

He was working slowly, his thinking mired in mud. He had to shake off the mood, he knew that, or else he’d make some dumb mistake. Music? That was about all he had these days. He’d been listening to Mozart and Liszt and Haydn for sixteen hours every day, the only way to distance himself from the backbreaking, unending job of cleanup. And all the time watching over one shoulder to see if a goddamn purple hadn’t broken through the insulation nearby, wasn’t there waiting for him to. brush against it, burn through his suit, get its deadly poisons into him …

“Carl!”

He turned, surprised by the feminine voice. Virginia! She didn’t go to him after all.

The sight of Lani entering the prep room crushed his sudden hope.

“I heard about Quiverian, thought I’d come down and…oh You’ve already slotted him?”

Carl nodded.

“No ceremony?”

“Wasn’t in the mood. Jim’s not feeling too well, and a ceremony by yourself…”

Lani studied him sympathetically. “I understand.”

“Maybe we’ll all get together tonight, hoist a few beers ….” He let the sentence trickle lamely away, remembering that they had almost started a romance, back a few lifetimes ago. He hadn’t thought of that for some time. Every day he revised his opinion of Lani upward, but his pulse still quickened for Virginia. Not that it matters … We’re all run ragged.

She nodded emphatically. “Yes. We could use a little group solidarity. You’re the leader now, Carl. You’ll have to hold us together.”

He had been nominal leader for more than a week, though without time to think of himself that way. “All six of us? With two or three sick’? Some crew. Half of shift one gone in—what? ten days? No, less.” He shook his head. “Things’re movin’ too fast.”

What would Captain Cruz have done that I haven’t? What have I missed?

“You’re tired.” She put a hand on his shoulder and patted him gently. Like I was a big dumb animal, he thought. Well, I’m not much better than that right now.

“I… I’m glad you came.”

“So am I. You obviously need help.”

“I started unslotting a couple more.”

“Won’t we need a dozen at least?”

“That’s what I need help with. We must have good people, but… well, who would you pick to introduce into this death house?”

Lani nodded silently, her face pensive and withdrawn. He wondered how she was dealing emotionally with the ever-present threat. She might be catching something from him—or vice versa—right now. They had no real idea what vector these diseases followed.

“Not my friends…”

He was surprised. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. I’m figuring on picking people I know can stand up to this.”

“I see. I considered first sheltering my friends; you think of pulling out those you can trust. That’s why you are suited to command, and I am not.”

Carl shrugged. He knew he was no real leader, not remotely like Captain Cruz; he just did what seemed obvious. Her other point was right, though. It was a lot less painful to watch comparative strangers sicken and die.

“I don’t like having to make these decisions on my own. I’m just an ordinary spacer, This is life and death, for chrissakes.”

“So it is.”

In a subtle way Lani withdrew from him, standing apart, face blank and eyes wary, waiting for his orders. She didn’t want the responsibility. Neither do I.

“Okay, I’ve got to tell the system which slots to start warming, or we can’t go any further.” He turned to the big console and began running his hands down the displayed list of crew skills. He pressed a finger at the dimple points next to two names.

“Jeffers and Sergeov,” he said grimly. Then he managed a dry, crusty chuckle. “Boy, are they going to be surprised.”

SAUL

Enough. Leave his poor body alone.

Saul rocked back from the treatment table and put down his implements.

“Cease code blue. Halt resuscitation procedures,” he said to the spidery med-mechs clustered around the pale, waxy figure that had been Nicholas Malenkov. “Maintain type-six tissue oxygenation, and begin precooling glycogen infusion for term storage.”

It was too late to “sick slot” the Russian. His dying had penetrated too deeply. Saul’s only recourse was to prepare the corpse as well as he could and actually freeze it against a hoped-for day when both thaw and cure might be available.

The master unit beeped twice. Saul, who had been looking sadly at his dead friend, glanced up.

“Yes? What’s the problem?”

“Clarification request, Doctor;” the med-mech announced. “Please select infusion and cooling profile. Also, term-slotting requires a death certification.”

He nodded. With clinical skills as rusty as his, it was a wonder he remembered the right general procedure at all.

“All right, then. Voice-ident:. Dr Saul Lintz citizen of the Diasporic Confederacy, seventh physician on Halley Expedition. Code number…” He pressed fingers at his temples. “I forget. Fill it in from the records.”

“Yes Doctor,” the machine assented quickly.

“I hereby certify Dr. Nicholas Malenkov, citizen of Greater Russia, expedition second physician, to be deceased beyond recall by available means. Cause: massive peripheral neural, damage brought on by undiagnosed, raging infection which crossed the blood-brain barrier three hours ago. Details and tissue analysis to follow in addendum.

“Patient term-slotted on this date…”

Saul looked up at his reflection in the side of the gleaming mech…pale, yes, tired. More tired than he looked, apparently.

What is the date? Was it still November 2061? Or already December?

Have I missed Miriam’s birthday? Only ten years since she died at Gan Illana. And yet it seems like another century.

Sometimes it felt as if he was fighting on for one reason only—so that Virginia could get to see age twenty-nine. If they were still alive, in six months, to put another candle on her cake, then he would find a new priority. One thing at a time.

“Fill in the date. And select the most commonly used slotting procedure for neural-damage cases,” he told the mech.

“Yes Doctor.” The machine would consult the mission mainframe, aboard the Edmund Halley, and take care of the details.

There was little likelihood that medical science would have learned to reverse such massive trauma in eighty years—as well as how to thaw bodies frozen solid as ice. Still, he owed it to Nick to offer him that chance.

In any event, term-slotting did not call for human supervision. Let the mechs do it. If—when—we go home, it’d be best if the procedures used to cool and store the body were as standard as possible.

Saul turned to leave the treatment room, leaving behind him the whirr of automatic processing. As the door hissed shut he rested his shoulder against the fibercloth wall. His arms felt heavy, even in the thin gravity. His sinuses throbbed.

Well? he asked inwardly. What’re you planning to do? Develop into a real sickness and kill me? Or quit bugging me and go away!

The damn cold had been hanging on for eight weeks! In all of a life plagued by little, dripping bouts with one virus after another, he had never, ever suffered anything really serious. But now this lingering, dull ache was really getting to him.

He shook his head to clear it. Make up your damn minds! he told the bugs, at the moment not caring if they were cometary scourges or more banal imports from a warm and fecund Earth. Right now Saul didn’t see anything unscientific in personifying his parasites. He hated them.

Poor Nick Malenkov, survived by the man he nearly slotted. He tried to remember the big, brilliant bear of a Russian the way he had known him in life, but it was hopeless. All he could see was the pale slackness of cheeks unanimated by emotion… the emptiness of eyes unbacked by mind.

Oh, Lord, he prayed. Don’t let anything like this happen to Virginia.

She had used an override to get into his room, two days ago, and by some definitions committed a completely shameless act of rape. His weak protests had been smothered under her warm body, her blazing mouth—as she shred in a moment any microfauna he had, and thereby ended any further argument over protecting her from contagion.

A decisive woman. She had hardly left his side since, except for the fourteen-hour shifts, of course. And although he worried, Saul could not say he was anything but glad.

It’s her choice, he thought. And Carl Osborn will just have to learn to live with it.

For as long as the three of them lasted, at least.

Yesterday he had helped slot Jim Vidor, feverish and raving. At least that time they were able to get the poor fellow in in time. Lani Nguyen had watched raggedly. For lack of any real attention from Carl, she had taken up briefly with Jim. Now she was as alone as before.

His wrist beeper pulsed. The mechs in the recuperation chamber were signaling him.

Enough loafing, he thought. Somebody must have wakened, at last. One of the first six.

Put on a happy face, he reminded himself as he started stepping into isolation garments. While slipping on antiseptic booties he touched the bandage covering his left ankle.

The scar was almost healed now. He still wasn’t sure how he had been cut, during that frantic struggle with the purples in sleep slot 1. At first he had been certain it was a bite from one of the horrible native worms, but after what happened to Peltier, and Ustinov, and Conti, he figured it couldn’t have been. There had been a swelling and soreness, then it had gone away.

Just a scrape, I suppose. A man like me won’t die of a purple bite, anyway. And there’s too little gravity here to be hanged.

His nose itched.

I’ll probably die in a sneezing fit.

Saul finished dressing. He put on an isolation helmet and passed into the booth with a flashing green light over the entrance.

Someone had indeed awakened. It was Bethany Oakes, the first person decanted after Captain Cruz’s death. The assistant expedition leader had been a tough case. Her thawing had not been easy.

Hibernation wasn’t a natural human function. Inducing it involved complex, massive doses of drugs that dropped the body into a slumbering, near-death state—reducing metabolism an pH, cooling tissues down to a bare degree above freezing. The process was anything but routine, even after decades of use in space flight. To prove it for interstellar travel times had been one dream of Miguel Cruz-Mendoza. It was supposed to be another gift from the Halley Expedition to the people of Earth.

Working alone, with equipment that might or might not still be polluted with Halleyforms, Malenkov had chosen the slow-thaw method, allowing the patient to throw off sleep-center suppression naturally. The decision had been questionable. It might be safer, but it left the possibility that the decanted would awaken with no one left alive to greet them.

Bethany Oakes was still an ample woman. Three weeks’ hibernation under an IV drip wouldn’t change that much. But her eyelids were already dark with the blue heaviness of slot stupor. As Saul approached, they fluttered open. Her pupils contracted unevenly in the light.

He dimmed the wall panels and picked up a squeeze tube of electrolyte-balance fluid to wet her lips. Her tongue flicked out, drawing in the sweetness.

Good, he thought. The sipping reflex was a rule-of-thumb test Nicholas had taught him. A sign of good progress.

In the hazel eyes, an apparent struggle—a mind climbing laboriously out of the cold.

“S-Saul… ?” Her voice was barely audible.

“Yes, Bethany. It’s me, Saul Lintz.” He bent forward.

“Are we. …” She swallowed, and smiled thinly. “Are we at aphelion yet?”

Saul blinked. Of course, the expedition’s second-in-command hadn’t been scheduled to be unslotted for thirty-three years, when the comet would have nearly reached its farthest point from the sun, when the colony would be briefly busy again preparing for the rocket maneuver that would send them hurtling past Jupiter toward rendezvous with the waiting harvesters, nearly four more decades beyond that.

How could he tell her that it had been more like thirty-three days!

He shook his head, wishing he had better news, and wondering how to tell it.

Saul smiled in his best bedside manner. “No, Betty, not quite…”