The Heart of the Comet

VIRGINIA

What a difference a mere three weeks made!

Virginia wondered as she glide-walked past hurried, bustling workers. Had it been only that long? Only twenty-five days since the remnants of the First Watch had gathered, weary and haggard, to note the passing of the year 2061?

An ebullient New Year’s Eve it had not been. Even with the wall holos set to their cheeriest summer scenes, it still felt like the winter of Ragnarok. They had huddled near the farthest end of the mammoth Central Complex Lounge—four poor survivors—and toasted from Carl’s carefully hoarded supply of Lacy Traces liqueur.

The bottle had gone quickly. There seemed little point in saving anything.

All attempts at conversation had lapsed. The vids from Earth were too depressing to watch—snappy scenes of commercial consumption or, even worse, an awful melodrama about the Scott expedition to the South Pole… no doubt somebody’s stupid idea of a gesture in their honor.

At her suggestion, Saul and Carl had tried to play their first game of chess since the death of Captain Cruz—or since Saul and Virginia had taken up shared residence together. But it wasn’t like before. The two men had hardly exchanged a word or a glance, and the play was savage. When Saul’s wrist comp called him away to tend the thawing sleepers again, Lani and Virginia had shared a look of relief.

She would never forget that gloomy evening for as long as she lived.

That had been less than a month ago. Now… well, things were different. At least superficially, they were much better. One at least heard voices in the cool hallways again, and people were trying to find solutions.

Virginia was also getting better at moving about in Halley’s soft gravity. She skim-glided quickly, grabbing the fiber floor with velcroed slippers and pulling along a wall cable on her way toward Control Central.

It was still a new experience, coming this way without a mind fogged from lack of rest, or a body nearly limp from fatigue. A full seven hours’ sleep was like a sinful luxury.

Yesterday, her shift had coincided with Saul’s. They’d had a chance to make love for the first time in a week, and slept side by side, linked through her electronic familiar, touching in the dim glow of JonVon’s status lamps. Saul had to leave early to get ready for today’s test of his new invention, but Virginia had awakened feeling his warmth still on the webbing beside her, his musty, now-familiar scent on her arm.

Someday, when I have some free time again, I’ll have to find out what JonVon’s making of our dreams. Saul and I are getting closer all the time, our shared, enhanced senses more and more vivid. I wonder—is it possible that I might have been right, after all? Is it possible to simulate human mental processes so well that you can achieve “telepathy” of a sort?

If so, can we give Earth at least one present, before we all die?

This morning she had stopped just before leaving her cubicle, hesitating by the slide door, and turned back to pick up a stylus. On the face of a memory pad she had scribbled quickly… not a poem—not yet—but a sketch for one.

The mixed verse had reminded her of her homesickness. She missed Kewani Langsthan, the only other Hawaiian on the first shift, who had lost an arm to an explosion on A Level, on Christmas Eve, and had to be slotted immediately when the stump went infected.

No Hawaiian was among the replacements. She didn’t know whether to regret it or to be glad that her countrymen were being spared this terrible time.

Anyway, the news from the island republic was not good. The last time she had had time to listen to the Earthcasts, tensions had been rising. Nations of the Arc of the Living Sun had accused Governor Ikeda’s government of “unecological projects.”

Ever since that evening months ago, when she had briefly shared Saul’s memories of his lost homeland, she had suffered from a deep, lingering fear for her own people’s precarious renaissance.

The sketch had disappeared into JonVon’s stochastic well of memory. Perhaps she would call it up again to work on it, if she had time, or remembered. Meanwhile, her pet machine would echo with her musings. Unlike the prim processors of Earth—or the stolid mission mainframe the techs had begun crating to move down from the Edmund to Central—JonVon did not simply file things away. He…it…was programmed to “remember” from time to time, untriggered and unpredictably, and to “ponder” new correlations.

She herself had no time to devote to the protect with which she had planned to while away the years. But JonVon would always have at least a small corner of memory devoted to it, gathering and organizing data for when, at last, she could turn her attention back to the question of intelligence itself.

I must remember to ask him what he has learned, now and then.

And here we are, she thought on coming to a double hatch with a burning amber light overhead. The entrance to Central Control… command post for the invading hordes from Earth.

Before entering, she had to submit to another damned cleaning. A bulky mech towered beside the hatchway.

“Please present all surfaces for ultrasonic exposure,” it directed, holding forth a flat, humming plate and a vacuum hose.

She sighed and stepped forward, turning before the double-tubed, jury-rigged machine. Harmonics from high-frequency sound waves stroked her skin in multiple octaves, all the way down to a low, grumbling growl that made her teeth grate.

She knew all the override codes, of course. But it would be better to submit to these measures, as half-ass and useless as they had to be. Somebody was bound to find out if she got into the habit of bypassing regs for her own convenience.

The low tingling told of bits of debris being shaken loose from her clothing and skin, to be sucked away into the vacuum inlet. Of course, this wouldn’t really stop people from tracking around cometary germs. Saul had said that the only long-term effect of the procedure would be to destroy all their clothes and eventually wreck everybody’s hearing.

The tingling stopped and the vacuum hose shut off. Virginia imagined a puff of air, cotton fibers, and skin cells-all sighing out into space far above, where the stars shone unblinking on a stark icescape.

“Prepare eye protection, please.”

She grimaced and drew the goggles from her waistband.

“Lay on, MacDuff,” she muttered, and scrunched her eyes shut as the hallway seemed to fill with actinic brilliance.

This was sheer idiocy, she knew. The UV lamps were their best weapon against the Halleyforms, but there were only about two dozen left, and they were burning out at a rate of one or more a day! There were already numerous cases of sunburn and skin rash.

The uncomfortable glare cut off and she breathed in relief.

“You may pass,” the mech pronounced.

“Thanks,” she answered sarcastically s the softly hissing door opened, letting her into a bustle of activity.

Voices tinged with anxiety…human torsos that disappeared into hooded data-speech shells… hands working switches or mech-waldo controls. Yes, there’s quite a difference that three weeks can make.

But the undercurrent of dark fear was still with them. If anything, it had grown.

Over in a far corner, a half-dozen forms clustered in low-G crouches around a holo map. Virginia recognized Dr. Oakes and her chief aides. Another damn strategy meeting.

Olakou na alii… They are the chiefs, heaven help us.

I wish Saul didn’t have to go down to the inner chambers to test his new machine today. I miss him so, already.

Virginia stepped up behind Walter Schultz, the man now operating mech-control 1. She was still early, but the fellow clearly needed to be relieved. His shoulders were hunched under the isolation hood, and his hands clenched whitely on the waldo-teleoperator controls.

She knew what he was going through. Mech operators had it almost as bad as the men in the corridors. They weren’t in direct physical danger, of course, but the hours were worse, and the intense mental effort just as draining. From the displays she saw that Walter was handling four big ’bots all by himself. He needed a break.

It wouldn’t be a good idea to pull him back too abruptly, though. Two days ago she had tapped Walter’s shoulder while he was linked. The man had whirled on her, pupils dilated, roundly cursing her as a “meddling Percell bitch.”

He had apologized later, but the phrase stuck in her mind.

I’ll tell him I’m here over an open comm line. But her hand hesitated just over the panel microphone. From under the isolation hood she heard Schultz sniffling. It was hard to tell if the man had a cold or if he was crying.

These days, it could be either.

“Virginia!” a high voice called out behind her. “Virginia. Would you come over here please, dear?”

Other than Saul, only one person spoke to her that way. She turned and nodded to the brown-haired, matronly woman motioning to her from the other side of the room.

“Yes, of course. Dr. Oakes.” She glide-walked quickly toward the big holo tank where the acting section leaders stood staring gloomily at the big display.

The current chief of Cometary Science Section, Masao Okudo, moved pointedly away from her end of the table, as did Major Lopez, the senior awakened military man. Virginia ignored the slight. It was part of the general undercurrent of resentment against her, as well as Carl and Saul and Lani. As if the First Watch had somehow been criminally incompetent in letting all this come about.

She had always found humans to be irrational creatures, deep down—herself included, of course. Many resented the choices that had been made, of who should be unslotted as part of the Crisis Management Team. “Why me?” was a refrain she had heard repeatedly, muttered in anger or wailed out loud as one after another of the wakers was injured fighting the crud in the halls, or fell ill to some unknown bug.

Carl had to make those hard choices, after Captain Cruz died. The wakers blamed him. And it didn’t help at all that he was a Percell.

I suppose the only thing keeping him and Saul and me from being completely ostracized is the fact that we’re indispensable.

Bethany Oakes, at least, seemed immune to any such feelings. She smiled as kindly as ever as she shook Virginia ’s hand.

“Thank you for coming over, dear. We are having a bit of a disagreement over a technical matter, and I was wondering if perhaps you could help us with the expertise you picked up during those frightful weeks you and the others faced this emergency all alone.”

Virginia nodded. “I’ll help any way I can.”

Dr. Oakes smiled back with moist, small lips. Virginia couldn’t help noticing that her face was puffy, and she wore makeup that seemed skewed, somehow.

Oh fates, you are mean bitches. You had to take Captain Cruz—our Columbus, our Drake—right at the very start, didn’t you? He made an expedition out of a spill of exiles and misfits, and now he’s gone. This nice woman is simply no substitute.

Dr. Oakes turned to Lefty d’Amaria, the head of Virginia ’s own department, Computations and Mechanicals. Lefty, at least, gave Virginia a quick smile, which she returned gratefully. Alas, the man gripped the table-edge uncertainly, and his brow was speckled with perspiration.

“There’re two problems we… we wanted to consult you about, Ginnie. The first has to do with how to fight the stuff out in the halls.”

She opened her hands. “Dr. Matsudo and Dr. Lintz have been studying the gunk. I’ve had less experience with it than any of the other survivors of the First Watch.”

D’Amaria nodded. “Yes, in person. But you’ve fought it through mechs, helping Osborn and his crews. What we want to know is if you think it might be possible to retrofit the surface mechs for work in the shafts.”

“Well, we’ve already reworked some of them—ship-utility robots, mostly.”

“No.” D’Amaria shook his head. “We’re thinking about the big ones. The real surface mechs.”

Virginia blinked. Were things already so desperate? Surface mechs had never been meant to work in tunnels. The thought of those great-limbed behemoths and spidery cranes cramming their way down here, under the ice, was enough to make her cringe.

“I… I don’t know for sure. We’d have to unlimber some of the factory gear…”

“A couple of factory-team crew are being warmed now,” Lopez told her. “Jeffers and Yeomans and Johanson are already awake.”

Virginia nodded. “But even with the factory running, it’d be a mess. In order to fit lifters or pushers into the shafts, we’d have to do more than just remove their legs and rollers. I’d have to burn new patterns into read-only memory. With the facilities at hand, it’d be a patch job, and I’m not sure it could be reversed.”

Okudo nodded. “Fine, fine. Then you are saying it can be done.”

Virginia blinked. “But it’s crazy! We’d never he able to set up the Nudge Launchers at aphelion without surface mechanicals. And without the Nudge. Halley’s orbit can’t he shifted. We’ll never be able to go—”

“Will you shut your stupid Percell mouth?” Major Lopez hissed quickly, baring his teeth. The Space Corps officer’s eyes seemed to burn, and he pulled back only slowly when Dr. Oakes cleared her throat pointedly. He glanced at the acting mission commander, and then back at Virginia. “Excuse me. I mean will you keep your voice down? Please?” His sarcasm was evident.

Virginia ignored him.

—We’ll never be able to go home, she thought, finishing her agonized complaint in her own mind.

Dr Oakes spoke to the military man. “Now, Fidel. I’m sure Miss Herbert realizes how essential it is to be discreet about some of the implications of our upcoming actions. Morale is bad enough as it is.”

“I’ll say,” Okudo stuttered. “I hear some crew are even feigning illness, trying every malingering trick in order to get back into the slots.”

I didn’t know. Virginia ’s stomach felt queasy.

Captain Cruz would have been more forthright with us. And nobody would have even considered letting him down by trying to run away into time.

Bethany Oakes contemplated the holo tank moodily, giving Virginia her first real chance to look for herself at the big display.

The region penetrated by tunnels was no larger than it had been a month ago, still taking up less than five percent of the volume of Halley Core, in a warren clustered around the north polar region. A few large chambers stood out, including three where the sleep slots lay buried. And this one, Central, amid a cluster of rooms barely a kilometer straight down from the tethered Edmund Halley.

Thank heavens most of the hydroponics are still aboard the Edmund, Virginia thought. Safe from the native lifeforms we’ve inadvertently wakened down here. If the gunk or the bugs ever got into the main gardens, we’d likely starve in short order. As it is, we’ll probably be going hungry soon anyway, if we have to keep this many awake much longer.

Nearly all the depicted tunnels and shafts were stained, the colors standing for different types of infestation. Only the four main chambers still shone antiseptic, uninvaded white—along with one path to the polar storage yards. And it had taken every UV lamp and half an eighty-year supply of disinfectants to keep just those areas clear.

Most passages glimmered in some shade of green where the only known invader was some variety of the lichenlike growths popularly called gunk. Those routes still held air and heat. For all anyone could tell, they might even be perfectly safe. At least Saul thought they were. He had gone off more than once, heedless of supposed danger, in search of more samples to study.

Maybe that’s one of the things that attracts me to him. Saul wasn’t brave in the flashy way, but in a manner that seemed to say “living day from day has always been a calculated risk.”

Perhaps her love was analytically simple. For Saul did remind her of her father. Anson Herbert had possessed the same sad, gentle wisdom, had shown her more in his quiet strength than other men with all their flamboyant posturing.

Virginia shook her head. Anson had been dead for two years, but she could almost hear him, telling her to quit daydreaming and get to work. There was problems to be solved, and always idiots trying to use hammers to fix clocks.

Lopez was gesturing at the tunnels that had the worst infestations, especially along the ducts where heat flowed from the power plant. Purple, yellow, and red stains showed where more active Halleyforms had erupted, tearing tunnel seals, wreaking havoc on vital machines, and, occasionally, even reaching out with a poisonous grasp after a passing Earthman.

“…Bigger surface mechs could patrol an expanded hallway, here, scraping and remelting the ice at intervals, sealing crevices and removing infested layers for disposal at the surface…”

Virginia couldn’t believe she was hearing this. The plan was lunacy. It was a cumbersome scheme that ignored the seven decades ahead.

“There are still other options to try,” she suggested. “Saul is working on a possible way—”

Lopez sniffed loudly. “Lintz’s death ray, right?”

Bethany Oakes nodded without turning her gaze from the map. “We can hope somebody comes up with something new, of course. But every conventional approach has failed. One thing is certain: If the infestation reaches the sleep slots, we are quite finished.”

She looked at Virginia. “That is why we asked you to join us over here, not only to help convert surface mechs for the struggle below. You…”

The older woman paused, blinking, as if trying to keep her train of thought. Virginia realized with shock that she must be on some sort of drug.

“…You are the only real expert we have on that old subject…artificial intelligence. I am familiar with the traditional proofs, of course, that the real thing is impossible. But a very good, flexible simulant might be enough.” She sighed. “Anyway, we must grasp at any straw. Saul Lintz’s invention, and even robots capable of acting on their own.

“We must come up with a way to make as many mechs as autonomous as possible… and soon. You see… we are losing men and women faster than we are unslotting them.”

Virginia stared. She found she could say nothing at all.

“This is a military secret, Herbert,” Major Lopez growled. “You tell anyone about this and I’ll have your Percell ass.”

Virginia only shook her head, and let him take it to mean anything he wanted.

A little later, by the refreshment center, she nursed a bulb of weak tea and wondered how she might even approach the nearly impossible tasks she had been assigned. It was ironic. I never thought anyone would ask me to work on machine intelligence.

Under these circumstances, it seemed so very wrong to her.

That was when the man she wanted least to encounter floated up next to her with a soft push of nubby legs.

“Well, sweet machine lady.” Otis Sergeov grinned. “I suppose you have heard latest interesting developments, Earthside? Have you not?”

“Go away, Otis,” she said levelly. “I don’t want to hear any more bad news right now, especially from you. What are you doing here, anyway? You’re hall crew.”

The Russian Percell shrugged. His eyelids were still slightly blue-tinged and his cheeks chalky from his recent awakening from slot sleep.

“I just stopped by to grab a look on way to Shaft Three. I go to help your lovers test their new machine to save the world.”

Virginia looked up quickly. “What are you talking about?”

“You know who I mean.” He winked. “Osborn and Lintz.”

Sergeov held out a small slip of paper with her name scratched on the outside. She plucked it up with her fingertips and unfolded it to read the message. Virginia nodded.

“So you’re going to help Carl and Saul test the new beamers. Is that it?”

He nodded.

“Okay, then. Tell Saul I’ll arrange to send him the mechs he needs for the experiment. I’ll scrape them up somewhere.”

Sergeov nodded. “Ah, ways to get around channels. I knew that he had influence with Secret Mistress of all Machines. I must learn his tricks.”

Virginia shrugged. Sergeov had had a reason to seek her out. Now she only wanted his visit to end. “Is that all, Otis?”

“Only one more thing. A personal curiosity. I did underrate you, Virginia. You may be Orthophile, but at least you chose the father—or uncle—of our race for shacking up with. He is still Ortho, but so is anybody over fifty, so if you are so kinky as to prefer old men, I guess you have no better choice, eh?”

She glared at him. “You dirty-minded little.”

“Wait until I get that old Hmmm? Will I then chance have?”

Virginia ’s head whirled. The man said so many infuriating things, each deserving to be burnt down with scathing logic. Oh, why am I so compulsive? He’s not looking for an argument over semantics, he wants to get on my nerves, that’s all.

“Fuck you, Otis,” she said at last.

Sergeov blinked in momentary surprise, then he laughed. His head rocked back and he cried out in delight. “Said well! If only we had you on Earth, day before yesterday! You could have told them.”

“Told who?”

“Bastards in Geneva.”

Virginia hesitated, feeling suddenly cold.

“What’s happened on Earth?”

“If you had more than time of day for your own kin, you would have by now known,” Sergeov taunted her. “We have no one to talk to but each other now… now that Orthos blame us for the diseases.”

“They do not…” Virginia closed her eyes and resolved not to be sidetracked. “Tell me what happened on Earth, Otis. Or this time I really will break your arm.”

The Russian spacer nodded. His voice was suddenly subdued.

“There was coup, Virginia. Hawaii is now under Arc of the Sun.”

“What?” She stared. “But… But that’s impossible! How?”

“Mercenaries from Philippines. Governor Ikeda dead. There is martial law.”

“But the Thirty-second Amendment… the United States has to defend—”

Sergeov shrugged. “Supreme Court of United States met in emergency session, Virginia… ruled that Hawaii, since 2026, is been semisovereign… I think that is proper phrase Means a de facto Arcist government is hokay—so long as it pays federal taxes on time, and keeps external-affairs-nose clean.

“They have already the Percell School closed down. Shut down uplift-research institute and that big tidal-energy project. More is to come, for sure.”

Sergeov came forward, one hand on a rail, breathing intensely. His voice was thick with sarcasm “Now you see? See why we could have yesterday used your eloquence back on Earth? The case was only six to three, decided. Surely if you had there been, you would have been able to convince them. Or at least could have told them fuck you right into their Ortho…”

He stopped then, because Virginia had already stumbled out into the hallway, pat the hulking decontamination robot, ignoring its monotone request that she submit to its worthless sound-and-light treatment. She moved without destination. blinded by sudden tears, navigating purely by rote.

CARL

Things were getting bad.

Carl drifted on a tether, waiting for Saul Lintz to show up. He was glad for the break.

In the last few days he’d learned to take his rest where lie found it—in little cat naps and food breaks, using every slack moment to let his muscles forget about what he was putting them through. There wasn’t time to get mechs into place for most jobs, and a lot of it they couldn’t do anyway.

Good old grunt work, Carl thought. Only it’s different if your life depends on it.

In a way, he was glad he wasn’t running things. Major Lopez, who barely concealed his distrust of Percells, had all the headaches. Fine. Let him sweat.

There weren’t enough hands to control the green gunk algae, much less the big forms. Bethany Oakes was busily unslotting people to help out, but that took time. He had heard things weren’t running well down there, either. Some unslotted ones were angry at being reawakened early, and then scared of catching the whatsits diseases running around.

Not that he could blame them. He had a new guy on his crew, a husky Norwegian named Veerlan, and already the sniffles and coughing were starting. The man had been out only thirty-five hours, hardly even fit for heavy work yet.

“Is the team ready?” Saul’s voice came to Carl out of a foggy blur. Saul landed stiffly on fiberthread nearby and hooked a line to a stay.

“Ah… yeah. Not much of a team, though.”

“How many?” Saul seemed alert and ready, even though long fatigue lines rutted his face. He carried a bulky machine strapped to his back.

“Four.”

“Including you?”

“Yeah.”

“Um…I don’t know…it’s going to be pretty cumbersome.”

“I’ll call mechs.”

“I’ve already had Sergeov tell Virginia. She’ll send some as soon as possible.”

Carl felt a hot spurt of irritation. “I’m in charge of mechs in this quadrant.”

Saul’s mouth tightened. “Look, this is an emergency—”

“I’ll call Virginia. This isn’t your lab, Lintz. I call the shots down here.”

“All right, be my guest. Call.”

“Well… yeah… I’ll patch through while we’re on the way.” Carl shook his head slightly, as if to clear it. “You’ve got the spec frequencies?”

Saul tapped his vest pocket. “Right here. Took all night.”

“This better work.”

“I hope it will.”

“Hope isn’t near good enough.”

“I can’t guarantee—”

“Listen, we’re down to a dozen, maybe fifteen able-bodied. They’re dropping faster than we can unslot ’em, I hear. I’m using men who’re groggy from work—like me—and women with noses running in their suits, coughing into tissues they’ve wadded under their chins. I mean…” He sucked in air, his eyes squeezed tight, expelled a tired breath. “It better work.”

Saul nodded sympathetically. “Ley’s go then.”

They met Jeffers and Sergeov and Lani in Shaft 3, where it had all started. The shaft was well lit so they could see to work, the phosphors glowing like regularly spaced advertisements along a dark highway that dwindled away into the yawning distance.

The party hung like dots of color, each suit a different primary, against the pink fiberthread background. From a lateral tunnel came a large, asymmetric bulk, towed by mechs. Three extras trailed.

—Virginia freed ’em up,—Jeffers said happily. —Makes it a whole lot easier for us now.—

“Yeah,” Carl said. He felt irked that Saul had gotten mechs quickly, without Virginia even asking for approval. And he hadn’t had any mech backup this whole damned shift, until brilliant Saul Lintz and his miracle cure came on the scene. “About time.”

I don’t suppose I’ll cry any if this doesn’t work, Carl thought, and then immediately rebuked himself. No, that’s stupid. You’re really getting worn down.

Jeffers must have been just as tired, but he grinned and wisecracked as he wrestled gear toward the target area. His angular face gave no hint of how he felt about being awakened into hell.

Both Jeffers and Sergeov still had shadowy slot eyes. Carl said to them, “Don’t bust your butts, guys. Easy does it.”

They checked the mechs’ securing cables and pivoted the array to move up the center of the shaft. Telerobots had towed the microwave-digger assembly, minus its tripod mount, all the way down from the surface. Without its legs it lost its former spidery grace and became merely another lumpy machine, pipes and struts sticking out at odd angles.

Ahead, the smooth surface of the tunnel was broken by purple strands jutting into the vacuum.

—They’re not moving,—Lani said. Beneath her high, melodious voice there was an undercurrent of fatigue.

—How long has the air been gone from this shaft?—Saul asked.

—Days,—Jeffers answered.

—And the temperature is down? Then the purples may be dormant.—

—What’s ’at?—Jeffers asked fuzzily.

Saul glanced at Carl questioningly, as if to ask, Is he groggy?

Carl shook his head. We’re all tired, so what? We haven’t been sitting on our asses in a lab all this time.

—The larger forms apparently were stimulated by leaking heat at the intersections,—Saul sent, —where the collar makes contact with the ice. But once they broke through, looking for more heat, they hit a bonanza. The air warmed them as it rushed out, and the forms kept growing—for a while. Now it’s almost as cold in here as the ice, so they’re dormant again. Mostly.

—Uh-huh.—Jeffers stared straight ahead, somewhat blearily chewing at his lip, and Carl couldn’t be sure the man had understood any of it.

“The purples will break in anywhere the gunk grows,” he said. “That means anyplace there’s heat or light or air.”

They slowed, the mechs’ jets taking up the inertia of the microwave borer. Bulbous Halleyform organisms protruded into the shaft all around Tunnel 3E. In yellow-tinged phosphor light they seemed to be sweating a film of oily blue.

—Beautiful, huh?—Jeffers sent sarcastically.

—In a way,—Lani said somberly, taking him seriously. —So strange…—

“Philosophy later,” Carl said. “We’ve got to kill it.”

—No, I want a sample first.—Saul coasted over to the wall and smacked into it awkwardly. Carl grinned maliciously. Let Saul make his own mistakes. He wasn’t going to waste energy babying anybody, especially Lintz.

—I have not seen them in this state. I had only reports to judge by.—

Oh great. “You mean you don’t know you understand them?”

—Oh, we’ve learned a lot. For instance, we now know that they aren’t really differentiated organisms at all, not like mammals or insects or earthworms. They’re more like jellyfish or slime molds… where different groups of independent cells take on specialized tasks for brief periods. I haven’t seen a phase like this before, but their fundamental chemistry could not change simply because they have a respite in their growth cycle.

The bland professorial arrogance of it irked Carl. “Who says so? How come you’re so sure?”

Saul pulled out a sample bottle. —General biological principles. The resonant frequencies of their long-chain molecules can’t change simply because their life rhythm slows.—

Saul clipped a fragment from the nearest jutting growth and caught it in the bottle. He peered into the open cut, where darkening tissue oozed. —Remarkable. It exudes a film for protection against the loss of vapor to vacuum. Yet the film itself is a fluid that somehow doesn’t sublime.—

“Hey, come on,” Carl called impatiently.

—I suspect it’s a very high-surface-tension fluid Somehow it hinds to the surface, yet remains liquid enough to cover the plant entirely, compensating for injuries.—

Saul clipped a section from another, then pushed off. —Done.—

—Good! Let’s get the microwave oven ready for fried eggplant,—Jeffers said.

Carl directed the mechs to focus the antennas on the plants. There would be side lobes that would lap onto the walls, but that couldn’t be helped. The trick—Saul’s idea—was to tune the microwave borer to the precise vibrational frequency of a molecule peculiar to the native forms so that a short burst would fry them without also heating the ice, nearby.

“Hope you’re sure.”

—The calculation’s straightforward. I’m confident.—Saul eyed Carl. —Look, if it works on purples, I can tune it to some of the worst varieties of green gunk, too.—

“To kill this stuff you might have to blister everything else around. If the exposed ice vaporizes, we’re going to be smack in front of a hurricane.”

Saul caught his look. —My calculations show… oh, to hell with it. Let’s try anyway.—

—She all tuned?—Jeffers asked.

Saul nodded. Carl put his glove on the manual switch “Firing.”

There came a faint buzz beneath his hand as the capacitors discharged, and then the wall flew at him. A white streaming gale hit Carl, blowing him across the shaft, slamming him into the wall.

He bounced off, spun, regained his attitude. The comm line carried grunts, swearing, a yelp of pain. —Watch the spider! It’s gonna crash into the wall,—Jeffers said.

The microwave unit was drifting backward with ponderous menace. If it slammed into the fiberthread—

“Mechs! Mechs!”

Jeffers and Carl leaped for the mech-command module. Stopping the mammoth machine by themselves would be impossible.

Jeffers punched his side console, swearing. Figures moved in the dim light, frantically grappling for purchase on the ponderous, awkward bulk. Mechs surged in several directions, slowing the unit. In a slow-motion swirl they applied force and leverage, while seconds ticked and forces merged.

It worked—barely. The unit bumped into the wall in a slow scraping of green.

“Any injuries?”

—No.—

—Only to my pride,—Saul sent. He brushed at a smear of green on his suit bottom. —Ouch. I guess I must’ve sprained my wrist, too.—

Slowly they assembled. The burst of vapor had blown Lani in a three-bank shot, ending up a hundred meters away.

—Hey!—Sergeov sent. —Regard.—He pointed to the rim of Tunnel E.

“The plants… they’re gone,” Carl said.

—Not just fried. We disintegrated ’em,—Jeffers sent.

—Of that I was certain,—Saul said. —But why so much vapor? Must’ve boiled the water in their tissues. I’ll have to adjust the frequency better.—

“Tune all you want,” Carl said. “Come on! Slap patches on those holes before something else grows through them.”

It took another two hours of tuning before they could blow the native forms apart with a single short burst from the spider and cause only a minor steam-storm of hot steam. Carl slowly admitted that the idea seemed to work. It was hard to get used to.

Dr. Oakes was enthusiastic. She approved orders to bring in two more spiders and crews to man them. If they worked three shifts per day they might clear the most important shafts and tunnels inside forty-eight hours.

The advantage of the microwave technique was that it ripped apart the Halleyforms down at the molecular level—much more effective than chopping them up or tearing them out of the ice by hand, hoping you had gotten every root and strand.

Now, he thought, now to get rid of the goddamn green gunk itself.

Carl began to feel a faint ray of optimism cut through his bone-deep weariness. He sent Virginia slow-frame pictures of purples exploding as the microwaves hit the bulbs. She sent back an enthusiastic “Yaaaaay!” then echoed it artificially so that it sounded in his headphones as though an entire stadium were applauding him. That lifted his spirits more than anything.

They were heading back toward Central, inside a pressurized tunnel, when the madman struck.

“Leave it, leave it, leave it be! You killers! You’re the aliens here!”

They turned to see a man in a tattered ship-suit, hanging from a side passage, glaring at them angrily.

“What… ?” Carl began to say. But the man screamed and leaped forth.

He threw himself at Carl, shouting, incoherently—a high pitched babble, laced with obscenity, and the eyes wide with fevered energy. Hands stretched forward like claws, legs set to kick.

Before Carl could react, hands had grabbed his helmet ring and they went spinning away together. His helmet flew out of his hands when they smacked into a wall. The madman wrapped his legs around Carl and pounded with hard, quick fists.

Carl was sluggish, dazed. He punched at the other but missed. A right cross caught him in the eye—brilliant crimson flashes. He swung wildly. Missed.

He’s fast. Carl blocked another punch. He struck—missed—and struck out again. This time he clipped the man on the shoulder. With the energy of the mad a flurry of fists smacked into his cheek, his arm, his chest. Then, at last, help arrived. Someone yanked and the man sun away, yelling, holding out a handful of something.

Carl felt friendly hands grab him, stop his mad tumble. Lani cradled him.

“What the hell?”

“Who was it?”

“Couldn’t tell.”

“Ingersoll, I think. A guy from Chem Section.”

He blinked unsteadily as the figure launched itself away with well-timed kicks off the tunnel walls. The gibberish went on, fading. No one followed. They clustered around Carl, who was still numb from surprise.

“I’ll have bruises, that’s all,” Carl said groggily, fighting down the adrenaline rush.

“Damnedest thing,” Jeffers said.

Lani touched Carl’s face gently. “It’s swelling already. What could have provoked him?”

“He seemed deranged,” Saul said. “I’d heard he had come down with something, but Akio said it did not appear to be fatal. Whatever it was, it’s obviously affected his mind.”

Sergeov’s face took on a grim, gray cast. “Now he flees into lower tunnels. Be very hard to find him, treat him, in there, if he does not want you to catch.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” Carl said. rubbing his jaw, “he can stay lost forever.”

Saul nodded, but his voice was pensive and worried as he said, “There were Halleyforms smeared on his face. I wonder how many others have what he’s developing?”

SAUL

At times, the words still haunted him. We are the aliens. Men were the invaders here, the interlopers. Now and then Saul wondered what right they had, killing what they did not understand.

Still, he admitted to a feral pleasure in roaming the deep ice caverns, zapping gunk—a savage thrill in aiming a sort of ray gun down a hallway, whispering “zap, zap” under your breath, and vaporizing the more dangerous outbreaks of comet stuff.

It didn’t surprise Saul that he was of two minds on the matter.

In this instance, it’s the soldier, the caveman in me that wins over the philosopher. My job is to chip flint, to flake new weapons and help save the tribe. It’s a priority that comes down from long, long ago. And it is right.

He touched the dial on his portable beamer. The rheostat kept drifting, and it was important to keep the device tuned exactly on the right frequency, in case they rounded a corner right into a writhing mass of purples.

In the days since that first experiment, the hall crews had learned a lot about how to use the new weapons. There was neither enough power nor labor to keep every passage clear all the time, and the waste heat would prove most unpleasant, if they tried for very long. But the effect on morale had been tremendous anyway. For the first time there seemed to be a chance they might just get through this. Those who weren’t sick were actually starting to catch up on sleep. There was less desperate talk of stripping surface mechs to be brought down below the ice.

Now, if only we can lick the sicknesses. Saul’s major reason for agreeing to come out here, to the remote tunnels near the surface, was to take enough samples to develop his data base, to begin to get some idea how Halley lifeforms interrelated, what roles the microorganisms played.

Just behind him, Lani Nguyen rode a large tunnel mech. The big robot carried a microwave digger that had been modified for hall scrubbing Except for a dicey area back on E Level, they hadn’t had to use it much. The really tough areas were those closest to human habitation, where heat and light and air fed complex lichenoid growths and attracted the deadly, iron-mawed, worm-like colonies.

Here in the outlying tunnels, the phosphor lamps were far spaced and the temperature was kept well below freezing. Only a thin film of green coated the walls. It was easier moving about—even in spacesuits—than back where the purples crawled.

He raised his hand and Lani halted the mech at an intersection that had once been bright in orange and blue plastisheath. Now the walls were dingy under the verdant pallor of a few green-covered glow panels.

Saul scraped away lichenoid, exposing letters on the wall: D-14-TAU.

Good, they weren’t lost.

—I’ll make soundings for crevices, Saul.—

He nodded. “Okay, Lani. Just don’t venture too far from the intersection.”

—I’m leashed to you like a faithful puppy, you betcha.—

Saul smiled. Lani was smart and brave, but she was also cautious. The combination was one reason he was glad to have her assigned as his partner.

She moved carefully along the walls, thumping the fibersheath and listening with an audioscope, skillfully seeking out breaks and soft spots in the ice underneath.

They had found through hard experience that the tiny, almost imperceptible Halley-quakes that had been going on ever since their arrival kept opening narrow cracks in the icy aggregate. The danger was particularly acute at intersections, where the insulation was weakest. Part of their job out here was to map the worst of these crevices for later remelt and sealing… if there was ever enough manpower to get around to it, that is.

The scrapings from the intersection sign went into a sample vial. Saul was almost certain this was just typical Hallivirensmalenkovi. But on this trip he had also discovered a host of other, as yet undescribed types. The ecosystem clearly varied from place to place as conditions changed.

Right now Akio Matsudo was back in Central’s bio lab, working with Marguerite von Zoon and three weary techs to seek treatment for the growing sick list.

Akio was a competent scientist, but he was ideologically incapable of really adjusting to the implications of this unexpected tide of cometary life.

Everyone’s excited over the success of my microwave disruptor. I’ve got a reputation as a man of action, now. But has it persuaded anyone to take my advice? To step back and try to get the wide view?

Ha!

Saul was resigned to investigating the Halleyform problem on his own, in his own way. One part of that investigation was coming out here and looking into it for himself.

The biggest drawback is missing Virginia so much.

Saul said a grateful prayer every day they woke up together, neither of them yet suffering from some horrible, deadly thing. It was a blessing that she had—so far—not caught anything from him.

Virginia had had a few rough days there, back when the news had come about the coup in Hawaii. The resulting Percell-Ortho tensions had almost overshadowed joy over the success of the beamer technique.

Three steps forward, four steps back, Saul thought.

He wiped his nose on the helmet’s drip pad, took another anti-histamine pill, and washed it down with a sip from a water teat. Saul bent-swiveled his body upside down in the faint gravity to take another scraping of an interesting-looking growth.

There was a low growl as Lani returned with the mech. She muttered rapidly in arcane engineering dialect as she recorded her results, then she looked up at Saul.

—Only small cracks as far as Shaft Six. So, do we toast this stretch of tunnels?—

He shook his head. “No, not here. We’d be half a day finding the right tunings for the individual lichenoid components. The disrupted cells would only spread out and coat the walls anyway, serving as food for a new generation. This stuff doesn’t seem to be doing any harm right now.”

He also wanted to avoid selecting for disruptor-resistant variants. They had a weapon, now. It would be unwise to squander it as twentieth-century man had done with the best antibiotics and insecticides.

“Why don’t you just zap the area around each phosphor panel?” he suggested. “So this corridor doesn’t go completely dark and unusable.”

—And the vent valves.—Lani nodded. —Right, Saul. I know the drill by now.—

In the thin, chill air the mech’s motors gave off a low, brittle rumbling. As the carrier passed, he glanced at the cold cargo strapped to its back…the corpses they had found late yesterday and early today.

One was a spacesuited woman, still twisted in a frozen-backed body arch, as if cold and rigor had taken her in the midst of an agonized spasm. Bulging eyes and a swollen tongue disfigured her nearly out of recognition, but Central had identified her as a Power and Propulsion tech, missing three days now.

The other corpse was clothed only in insulstat coveralls. Saul and Lani had found him in the embrace of a lifeform Virginia had called a hall anemone. Bits of flesh had torn off as they tried to tug the body free. They’d had to readjust the beamer and blast the writhing colony creature to bits in order to recover and bag the poor fellow’s remains.

Who could tell why a man had died out here, so far from Central and all alone? Until they could do tissue analysis, nobody would even know who the unrecognizable jumble had been.

It was a troubling pattern. Other parties had found dead men and women in outlying tunnels. More seemed to be dying in solitary, during their off-duty hours, than suffered casualties during the hall fighting.

At first I thought it was like the way a wounded animal will sometimes drag itself away from the pack, seeking a hole in which to die. l wondered if, maybe, sick, feverish people just crawled off to be alone.

But that wasn’t it at all.

He drew his sheath knife and picked away at a mosslike growth next to the intersection code sign. The gunk was hiding something else.

Green stuff floated away from his vibrating blade, and there it was… a circle with an arrow coming off to the upper right-the symbol of maleness-with a stylized flower within.

It was the third type of graffito they had found. In this quadrant the most common had been the Arc of the Living Sun—symbol of radical Orthos from equatorial-belt countries. But there had been others as well, including the P and infinity cartouche…

… the Sigil of Simon Percell.

—Finished with that tunnel, —Lani announced. —Good thing we checked. The pressure release was stuck. Could’ve caused problems.—

“What do you make of this one?” he asked Lani, pointing to the uncovered circle-and-arrow symbol.

There was a long silence. Her face seemed pale under the helmet highlights.

—Every variety of crank was sent on this mission, Saul. Even we spacers have ours, I guess. That’s the sign of the Martian Way.—

Saul nodded. His suspicion was growing more firm.

“Clan marks. People really have taken to living out here. At first I couldn’t believe it.”

Lani explained, —It’s picked up since people have grown a little less spooked by the purples. Those guys we met down on Level K… from Madagascar and Fiji… they do their jobs at Central but they’re terrified of Percells. Refuse to sleep in the same chamber with ’em.—

“Terrified,” Saul repeated. He found it amazing that modern men and women would behave this way. He had been astonished by it all his life.

It wasn’t the Percells’ fault that they seemed more resistant to the comet diseases than unmodified humans…or at least showed fewer superficial signs of illness. But that didn’t stop the irrational myth.

During the Middle Ages the same thing happened to the Jews of Europe. Because they killed rats on sight and washed their hands, they tended to suffer less from the Plague. In the end, though, their clean habits made little difference. Enough died at the hands of enraged mobs to more than balance the toll.

Never underestimate the potential for human stupidity. It seemed that more and more crew were taking to sleeping in their spacesuits, in outlying tunnels. And sometimes, out there, the sicknesses got them and they died, horribly and alone.

—I’ve asked people in the different faction territories to try to report if somebody’s missing. I don’t know what good it’ll do.—

Faction territories, Saul mused. “Everyone still talks to you, don’t they, Lani?”

She looked back at Saul, perhaps a little nervously.

—Well, I guess nobody feels threatened by me. I’m a pretty innocuous type. People tend to tell me things.—

Saul smiled. The Amerasian girl had depth, perhaps more than she realized.

“No. That’s only part of it. You’re a bridge of sorts, Lani, an Ortho, but one who likes Percells. A… what’s it called?”

—A Percephile, Saul?

Her laughter had a dry, nervous edge to it.

He nodded. “You’re the only one of us survivors from First Watch that most of the wakers seem to trust.”

—Mostly ’cause they know I was just a grunt. Had nothing to do with deciding who to thaw. That’s what they blame poor Carl for…—

She shook her head.

—Anyway, you’re wrong about that, Saul. Folks are pissed off right now, but if they had to pick three indispensable people out of the whole expedition, it’d have to be you and Carl and Virginia.—

Saul laughed. What a sweet child! She reminded him of what little Rachel might have been like, had she grown up. But with deep almond eyes.

He almost asked her how things were going with Carl. Rumor had it they were getting together at times… though obviously on less of a committed level than Lani would prefer. Too bad. It would be good to see something going between them, if for no other reason than because it might ease Carl’s stubborn anger over Virginia.

Saul decided against bringing up the subject. Probably I’d just put ol’ foot squarely into mouth.

“Heigh-ho,” he said, lifting his portable beamer carefully to compensate for inertia. “Back to work, kiddo.”

Lani smiled and started up the mech. He hung on in front as they moved down a long stretch of tunnel, watching the close, green-tinged walls warily.

Up at A Level the chamber scheduled to be the launcher factory gaped like an antediluvian tomb. The aft end of the sail tug Delsemme lay in the center, amid a scattering of unopened crates and machinery. Colored threads festooned the sides of the cargo vessel, giving it a faintly fuzzy outline. The cavern looked as if it had been abandoned for years. It was hard to imagine it humming with bright lights and activity—as it would have to if they were ever to get home again.

Carl’s friend, Jeffers… he’s been too busy to come up and look at this. I wonder if it would be a kindness not to tell him.

“Let’s give the place a zap on disruptor frequencies three, five, and ten,” he told Lani. “Then we’ll hurry through that inventory Betty wanted us to do up here.”

—Right, Saul.—Lani’s mech moved out under her delicate control. Soon a tiny series of clicks was accompanied by rising clouds from all over the chamber as the Hallivirens algoid blew apart under microwave disruption.

Saul pondered. If only treating the diseases were as simple. He took out a light pen and began scanning boxes, letting his Portable computer take inventory of the contents of the chamber.

—Saul,—Lani whispered. He turned from a scraping he had been taking, and saw that she was at the other end of the chamber pointing down one of the side passages. When he arrived where she was standing, his first reaction was one of quick combat adrenaline. For there was a telltale squirming ripple that told of purples, grazing on the gunk-lined fibersheath.

Then he saw something else. A hundred meters or so down, near one of the fungus-dimmed glow bulbs, an indistinct figure floated.

“Another deader?”

She shook her head.

—No. I… I think it’s Ingersoll!—

Saul cursed the scratchy, intermittent blurriness caused by the antihistamines. He peered down the tunnel. The dim figure was moving.

Ingersoll. Everyone simply assumed he was dead, by now. At first he thought the missing madman wore a green spacesuit tinted to match the growth-lined hallway. But then…

“What on Earth?” Stunned, he realized that the figure was not wearing clothing.

—That’s dried gunk he’s covered himself with! What’s he picking of the walls, Saul? What’s he doing?—

Fortunately, their suit helmets contained the sound of their voices. Saul tried to float closer quietly, using an awkward puff of his gas jet. “I think…”

The man must have heard something in the thin air. He whirled, and Saul saw that only his face was not coated by a thick layer of green, living growth. He cried out, eyes clouded with madness. Saul could make out only a few words.

“… Perfect!… Sweet, sweet, sweet an’ warm!… You’ll know, know, no, no, no!…”

It was hard to pay close attention when one saw what hung dripping from the man’s mouth… a purple bleeding mass.

Then in a sudden spin and kick, Ingersoll was gone. Lani and Saul could only stare after him, momentarily too stunned even to think of giving chase.

Finally, Lani broke the silence.

—Yuk,—she sent. Even through her suit he could see her shudder.

Saul nodded.

“Well, that’s one fate I’ll be spared. If it were me, I’d probably be allergic to the stuff.”

He touched Lani’s arm and winked at her. Finally she smiled.

Then Saul sneezed.

‘These damn antihistamines are wearing off again. Come on, Lani. Let’s mark this passage and go home.

With a backward glance down the purple-lined hallway, they turned and headed back, alone with their separate thoughts.

An hour later, they had looped around toward Central again and were approaching the worst area—the Border—where the warmth and air and moisture of human habitation most excited the comet forms. Lani was tuning the disruptor back to settings deadly to the purples, in case they had to fight their way through. Saul, though, felt his spirits rise. Beyond No Man’s Land, he knew, there was warmth, and food, and one special person waiting just for him.

His thoughts were a mix of shapes. The frankly sexual image of one of Virginia’s nipples, warm from his hand and stiffly erect. Her soft breath in his ear and the electronically enhanced tendril-touch of her emotions, channeled directly to his own…

And yet his mind kept drifting back to the little cells, multiplying in profusion, growing in mottled, many-hued hordes, forming cooperative macro organisms where no one with any common sense would have expected them to exist, let alone thrive.

There was a common chord to the images. A symphony of self-replicating chemistry… a young woman’s sexual flush, her deep currents of love, the surging tide of Comet Life, rising to meet waves of heat from a spring that came but once every seventy-six years…

Only indirectly, without malice, did the native forms wreak havoc on the visitors—killing them, and bringing retaliation in turn. Saul might have felt guilty over inventing weapons for such a war. But guilt would miss the point. Nothing we do here will set the Comet Life back. We are like the summer. And we, too, shall pass.

The speaker above Saul’s right ear crackled.

—Lintz, this is Osborn. You awake up there?—

Saul nodded. “Yes, Carl. What’s up?”

—There’s been some developments, Saul. Can you come to Shaft Four, K Level? I… We may need your help.—

“Oh? What’s happened?”

There was a pause.

—I want to talk to you privately, if possible.—

“Why’s that?” Saul frowned. “Is it something you can’t mention on a coded channel?”

There was another pause.

—No, not exactly. But… Well, I think I know where the missing slot tug is. I’m pretty sure I know what’s happened to the Newburn.—

Now it was Saul’s turn to stop, blink.

“We’re on our way in. Lintz, over and out.”

VIRGINIA

“JonVon,” she said pensively, “I can feel what you’re doing.”

HIGHLY UNLIKELY.

“No, really. There’s a tingling, a tickling.”

THE NUCLEAR MAGNETIC RESONANCE SCANNING PROCESS MOVES NOTHING. IT DOES NOT EVEN TOUCH YOUR SKIN.

“I can feel it.”

THERE ARE VERY FEW SENSORY RECEPTORS INSIDE THE SKULL.

“Well, something’s moving. Like fingers dancing on my scalp, only… deeper.” The sensation was unsettling, like tendrils lacing through her head. She stirred uneasily on the webbing. Only a thin buzzing came from the banks of equipment that ringed her.

THE MAGNETIC FIELD, PERHAPS.

“Can people feel magnetic fields?”

STRONG ONES, YES. I AM APPLYING 7.6 KILOGAUSS TO THE ZONE OF STUDY. UNIFORMITY ERROR IS LESS THAN ONE HUNDREDTH OF ONE PERCENT.

Just like the pedantic program—and she should know, she wrote it—to throw in an irrelevant detail.

Or maybe it wasn’t irrelevant. The tumbling of infinitesimal spinning electrons inside her skull demanded fine tuning of an order unusual even in research. She quelled the temptation to slide her eyes sideways to see the poles of the big superconducting magnet. Even that much movement would set up unwanted trembling in her head.

I AM ACCESSING THE LATEST DATA BASE ON HUMAN NMR. I WILL INVESTIGATE POSSIBLE UNANTICIPATED EFFECTS.

“Do. It itches inside my head.”

SEARCHING AND INTEGRATING NOW.

“Did Saul mention any effects?”

HE SUPPLIED SAFETY MCROS WHEN HE BROUGHT THIS NMR UNIT DOWN FROM MED CENTER, BUT STATED THAT USE WAS HARMLESS WHEN INSIDE THE INDICATED OPERATING RANGE.

“Ummm. Maybe I should’ve done this sedated.”

NONSENSE. I WOULD NOT WISH TO UNDERTAKE THIS TASK ALONE.

Just like me, she thought. Anxiety loves company.

THAT IS QUITE TRUE.

There was virtually no difference now between JonVon’s grasp of her surface thoughts and her speech, since JonVon read both directly through the neural tap. Still, it felt different to her. Her mind processed the words in subtly different ways. The pre-speech processing center in her brain gave its own pacing to the phrases, feeding the words “forward’ in the unconscious cadence that made her own speaking style. When she thought without the subtle intention to speak, there often were no words at all. A quick. almost holographic perception of the idea shot through her. She wondered if JonVon could tell the difference.

OF COURSE.

“Of course,” she said/thought ruefully.

I DO NOT DETECT THIS TINGLING YOU MENTION. THOUGH OF COURSE I CAN PERCEIVE AN ECHO OF IT IN YOUR GENERAL STANDING WAVE PATTERNS, NOW THAT I KNOW WHAT TO LOOK FOR.

JonVon’s words came to her in two steps—the flash of their general sense, followed an instant later by an arranged sentence. That was her speech center operating in reverse, taking a series of swift, fleeting inputs from JonVon and forming them into prim, linear sentences.

“What a work of art we are,” she said.

SHAKESPEARE?

“Taken vaguely from him, yes.”

UNTIMELY RIPPED.

She constantly forgot how quickly JonVon could search out and scan a vast literature. “I’ll have to keep up your poetry lessons. You show a certain aptitude.”

YOU HAVE MADE ME…

PERCEIVE THE AMBIGUOUS SENSE OF SUCH LINES THE VIRTUE OF INDEFINITENESS.

She guessed that the program was reluctant to use feel and chose perceive only after a long comparison search and an inner struggle. Machines did not share a human’s casual confusion of senses and thoughts, since their input paths were vastly different. JonVon, though, could fool laymen into thinking he was a real person by using the terms in the normal, slippery human way. People commonly said I feel for I think; machines usually kept ironclad walls between the two meanings.

Which was one of the reasons she was doing all this, as well. Throw a rock at a woman and she could quickly digest the information incoming on sense channels, process it into intuitive vectors, speeds, and angles—then race forward, project, make approximate solutions-all to see where she should dodge.

Silicon-based machines could do that, but quite differently. They much preferred—meaning, humans were far better at programming them to—taking it as a problem in introductory physics, setting out the initial conditions all neat and clean, then integrating the equations of motion forward to see the exact result. Fine. Only by then you’re dead.

THAT IS A DRAWBACK.

“Another spurt of humor! You’re doing that more often now.”

YOU DID NOT LAUGH.

“That was irony you used, not yuk-yuk.”

OH. I ONLY DIMLY SEE THE DIFFERENCE.

She suspected JonVon used dimly see as a speaking convention. He did not have real power of language metaphor yet. “Well, all humor is based on two elements—ridicule and incongruity. Irony has…” She frowned.

YES?

“There are some things…”

MAN WAS NOT MEANT TO KNOW?

“Nope, wrong cliché. There are some subjects beyond explanation.”

A RIDDLE WRAPPED IN AN ENIGMA?

“Boy, you’re fast-accessing today. Can you do that and monitor this experiment at the same time?”

MOST ASSUREDLY.

Virginia could not remember inserting that smug lilt into this particular simulation. Was it mimicking Saul? JonVon had been in link contact with her lover a lot, lately. And she should never forget that JonVon, as a bio-organic construct, was midway between humans and silicon computers in his information processing. That led to unexpected capabilities.

“Can you stop the tickling?”

JonVon’s input broke into two channels, which she felt as a sluggish red stream of rusty words, with blue darting commentary slipping in and around them.

WHILE WE “SPOKE” —NOT THE RIGHT WORD, I

I TESTED THE EFFECT KNOW, BUT THERE IS NO

AND FOUND IT IS DUE OTHER

TO CONCENTRATIONS OF

MAGNETIC DIPOLES AVERAGE NUMBER 10°

FLIPPING TOGETHER

WHERE YOU HAVE BUILT

UP EMOTION-LADEN PROBABLY FROM ADOLESCENCE

TRIGGER COMPLEXES.

I AM AFRAID I CANNOT

ELIMINATE THEM BECAUSE THEIR PRIMARY EXTERNAL

THEY ARE CLOSELY TRIGGER SEEMS TO BE SEXUAL

TIED INTO YOUR LEARNED

MOTOR RESPONSES THE IMAGE YOU ARE CALLING

UP AT THIS MOMENT IS THE

CONTRACTION OF UPPER

THIGH MUSCLES AS YOU

SPREAD YOUR LEGS FOR—

“Stop! I don’t want my sex life played back by you.”

YOU ASKED.

“I did?”

SORRY.

Her head was clamped in close-packed foam, which proved to be good foresight—she would’ve flinched with embarrassment, otherwise.

“How much do you…” Well, of course. The times with Saul.

YOU ARE DISPLAYING RHYTHMS OF EMBARRASSMENT. SORRY.

“Oh, it’s not your fault.”

I CAN ABORT THE EXPERIMENT.

“No! I need this for the mechs.”

I AM RECEIVING VALUABLE SUBROUTINES NOW.

She supposed this last sentence was supposed to be reassuring. The program had an uncanny way of responding to her apprehensions. Still… “Just out of curiosity, what has my motor skill at handling tools—that is what we’re trawling for in my middle lobes, isn’t it? —what has that got to do with spreading my thighs?”

YOU HAVE ASSOCIATED THESE ACTIONS IN YOUR SELFPROGRAMMING.

“Self-programming?”

LIFE-LEARNED.

“Oh. Experience, you mean.”

THE BEST TEACHER, AN OLD SAYING GOES.

“Maybe. Some things I’d rather get safely out of a book.”

YES.

He’s being diplomatic. After all, he doesn’t have the option of directexperience. “Can you scan the nearby memory tie-in?”

YES.

Was there a hint of reluctance? “Can you assign a date when those complexes were laid down?”

A YEAR, NO. TIME ASSOCIATIONS ARE VAGUE, HOWEVER, YOU ARE LYING ON SOMETHING GRITTY AND COLD. THERE IS A SOUND. WATER WAVES, I ESTIMATE. OVER YOU THERE IS A FACE AND A POUNDING IN YOUR LOWER ABDOMEN.

Yes. That warm spring Hawaiian evening, fragrant with promise. A movie and a shake and off to the beach for some friendly necking. Only the warm kisses and gently probing, caressing hands hadn’t stopped there. Something powerful had seized her in a way she had never imagined—no matter how many thousands of times she had already thought of it, tried to visualize it—and then they were actually, unbelievably, doing it. And rather than a fiery yet lofting sensation, a cosmic rapture, a mystical union, as her dreams had envisioned, it was raw, crude, uncomfortable, painful, and finally depressing.

SHORT PANTS

ROMANCE

“A simple rhyme isn’t poetry,” she said primly.

TRUE.

“And anyway, what do you know about it?” Even as the words formed she thought, Well, actually, Jon Von knows exactly what you do. Or will, when he’s finished mapping your lobes, dipped into your hindbrain, plumbed the reptilian core of you. It was a sobering thought.

JonVon chose to not reply. Tact? Or was she indulging the usual programmer’s bias, reading human traits into machine responses?

The delicate cool tickling continued. She relaxed, letting her mind glide away from the red swirl of emotions the recollection had called up.

She knew that memories lodged close to sites where physical associations were stored, so that the body led the mind in storing data. A crisp dry smell could call up a distant dusty afternoon or childhood. But this made her wonder about the radical experiment she was attempting here.

The mechs needed supervision. Special processing programs controlled subtle waldo arms, but they weren’t smart. JonVon was fairly “smart” but he couldn’t help a mech turn a screwdriver or balance a suction sponge. As a stochastic machine, he was built to deal in uncertainties. He did not interface well with the mechs’ reductionist, solve-the-equation worldview. And JonVon lacked the intricate motor skills that evolution and exercise had given humans.

So she had decided to try one of her outlandish, low-probability dreams: Let JonVon read her skills. Her reflexes were also stochastic and holographic. He might understand them better.

The technology was available, if you knew where to look. The brain stored memories in the orientation of electrons, deep down in the cells and synapses. In principle, one could read the directions that these electrons pointed. The entire swarm of spins stored information—the intricate turns and tugs necessary to swivel a wrist, poke a finger. Virginia already had good programs that translated the human moves into mech moves. If JonVon could store her motor skills, he could take over much of the mech-managing. That would be a big help. Carl and other spacers had nagged her endlessly to spend more time with the mechs, and she was getting frazzled.

This was a way out. Maybe.

She would have to develop this technology eventually, anyway. Even with Saul’s microwave eraser, things were still dicey. Oakes and Lopez still gave mech-directing top priority.

If they kept losing people, over the seventy-year haul the mechs would have to be much more independent than the expedition had planned. And she had to be slotted eventually, so she had to at least start on a better programming system right away.

READING NEARING COMPLETION.

She sent an expression of relieved excitement: burnt-gold lightning strokes zapping across a velvet sky.

I RECORDED THE TRIGGER SITE. I COULD SUMMON UP FOR VOLUNTARY RECALL THE INCIDENT FROM YOUR CHILDHOOD. FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT.

“I wasn’t a child, you bucket of bolts.”

THE ASSOCIATIONS—

“And I don’t think it was `entertaining’ either. That big hulk of a boy—“She had a sudden jolting memory of a rasping, panting male voice muttering Eli a hohonu keia lua. His hard, machinelike ramming had hammered the words into her memory: I dig this hole deep. She shuddered.

YOU MAY MOVE NOW. READING COMPLETED.

“Thanks.”

NOT THE BEST OF BEGINNINGS.

She knew JonVon didn’t mean the reading. “No, it wasn’t. Oh, he was kind enough, I guess. I liked him enough to go out with him several times before that, after all. But never after… that.”

AND SINCE?

“I’ve had my share. An engineer in college… no, who am I kidding? Not many. Not many at all.”

A CONGRUENCY IS DIFFICULT.

“It’s not a mathematical congruence, you know, JonVon. People don’t look for someone exactly like themselves. Almost the opposite, in fact.”

YOU ARE YOUNG. YOU SEEK AGE?

Saul’s s desert-weathered face came to her, grinning in that lovely distracted way he had, and for a moment she was not sure whether she had recalled it or…yes… “JonVon, you put him in my head.”

IT SEEMED NEEDFUL.

“I’ll be the judge of that. At least let me stage manage my own fantasies!”

OF COURSE.

But the quick vision of that lopsided grin below the dark, seldom-joyful eyes had indeed gotten to her. It seemed an age since she had seen him, taken shelter in those strong enveloping arms, smelled the heady musk of him, talked—

“JonVon! Call him for me.”

I BELIEVE HE HAS AN APPOINTMENT WITH CARL OSBORN. ONE OF THE MECHS I COMMAND WITNESSED HIM PASS BY 1.34 MINUTES AGO.

“Drat! I miss him.” She jerked the foam padding away from her head and grimaced at the imposing banks of equipment: spindly nuclear resonance pickups, looming pancake magnet poles, ranks of digitizers.

“I’m worn out with this everlasting crisis.”

YOU NEED RECREATION.

“You bet.”

A picture leaped into her mind—so graphic, so lurid—silky entwined limbs, and more. She would have turned away if she had ever seen it displayed in mixed company…and yet she found it sensually enticing, pulse-quickening, as if calculated to pry up the hinges of her own special private places.

“JonVon!”

ONLY A SUGGESTION.

The quilted scenes faded, leaving a halo of blue afterimage.

“How did you… know?”

I READ A LOT.

It was, she supposed, a joke.

CARL

Over here!” Carl shouted.

Saul’s silhouette turned at the far end of Tunnel K and waved. The figure kicked off and glided the hundred meters, passing through pools of ivory phosphor radiance.

“Damned chilly,” Saul said as he windmilled to bring his feet around in front of himself. He landed, knees taking the shock.

He’s getting better, Carl reflected. Everybody’s going to have to learn to sweat from now on. “We’re keeping it cold even in the central tunnels now. Me, I’d like to vac all these.”

“It would cut down on our maneuverability enormously.”

“Cut down on the purples, too.”

“I use the inner tunnels every hour or so. If I had to suit up every time”

“I’m going to recommend it anyway.”

“Bethany Oakes has already decided.”

“Yeah, I know.” Every time you confront Lintz with a problem he starts citing decisions by the higher-ups.

Saul seemed reflective. “On the way here Lani and I saw Ingersoll down one of the side passages near Level A. He’s eating native forms, I think. Amazing. He seems harmless, if crazy.”

Carl felt a jab of irritation at the mere mention of Ingersoll. Things are so bad we can’t even catch a madman. But he kept his voice matter-of-fact; diplomacy came first. “Yeah, he’s crazy, but crazy like a fox.”

He shook his head and decided to get right to the point.

“I… Look, I’m going to propose to Oakes that we go retrieve the Newburn.”

“Really? You’ve really located it?”

“Right. It was Lani’s idea, actually. We were just talking, looking at that numerical simulation Virginia did a while back.”

“The one which showed how the Newburn’s solar sail could’ve been shredded by Halley’s plasma tail?”

“Yeah. I figure the other slot tugs were just plain lucky they didn’t get hit. The cross-tail-induced currents probably blew out Newburn’s tracer beacons, too. Without that sail deployed, finding Newburn was hopeless. So Lani, she says maybe we could try sending tightbeam microwaves and listen for an echo. I used a little sack time and did just that and—bingo! —got a signal back after a week long search.

“Wonderful. And so simple!”

Saul’s surprise was gratifying. At least he didn’t think of it first. “We’re going to need those forty sleepers, at the rate we’re losing people.”

Saul nodded, thinking. “Right… the manpower problem will get worse.”

“We’ve got to do it soon. The Newburn’s drifted pretty far away, more than two million klicks already.”

“I agree, but I still don’t understand. Why get me all the way out here to tell me?”

“I want to line up support first, before telling the Committee. I’m no good at arguing with Oakes.”

“And I am?”

“Right. Also, I want you to go with us as doctor.”

Saul brightened. “Good thinking. Those slots may have suffered damage.”

“Be a good morale booster, too.”

“Exactly what we all need. I’m sure I can make Betty see the advantages, now that the purples are under control. But can the Edmund fly right away?”

“Jeffers says his tritium-finding mechs have already filtered out enough to quarter-fill the short-range tanks, just as a byproduct from tunnel digging. He can top off the fuel we’ll need inside a week.”

“Good! You’ve thought this through.”

Is that supposed to be a compliment? Gee, thanks, Dr. Lintz. We grunts try to do some thinkin’ now and then, we do.

“Let’s see.” Saul rubbed his chin. It’ll take the better part a month to get there. That means we’d have to take some hydroponics modules, and…”

Carl had already figured out the basics, but he had also learned that it was a good idea to let scientists talk for a while before you got on to the hard part, the decisions. Maybe that was what kept them out of the really top positions. If you sat there while they gave their little lectures, usually they’d feel they’d had their say and they wouldn’t make a lot of stupid objections to what was already obvious.

Saul crouched against the wall with the innate insecurity of a ground dweller, always a little uptight about simply hanging on to a handhold above what his senses—no matter how well he trained them into submission—told him was a long drop.

“Sure,” Carl said when Saul had wound down a little. “Point is, what about Oakes?”

“We’ll need a consensus on this plan, of course, which may well take time.”

“Consensus, hell. Every day we wait the Newburn gets further away!”

Saul scratched his head. “Well, some will see the Newburn as a side issue.”

Carl gritted his teeth. “It’s forty lives.”

“True, but even I might be forced to put them on the back burner. The major problem is understanding the Halley lifeforms. If I can finish my current experiments on time—”

“Experiments!” Carl couldn’t believe he was hearing this. “You think they’re more important than forty people?”

“I didn’t say that, Carl! But we’re not out of the woods yet. There are so many diseases! We have to understand how the cometary ecology works when we add a new source of heat. That’s what we hadn’t anticipated, of course. I was speaking on tightbeam with Earth day before yesterday, and Alexandrosov, the head of the Ukrainian Academy, has a theory. Even with the minutes of time delay in the conversation, we got a lot of thinking done. I told him my ideas—preliminary ones, of course—and he saw an analogy—”

“Aw crap,” Carl said harshly.

“What?” Saul blinked.

“You’re talking like this was a damn thesis problem or something.”

“Thesis?” Saul blinked. “Carl. I assure you, an event of this magnitude, with so many implications, is bigger than a mere—”

“Shit, I don’t mean how big a deal it is with your professor friends back Earthside! I mean that you’re using it to make points!”

Saul’s face compressed, reddened. “That’s incredible. I—”

“You keep running tests and making up theories, yakking to your buddies Earthside—and the rest of us are working our butts off to stop this stuff.”

“I don’t need you to—”

“Come off it!”

“I’m sure I don’t know—”

“Life on comets! Discovery of the century! Saul Lintz, the interplanetary Darwin!”

Saul stiffened. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Some of us, we’re starting to wonder.”

Saul glowered. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You weren’t Mr. Popular in the scientific world when you signed on for this cruise, were you?”

“I was the last living figure identified with the origin of the Percells, if that’s what you’re driving at.”

“Right.” Carl felt a sudden hot embarrassment, remembering who and what this man represented. But he could not keep his resentment in check. “The Israel you knew wiped out, family dead, career finished—you were on the ropes.”

Saul spoke in separated syllables. “So nu?”

“So you ship out. Why not take this ride—it’ll return you when your past is old, forgotten, right?”

Saul said with surprising mildness, “I didn’t think I’d return and still don’t.”

Carl rode over this pause in the momentum. “But! Along comes alien life, and then the green gunk, the purples—bonanza! You’re famous—by accident, really. Anybody could’ve analyzed that ice and found microbes. But to understand it—that’s the big game. That’s where Saul Lintz will make his mark, show that he’s not just lucky. No, he’s a first-class scientist. And he can work on all the new stuff by himself. Study it hard. Squirt it Earthside when he likes. Every biologist back there is waiting for a speck of data about the first alien life, and the only person he can get it from is—ta-daah! —Saul Lintz!”

Carl finished, puffing, his breath spurting cotton clouds in the cold air. Saul regarded him silently, his face lined and more than middle-aged in the harsh phosphorescent glare. A long silence passed between them and Carl calmed down, began to regret … But it was too late.

Saul poked at the caked sealant. “This wasn’t why you called me out here. You asked me to volunteer for the Newburn rescue. Very well. I volunteer. I don’t have to eat any of this chazerei”

He cast off awkwardly, heading back toward Central. As he coasted, still looking back at Carl, hip words game in the chilled quiet: “It’s really Virginia, isn’t it?”

And Carl knew that it was.

He came into the Rec and Lounge cylinder with a sour, tired weight pulling him down. The grav wheel had been one of the last items transferred from the Edmund. It was always depressing coming in from near-zero G into a centrifugal G field, for several reasons. Even in a big wheel, there were Coriolis forces that set your reflexes off, induced a mild veering nausea. After a day in near-zero, where the slightest tug was important, you couldn’t walk without feeling the misaligned forces. Halley’s spin always pushed you slightly to the left.

But the worst of it was the simplest: you had been an eagle, and were now a groundhog.

So Carl was not in a warm mood when he met the Ortho. The man’s name, Linbarger, was stenciled on his crew over-alls.

“Don’t sit there,” he said as Carl eased into a recliner.

“Huh? Why not?”

“Got a friend coming.”

“Plenty of room.”

“Not for some there isn’t.”

Carl put down his drink. “You’re just out of the slots, so I’ll take that as a sign of the drugs not wearing off yet.”

Linbarger had all the slot symptoms. He was a thin stub end of a man, all skin and bones and no meat. The slots gradually used up your stored fat because the body was still running, only at an exponentially reduced level. But Linbarger must have been thin to start with. His head was long and narrow, set on a chicken neck with a knotty Adam’s apple. His face was all nose and cheekbones. His watery gray eyes were set deep in the skull, the jaw round and hard.

“My friend, he’s just been unslotted, too. And I’d just as soon neither of us sat next to a Percell.”

“Oh, really?” Carl said with mock concern.

“So clear off.”

Linbarger wasn’t awakened for the rendezvous, so he’s not mentally adjusted from Earthside ideas, Carl thought. Okay, I’ll allow for that. Some. “Look, things are tough enough around here without you being a jackass.”

Linbarger rose and knotted his fists. “Don t breathe on me, Percell, or I’ll—”

“Oh, it’s my bad breath? Sorry, I didn’t bring any mouthwash from Earthside.”

“You know what I mean. It’s the damned germs you’re carrying.”

Carl snorted derisively. “The microbes are in the ice, not in us.”

Linbarger’s face took on a sour, cynical cast. “I’ve been out of the slots three days, reviewing what’s happened—and you can’t fool me. Normal people have died twice as often as you Percells.”

“So?” Carl had heard something about that from Virginia, but in the confusion and long hours of these last two weeks it had meant nothing. Just another piece of data.

“You Percells are using this to take over the expedition.” Linbarger announced it as a known fact. Heads turned at other tables. Carl noticed Lani Nguyen get up, concern knitting her face, and start toward them, but another Ortho put a restraining hand on her shoulder.

“That’s what you think?”

“We all do—those of us normal people who have come out of the slots. We know it. You can’t pull the wool—”

“Spare me.” Carl said, lifting his hands. There was no such plot—who the hell had time to think about such things? —but how could he convince Linbarger of that?

Across the curve of the cylinder he saw Lieutenant Colonel Ould-Harrad. He called, “Sully!”

The black man approached, compensating for the Coriolis twist with an easy stride, a drink in his hand.

“I was hoping you could straighten this guy out,” Carl said. “He’s going around saying that it’s us, the Percells, who’re.”

“I know,” Ould-Harrad said abruptly.

Carl nodded, relieved. Ould-Harrad hadn’t been out of the slots for long. He had been called up for service when Major Lopez had sickened in hours and been slotted. Ould-Harrad wasn’t working in the tunnels all day; he would have time to keep on top of this political crap. Carl could turn all this over to him.

But then Ould-Harrad looked uncomfortable, his broad face converging on an unwelcome topic by lowering the thick eyebrows and pulling the wide mouth up into an expression of sorrowful, vexed concern. “I believe you people should pay attention to what Linbarger says. He points out difficult facts.”

“But he’s warping them, making.”

“The source hardly matters. Consider the implications.”

Carl was stunned. “What… what implications?”

“We need more protection against the diseases.”

Carl said, “Well, of course we do, but—”

“No. You do not understand. We do—we normal people. Especially.”

“Oh… So it’s going to be that way?”

Ould-Harrad looked at Carl grimly, ignoring Linbarger’s eager nodding. “Heaven forfend, it already is that way. Unless normal people feel they are protected against these diseases by isolation, by more care—then they can see only one outcome.”

“What?”

“You Percells will come to run the entire expedition. There will not be enough other people alive to oppose you.” The African spoke with a calm earnestness, free of aggression and all the more striking because of his powerful frame. He had the impressive calm of those whose strong religious convictions inform their every word.

“That…we don’t intend that,” Carl finished lamely.

“No matter.” The brown eyes held sadness. “Many believe that is what will happen.”

“Look, I called you over to quiet down this guy, this Linbarger. I—”

“It’s not for the likes of you to shut me up,” Linbarger said hotly. “If you think you can, I’d be glad to—”

“No, no,” Ould-Harrad said sternly, raising a hand toward Linbarger. “Please be quiet now.”

“But he—”

“Please.” Ould-Harrad silenced Linbarger with his ministerial presence.

Carl thought hotly, It might be fun to bash Linbarger around a little. Bad for him, but good therapy for me. Better than all this talk, anyway.

He said, “I certainly didn’t think you’d back up Linbarger! These guys are using hypochondria to get back into the slots. And all this Ortho nonsense.”

“You see?” Ould-Harrad said. “You have your own name for us.”

“So? You call us Percells.”

“We need no special name. We are the normal people—the human race.”

“And we’re not?”

“I… I did not say that.”

“You intended it! You probably think we don’t have souls.”

The black man shook his head mournfully. “That issue is in the hands of the omnipotent. The point remains that we are different.”

“Yeah, and you’ve got renegade Arcists and worn-out Zionists and Salawites—” Carl noticed Ould-Harrad wince. “But you all stick up for each other around us, huh?”

Ould-Harrad said mildly, “We must struggle to balance the viewpoints of all.”

Carl had never been good with words, did not have the easy, oily skills of an administrator, and he had no magic way to get through to Linbarger, or to Ould-Harrad. All this endless talk! He gritted his teeth in irritation, stood, and left without another word.

SAUL

Not paying attention, Saul thought. That was our basic mistake, these last few centuries. Nature flowering and bursting with life all around us, and we never paid enough respectful attention.

He was waiting for the others to arrive in sleep slot 1, trying to rest in these few free moments. Avoiding thinking about the daily slot meeting, about to start.

You’d think we’d have caught on with the limestone business. He smiled wanly. Only blue-green Earth burgeoned with life. And Earth had proved to be the only planet with an oxygen atmosphere, thick, yet transparent enough to let excess heat escape. It had taken generations to realize that the latter fact did not cause the former. No, it was the other way around. Life…trillions of tiny cells in the early days of Earth, had pulled the carbon out of the primordial atmosphere and stored it in their bodies, which silted to the ocean floor and became limestone beds… changing the air itself in the process.

Science was still fumbling with the notion that life might be driver in the evolution of worlds, rather than a simple passive passenger, shoved about by the rude winds of astronomical fate. After the bleak vistas of Venus and Mars, scientists still assumed that minute changes in planetary mass or distance from the sun made life impossible. Like all the others, he had ignored the possibility that life had spawned in comets. It had tailored this ice mote, too, carving caverns and spreading seeds.

A tiny Gaea… a self-regulating ecosphere scaled in ice, revived when the sun’s licking warmth came to briefly banish the long night… and perhaps trillions of others, too, swooping in from the far dark… He would have to mull that one over, if he ever got a spare second…

“My, how serene.” Virginia’s lilting, affectionate sarcasm cut through his musing.

“Um? No, just my ritual worrying.” He sat up, feeling dull aches rearrange themselves in his legs and back, even in the faint gravity.

Virginia sat beside him on the narrow bench that was the only furniture in sleep slot 1’s observing room. In the pale enameled light he studied her with wonder. She was trim and sure, her milky green pullover covering but not concealing a flat stomach, breasts hard and high, a muscular calm. The septic certainty of the room numbed his senses, but she redeemed that with a soft warming presence, calling up memories of humid, spice-laden Hawaiian air. Yet she likens herself to her machines, cool and cyborg-certain. How wrong!

The quiet comfort of being with her reminded him of other days, of cramped apartments, gas flames licking the dark as friends talked far into the night, meals of peppery meats and crisp onions, an enfolding sense of an enduring natural order—

He cut off the thought. Nostalgia clutched him sweetly with hollow, fuzzy fingers whenever he let it, and this was most certainly not the time.

Virginia said lightly, “You look like something the cat dragged in.” She scratched the back of his neck.

“You can’t turn my head with mere compliments.” He rubbed his eyes. “Besides, we have no cat.”

“Lucky we didn’t thaw the pets right away. Or would they be susceptible?”

“Of course. These viroids love lung tissue—I suspect some spread through the air.”

“So Spot and Fluffy would buy the farm, too.”

“Definitely.”

He did not mention that he and Matsudo had thawed some rabbits and monkeys already—had to, for tests of new treatments. Of course the poor creatures had to be sacrificed. He had never been able to do that without a twinge of guilt. Yet you chose to be a biologist.

She looked out through the transparent wall, to where several suited figures labored over pale, waxy bodies. “If we could just stop the stuff from spreading! Particularly that green gunk climbing the walls—it gives me the shivers.”

“I suspect the algoids and lichenoids aren’t the true danger.”

“They’re spreading so fast!”

“There are so many variants, it’s difficult to control them even with the microwaves. But we’re making progress.”

She wrinkled her nose. “The stuff smells.”

An introspective, distant smile creased his leathery skin. “Aesthetics come later. If ever.”

Virginia frowned. “Do you think you’re learning… well… fast enough?”

“My father always said that life was like giving a violin concert while you are learning the instrument.”

She grinned. “And while everyone you care bout is watching.”

“Quite so.” He was aware that Virginia was trying to cheer him up, but a more sunny smile would not do it. He was familiar with his own moods, the fitful depressions that had come more regularly these last few years.

Not that he did not have ample cause now, of course. With more self-knowledge than he would have liked, he understood his own brooding as another evasion. Ever since the fall of Jerusalem, he had found it far easier to meditate, to pontificate, than to throw himself fully into the raw world, to feel all its stings and scrapes. He still needed the security of his emotional calluses.

Virginia had seen his mood. She put her hand in his and said softly, “I know…” He squeezed her hand. “If there’s anything—”

“Get this straightened out,” a thin man said loudly as he came into the room with Suleiman Ould-Harrad. “Damned if I’ll let them play the angles while we sit on our asses.”

Linbarger nodded toward them, his lean face self-involved. “I figure it’s obvious—we’ve got to keep normal people on top, where they can see everything’s run right. We can’t let the Percells move up! If the casualty rate keeps on this way, they’ll outnumber us, maybe even two to one. Unless we hold the commanding positions, they’ll make every decision, run right over our interests.”

Ould-Harrad looked embarrassed. “I will have to confer.”

“No conferring to it! This is an executive decision, you have to do it. Start taking a vote and we’ll be goners.”

Saul grimaced. “Is this what it sounds like?”

Linbarger turned, hands on hips. “I’m trying to make sure our people don’t lose control of the situatio.”

“Our people?”

“Right. You heard? Oakes has that sky-high fever, the one that fries the brain in a couple hours. She’s going into a slot right away.”

Saul said, “Oh damn,” and sat down. Maybe I should’ve spent more time in sick bay. I might’ve made a difference…

“Someone has to do the research,” Virginia whispered, as if reading his thoughts.

Bethany Oakes had been barely adequate in these last few days, but at least she had been the obvious successor to Miguel Cruz. Continuity was important.

After Major Lopez was slotted, skin half-gnawed away by some slimy fungus, Ould-Harrad had been pulled…and now dropped into a command position no one could envy. The tall, rangy black man had never been more than the nominally senior of the five section heads. He carried no cachet of command. Certainly the dour African had not been selected for his skill at balancing political forces and quieting clever loudmouths.

Linbarger nodded, licking his lips. “Pretty fine mess, huh? It’s either the fever or the chills with the blue spots all over you, or else that shaking thing—all of ’em fatal.”

“I believe I’ve isolated the agent that causes the chilling disease,” Saul said quietly. “A vaccine should take only a few days. The skin infections show signs of vulnerability to microwave.”

“But there’re eight or ten diseases already!” Linbarger shouted. “And that’s just the ones we know of. That we can spot easily.”

Saul looked into the man’s pinched, anxious face and read there something that felt like a cold draft let into the room.

“There are some promising measures for the rest. That’s all I can tell you right now.” He glanced at Ould-Harrad. Take the wind out of this fellow’s sails, Saul thought, as if to will the African into action. But Ould-Harrad remained impassive, eyes distant, his arms folded across his broad chest.

Linbarger seemed to feel he was gaining momentum, winning an argument. He looked at the two men, ignoring Virginia. “With Lominatze out there getting iced” —he pointed at the transparent wall— “and Byrnes and Matsudo headed there before long, that means Percells are going to be running both Power Systems and Tunnels and Gases.”

Saul said formally to Ould-Harrad, “May I ask why Dr. Linbarger is at this meeting?”

The tall black man’s face took on a wary, diplomatic cast. “I felt each, ah, faction in the crew should be represented in making slotting decisions.”

“Yeah,” Linbarger said. “That’s why she’s here.”

Saul looked at Virginia. “Oh? You came at Ould-Harrad’s request?”

She nodded. “I was free. Most Percells are either asleep or working in the tunnels. Or sick,” she added pointedly.

“I’m taking a risk just being in the same room with her,” Linbarger muttered.

“No one’s assigned vectors for most of the diseases,” Saul said carefully, restraining his rising irritation. “There’s no reason to believe the genetically augmented people carry anything.”

“Just because they’re immune doesn’t mean they can’t be carriers,” Linbarger said. “I know that much.”

“There is no correlation—“Saul began, and then realized no scientific discussion was going to reach the man. “Look. We need to learn more, and that means cooperating with every.”

“Pretty soon they’ll be giving us orders! If—”

“Shut,” Saul said precisely. “Up.”

Linbarger frowned, puzzled, plainly feeling betrayed. “You’re a biologist, you know three of us get these diseases for every one of them.”

“Then thaw out more Orthos,” Virginia said cuttingly. “Swell your ranks.”

“And see most of them die?” Linbarger whirled toward her, fists clenched. “You know a man fresh out of the slots is more vulnerable to these bugs!” Linbarger glared at her, but was obviously playing to Ould-Harrad.

“We must use all those available hands,” the African spacer said at last. “Especially if we are to save the Newburn.”

“You’re approving the mission?” Saul asked, helping the apparent effort to change subjects. Bethany Oakes had ruled out the effort to seek and recover the long-lost slot tug.

“Yes. Carl Osborn’s case is convincing. It may distract us from our… disputes.” Ould-Harrad glanced pointedly at Linbarger. “They are our comrades, aboard the Newburn, and if it is God’s will, Inshallah, we shall rescue them.”

“Who goes?” Virginia asked.

“I shall decide later. First we must refine more tritium from the ice—”

“Jeffers is already doing that,” Saul put in. “He says he can get us enough in a week or so.”

Ould-Harrad pursed his lips. “You people have been continuing work even though Bethany vetoed it?”

“Well, Yes,” Saul admitted with a small smile. “The refining uses big surface mechs which weren’t doing anything else.”

“Ah. So be it. Then the hydroponics pods must be arranged, the majority brought into Halley.”

“I’ll do that,” Linbarger said. “Some of my buddies will pitch in, too.”

Anything to get away from Percells, Saul thought. He’ll have plenty of Ortho volunteers.

“Very good,” Ould-Harrad said warmly. “As for the rescue crew, I will decide after careful—”

“I’ll go,” Linbarger said. “if Osborn isn’t in charge.”

Virginia smiled dryly. “You want an all-Ortho crew?”

“Why not?”

“You’re more likely to have sick people going, then,” she said.

Saul frowned. Soon he would have to break it to her that he was going as ship’s doctor.

Ould-Harrad said soothingly, “We all are taking risks.”

“You have no idea if Lintz and van Zoon and the others will find cures,” Linbarger’s mouth knotted up into a sour, disgusted sketch of impatience. “If they don’t, and I get sick, they’ll never bring me out of the slots.”

Ould-Harrad spread his hands, open and uplifted, showing his good will. “Then you will finally wake up on Earth.”

“Nobody intended us to sleep seventy years sick! Metabolism is slow in the slots, but it’s not zero. All the experience has been with people who’re well, right? We could all die.”

Linbarger had a point, but Saul was damned if he would admit it. “There is ample reason to expect that.”

“Ha! ‘Ample reason.’ That’s not enough for me and my friends.”

“Which friends?” Virginia asked. “More dumb Arcists?”

Linbarger bristled. His voice came out thin and reedy, as if from a tight place inside him. “Yeah, some of us. Got kicked out of Indonesia for being against land rape and poisons and experimental animals like you.”

Virginia muttered, “And made up for it by shooting people in Pan-Africa.”

Saul tried to cut in. “Just a.”

“No, let him babble,” Virginia said evenly, her arms held ready, a concentrated energy in her stance. “I’ve heard it before. His kind took over Hawaii. Governor Ikeda’s dead, Keoki Anuenue’s uncle is in prison. I want to see what kind of creature does things like that.”

Linbarger did not seem to notice her rigid restraint.

“I’m an Arcist, sure, but I’m talking for all the normal people. We aren’t going to take orders from Percell pigs.”

Saul said, “You watch your.”

“Sure, we’re herding you Percells into camps in Hawaii—and we’d be better off doing the same thing here!” He shook a fist in her face.

Virginia caught him full in the stomach with a quick, savage kick. Linbarger flew backward with a heavy grunt and smacked into the wall. Ould-Harrad moved to block Virginia but she compensated neatly for the low gravity and slipped past him. She clipped Linbarger neatly on the chin with the heel of her hand, putting the full force of her shoulder behind her chop. Linbarger made a gurgling noise and spun away, still conscious but limp.

“Stop!” Ould-Harrad cried severely and unnecessarily—Virginia had already come back to an automatic zero-G defensive stance, floating, eyes gleaming like ice.

“Sorry,” she said. “It was a reflex.” Obviously she regretted nothing.

Ould-Harrad and Saul checked Linbarger, who waved them away feebly.

Virginia said, “I’ve been hearing Arcist bullshit for days now, holding my tongue. No more. He’s endangering the whole expedition.”

“Do not overstate your case, Dr. Herbert. Dr. Linbarger has a right to his opinions,” Ould-Harrad said judiciously.

What does it take to stir him up? Saul thought. Or has he witnessed scenes this bad already? An unsettling suspicion. Saul hadn’t been socializing himself for a week.

“In any case,” Ould-Harrad said, shaking his head gravely, “nothing excuses such conduct as yours. If we were not desperate, I would confine you to quarters.”

“Oh, please do,” she said sarcastically. “I need the sleep.”

Linbarger opened his mouth to say something, but then the prep-room door opened to admit Bethany Oakes. They all fell silent as the official commander slowly entered with her escorts.

Said was shocked at the sudden change—at her red-rimmed eyes, bone-white face, and shambling walk. Her palsied hands trembled and her mouth sagged vacantly.

“Betty, you shouldn’t be walking,” Saul said.

Then he saw Akio Matsudo and Marguerite von Zoon following respectfully, their eyes beseeching him not to interfere. She way making a brave show, the commanding officer committing herself gallantly. Even Linbarger saw it, and though his face was still compressed with anger and resentment, he kept quiet.

Matsudo did not look very well, either. His eyes were glazed and his face had a hard, sweaty sheen. If he goes, that will leave only Marguerite and myself to run the hospital. That’ll keep me off the Newborn rescue for sure.

Bethany Oakes met his eyes briefly. “Saul…” Her smile was wan, sad. “Persevere…”

She passed slowly into the chilly inner chamber and the waiting techs.

Damn. Saul was uncomfortably aware that Oakes might well never revive from the slot-sleep process. If the disease could continue to do its dreadful work as she floated through the dreamy years, she might well be going to her grave. The accompanying party had probably guessed this, and there came upon them a reverential silence as Oakes insisted on struggling up onto the slab herself. She gave a fluttering wave of farewell and then sank down into the pink nutrient web. It was a release for her, Saul saw, amid the chill promise of salvation, to lie down gratefully into the embrace of fog-shrouded, gleaming steel and glass.

Saul looked up at Ould-Harrad. It was easy to read the African’s silently moving lips, shaping words in Arabic. Saul knew that the prayers were only partly for Oakes, but also for the new, reluctant commander, Suleiman Ould-Harrad himself.

VIRGINIA

“Damn! I wouldn’t put it past him to have done this on purpose!”

Virginia paced back and forth in her tiny laboratory. It was difficult to do in less than a milligee, but she managed by holding on to a nearby console. Her velcro soles scritched softly as she walked from one end of the room to the other, tossing her hair and muttering to herself.

“Carl planned this. I know it!”

The main holo screen rippled. A face appeared, but the “man” was no member of the Halley Expedition… nor indeed any man at all. The visage was long-cheeked, with reddish locks and a curling, salty mustache.

“Sure an’ ’tis a churlish deed, liken to the way Queen Maeve was deprived of her beloved,” the figure agreed.

Virginia sniffed. “Oh, cram it, Ossian. I don’t need sympathy from literary simulacrums, I need Saul! And I don’t want him blasting off in a stripped-down, overaged spaceship that needs fifty years of overhaul before it’ supposed to fly again!”

The display flickered. Another face formed… a graying eminence in scarlet robes. The woman on the screen held up a sign of beneficence. “It is a mission of mercy, my dear child. Forty souls are at stake…”

“Don’t you think I know that?” Virginia’s feet left the floor as she smacked the tabletop. “Cardinal Teresa, off! I don’t need logic or appeals to my better nature. I need a reason why…”

A last image appeared, drawn from deep within—an early simulation, seldom called up for the pain it brought. A smiling man with a small gray beard and eyes that crinkled as they smiled warn-fly down at her.

“Anuenue, little rainbow. Reasons do not help at a time like this, daughter. Feelings have a logic all their own.”

Virginia buried her face in her hands. She floated against a storage cabinet and slowly settled toward the floor.

“I was happy, Daddy. I really was, in all this hell. I was happy”

A slender, lambent, transparent hand reached down, as if to touch her. The voice was strong with gentle wisdom.

“I know, darling. I know.”

CARL

—E Alulike!—the strawboss urged. And the crew pulled together filling the chosen comm channel with their chant.

—Ki au au, Ki au au

Huki au au, Huki au au!—

The Hawaiians heaved at the hawser as the main cargo unit of the Edmund Halley lifted out of the vessel’s body. Massive and immense as it was, the section climbed swiftly toward the top of the spindly A-frame, where a spacesuited figure gestured in exaggerated semaphore.

—Easy, easy. Okay, you Indonesians and Danes over there, you draw radially!—

Carl had not seen Jeffers so happy since the man had been unslotted. The man had hated work in the tunnels, preferring by far the hard glimmer of space and the oily tang of metal and machines.

Carl couldn’t really blame him, at that. Almost anything beat the doom and gloom down below. That was a major reason why he had pushed for the Newburn rescue attempt. He was convinced that the benefits to morale would do more for general health than all of Akio Matsudo’s traditional therapy and Saul Lintz’s laboratory concoctions.

He adjusted his visor to magnification 4 and looked toward Scorpio, where the comet’s fading dust tail was now barely a faint glow in the infrared. A few speckles told of grains big enough to reflect light still from the diminishing sun. One of the biggest of those speckles, he knew now for certain, was the slot tug Newburn.

If she had not existed, we would have had to invent her.

There came a cheer over the open-background comm as the storage unit met Halley’s surface with a soft puff of vapor. Jeffers wrung his hands over his head in nonchalant triumph. Carl had to smile.

This was his favorite of the three shifts working to refurbish and strip down the Edmund. Sure, he felt at home with Sergeov’s purely Percell team. But the mixed volunteers were the most cheerful lot.

Especially the Danes and Hawaiians. They didn’t seem to give a hoot if a man was an Ortho or a Percell… or a Denebian Glebhound… just as long as he wasn’t a purple or a goddamn Arcist.

Virginia is Hawaiian, he remembered. No wonder she was such an unrepentant Orthophile. Ortho-lover. Obviously, she didn’t see anything wrong with shacking up with one.

The thought lingered and made him feel a bit guilty as Lani Nguyen passed by, carrying a nickel-iron brace that would have crushed her anywhere with gravity, even on the moon.

—Hey, handsome—she sent. —You busy for the next three months?—

“What’ve you got in mind?” he said, leering back amiably. And she managed to put a little wag into her walk as she passed. Her unicorn tabard grinned back at him.

Oh, hell, Carl reminded himself, there are some good Orthos.

Lani had volunteered for the rescue mission in a flash. Good old Lani. She was so patient with him, never rebuking him at all for showing up at her cubicle every now and then, looking for company, then disappearing or keeping things strictly comradely for weeks at a stretch.

If only she were more what I’m looking for. More intellectual. More sensual. A Percell.

More like Virginia, in other words.

Only one Arcist was on duty right now. Each faction had a “watcher” to keep an eye on the others’ shifts… an unofficial designation, to be sure, but one more and more common at important functions such as slottings and unslottings.

Helga Steppins viewed the proceedings carefully, using a laser transit to double-check everything done by Jeffers’s crew. As Carl approached, she stepped to one side warily, as if he could infect her through two spacesuits and three meters of vacuum.

“You know, it’d be a lot easier to get at the Edmund’s science cluster if you’d let us remove the hydroponics modules first,” he told her. “It’d probably save two days.”

The taciturn, blond Austrian woman shook her head.

—Stupid trick, Osborn. We both know the launch date is set by when the fuel is ready. That’s at least next Tuesday.—

He balled his fists in disgust over this obstinacy. “Why, in the name of the Black, would I want to trick you? You people are the ones to insist on an insanely huge fuel reserve for a simple three-month rendezvous and return! We’ll have a stripped ship, and we don’t need more than six kilometers per second delta-V!”

The Arcist woman shrugged. —Safer if the tanks are topped off. Only au idiot sets sail without proper stores.—

“But…

—You don’t like it? Complain to that Percephile, Ould-Harrad.—

Carl snorted. Ould-Harrad? A Percell lover? Ha!

“Look, if we lower just the number-one hydroponics module now…”

—No!—She whirled on him, gripping the laser transit tightly. —The whole colony depends on that farm!—

“But the new dome is almost ready. All the fittings…”

Steppins swiveled back to face the Edmund again, as if afraid that Carl’s intent was only to distract her while Jeffers and the Hawaiians spirited the entire torch ship away.

—You Percells don’t fear the Halley diseases as much as we human beings do. We won’t go into why, since you keep denying all responsibility for the sicknesses. But it is sufficient to know that we will not let the hydro be polluted! Both the big and small hydroponics modules stay attached until the new dome is completely checked out…and by an Ortho specialist!—

Carl fumed. He knew what his alternatives were. He could give Jeffers the go-ahead anyway… and maybe spark a miniwar among the factions.

Or he could run below and complain to the spineless Mauritanian in command.

Or he could go down and lend a hand.

“Use a purple during your next erotic rest break,” he suggested, and kicked off toward the workers before she could reply.

“Hey, Lani!” he called. “Let me help you with that thing.”

SAUL

“I’m getting so I don’t even care about the danger of dying anymore, Saul. It’s the itch I can’t stand. All day, all night, in spite of the topicals Akio Matsudo gives me. I swear, if this keeps up I’m going to ask ’Kio if I can borrow his great-grandfather’s seppuku knife and really scratch!”

Marguerite von Zoon lay facedown on the taut webbing, trying to keep still as the masked and gowned treatment-room techs picked away at her skin with tweezers and little glassine vials, sampling the fungoids that were turning her body into a battlefield.

A quarter of her skin was broken and cracked. Pink, half-open wounds and dark-domed blisters erupted in ugly patches. Here and there, the flesh had split open in nasty ulcerated sores, glistening with sickening dampness.

Saul worked his team as quickly as possible, knowing how hard this must be for her. Marguerite was an intensely private person—a true exile who had left Earth only in order to save her family from punishment for political crimes. Whatever it stated on some piece of paper, only a bureaucrat would try to say that she had “volunteered” to come out here to become food for gnawing alien cells.

And yet Marguerite’s cheerfulness was legendary. The discomfort had to be severe for her to be complaining at all.

Saul stepped up beside her as soon as the techs had finished. “Marguerite, I’m going to bring up the new beamer and try that experimental subdermal scrub now. Try not to move unnecessarily.”

She nodded curtly. Only a damp sheen on her forehead and her flexing palms betrayed her nervousness. Saul guided a wheeled hospital mech into position, canting the broad plate of a synthetic aperture microwave array over her prone form.

I’ve been privileged to know many fine human beings, Saulthought. But none braver than this good woman.

She had volunteered to be the first to try this untested treatment. When offered a chance to escape into the slots instead, she had rejected the idea outright. “I’ll not leave you and Akio as the only physicians awake during this crisis,” she had told him flatly.

Days had passed while the technicians built and rebuilt the new beamer to Saul’s specifications… always scratching for priorities against the hall crews and those overhauling the Edmund Halley. By now, there was little choice left. If this treatment didn’t work, Marguerite would have to go on ice.

Secretly, Saul feared it was already too late even for that. There was no guarantee that cooling down to a degree above freezing would stop these vicious, multicolored, funguslike growths, once they were this deeply established.

A third of the awake crew—and even a few of the slotted corpsicles—have these creeping skin disorders. They worry Akio worse than the Crump Mumps or even the Red Clap. They’re the biggest reason why I may not be able to go out with the Edmund after all. Osborn and the others may have to take their chances without a doctor.

And there was one more cause for his hurry to make the new treatments work.

Yesterday, while they were making love, he had fund a fine lacelike webbing of green strands spreading under Virginia’s shoulder blades and issuing across her back. He hadn’t said anything to her, yet. But his motive was stronger than ever to find a cure.

The machines had finished moving into place. “All right, Marguerite,” he told his patient. “Now remember, hold still.”

“Yes, Saul.”

Her hands clenched the table’s rails. Saul turned to the hulking, spiderlike medical-mech. “Access five—” he began. But he had to stop as a sudden wave of dizziness swept over him. He managed to lift the collar of his gown just in time to contain a violent sneeze.

Saul’s head rang. The dull body aches that he had managed to put out of his mind for half an hour or so returned in force now. It was a long moment before he could look up, blinking through drifting blue spots, and address the machine again.

“Access… five-two-seven Jonah.”

A receptivity light winked across the mech’s plastic panel. He continued, “Play sixty milliwatts in preprogrammed fungoid RNA resonant spectrum A dash two-nine-four, focused on foreign subdermal growth, patient’s right inner rear thigh, five hundred seconds, safety factor beta.”

They had adapted a unit designed for magnetic resonance and ultrasound inspection of internal injuries. The sophisticated mech would be able to aim and evaluate the focused radar far quicker than any human operator.

“Preparing to project,” the machine announced flatly.

Saul’s best assistant, Keoki Anuenue, was watching a data tank, supervising the procedure. Not only was Keoki a skilled laboratory technician, he was also one of the strongest men Saul had ever known. Three days ago, he had had a chance to see the big Hawaiian in action, when there had been a cave-in up on Level B.

A particularly nasty variety of vermin had lodged a beachhead in the utilities shaft leading to Airlock 1, their main lifeline to the Edmund Halley. The major cooling vent—essential for keeping the ice around them from melting—was nearly chocked off with an ocher variant of worm bigger than the purple horrors.

Saul and Keoki had arrived on B Level just as the halls erupted in loud screams and alarm Klaxons. Most terrifying of all was the grinding groan and squeal of collapsing ice. The cable Saul had been climbing broke loose and whipped from the wall like a tortured snake, flinging him away just as a block of dark, mottled crystal pierced through the fibersheath lining and smashed the side of the shaft.

Keoki Anuenue caught Saul and planted him into a safe niche, then turned and leaped up toward the glittering stone boulder that had seven men and women trapped in the utility tunnel. They had minutes, at best. Keoki went at saving them the only way possible.

He braced his back against the tattered plastisheath, planted his feet on the iceblock, and heaved. It must have massed a hundred tons not counting the rubble lying atop it. “Kei make nei mai…” Keoki had grunted as the boulder, unbelievably, grumbled and started to move.

A blast of fetid dankness flowed through the gap. The Hawaiian’s face was a beaded torrent in the humid air, his neck tendons bunched like knotted ropes. Saul had no time to stop and think. He dove into the narrow opening.

Along with a dozen other odors, the air was filled with the scent of almonds. If any of their suits had been punctured, even the blood cyanutes wouldn’t have protected the trapped crewmen much longer from the rich vein of cyanide that had been broken open by the falling rock.

Saul had wriggled in though quite aware that he wasn’t wearing a suit at all. He tried not to think about the big man behind him, struggling with enough mass to crush a building, on Earth… prodigious even at half a milligee.

Thus had begun a hellish race to drag the survivors out. No one ever told Saul how long the ordeal took. All he knew was that Keoki Anuenue could have let go after one, or two, or three had been pulled free.

But Keoki did not. A figure carved in stone, he held the ragged, primeval mountain until Saul verified that the last two trapped crewmen were dead—and stopped briefly to take a ten-cc sample of pasty, reddish fluid from a crushed, pulped thing the size of an anaconda. Only after Saul had wriggled out of the utility tunnel—to see the relief party come jetting up the shaft at last—did the silent giant finally ease slowly back in a groan of ice and flesh.

All Keoki had said, when Virginia’s mechs moved in to take his burden away from him, was a mumbled phrase Saul remembered as clearly as his own name:

“Ua luhi loa au…”

Strange, magical words—a phrase ripe with secret strengths, the mysteries of exotic gods.

Later, Virginia told Saul that it meant, simply, “I’m very tired.”

That had been just a few days ago. The hall battles continued slowly tapering down. Diseases took their toll. And preparations for the Newburn rescue mission neared completion. One did not dwell on past heroics to any benefit. Let the billions following the “war news” on their vid sets, back on Earth, keep score. Here, people were simply too busy.

Keoki stood by his monitor screen and motioned to Saul. All appeared in readiness.

Saul stepped back and gave the spidery medical-mech the go-ahead command: “Five-two-seven Jonah, commence.”

An oval spot of light, about five inches by three, appeared on Marguerite von Zoon’s right thigh—only a soft laser spotter beam depicting where the machine’s synthetic aperture was now projecting invisible, finely modulated microwaves from Saul’s slapped-together treatment device.

Rube Goldberg science, he thought ruefully. This was much more difficult than using those giant beamers in the passageways to blast the bigger comet lifeforms.

There, we can just pour energy into the animals’ major cells through protein resonance bands. Don’t have to be too accurate in choosing the right frequency. Whatever misses just spills over into heat. Shove in enough power and the cells tear themselves apart.

Here, though, he couldn’t use that kind of overkill. In this microwave scrub of Marguerite’s skin, he wanted to wreck only the invader cells. Not only must the machine be tuned not to disrupt any of the patient’s own tissue, he could not even allow much waste heat.

They had to finely adjust each scrub beam to a narrow set of frequencies, and play the atoms like beads on a string, tapping and tapping again until the overstrained molecular threads fell apart. Tuning had to be orders of magnitude more exact than for the weapons being used by the hall crews.

Marguerite’s thigh quivered, from tension certainly. She shouldn’t feel more than a faint warmth… at least in theory.

Saul looked back to make sure Keoki had not read anything untoward in the patient’s vital signs. But the big Hawaiian watched the tank placidly, showing no sign of concern. He hummed softly, placidly, rocking in his spacer’s crouch.

That was when Saul saw Colonel Suleiman Ould-Harrad slip into the treatment room.

Oh, heaven help us. Now what is it?

The spacer officer sought through the dimness until his gaze finally lighted on Saul. Saul’s initial resentment evaporated as he saw Ould-Harrad’s expression—his lined face a mask of exhaustion mixed with open dread.

“I’ll be right back, Marguerite.”

“Take your time, Saul. I am not going anywhere.”

He touched her shoulder for encouragement. “Watch her carefully, Keoki.”

“Sure thing, Doctor.”

Saul passed through a disinfectant haze in the decon airlock and removed his helmet as the outer door cycled open. The acting expedition leader waited, absently rubbing the back of one hand with the other.

‘Colonel Ould-Harrad? How may I help you?”

“There is something that I…” Ould-Harrad shook his head and suddenly looked away. “I know you have no reason to wish to help me, Lintz. I would understand if you told me to go straight to hell.”

Saul shrugged. “Jerusalem est perdita.” Jerusalem is lost. “The past hardly matters now. We’re all in this mess together. Why don’t you tell me what ails you, Colonel? If you want to keep it quiet, we can arrange treatment outside of sick call…”

He trailed off as Ould-Harrad shook his head vigorously.

“You misunderstand me, Doctor. I need your advice in a non-medical area… a matter of most grave urgency.”

Saul blinked.

“Is it something new?”

The tall Mauritanian bit his lip. “There are so few left with level heads, anymore. My people are collectivists, and so I cannot deal with emergencies as Captain Cruz did. I need consensus. I must seek advice.”

Saul shook his head. “I still don’t understand.”

Ould-Harrad seemed not to hear him. His gaze was distant. “Earth is too far away, too confused in its instructions. I need a committee to help me decide how to deal with a dire emergency, Dr. Lintz. I am asking you if you are willing to please be a member.

“Of course. I’ll help any way I can. But what is all this about?”

“There has been a mutiny,” Ould-Harrad told him concisely, his lower lip trembling with emotion. “A band of fanatics has taken over the Edmund Halley. They seized Ensign Kearns when he discovered their plans and—”

The man hid his eyes. “They threw him out of the ship naked, onto the snow! They… they are demanding sleep slots and tritium, or they will blow up all the supplies in the polar warehouse tents.”

Saul stared. “But what do they think they can accomplish?”

The African spacer blinked, he shook himself, and at last met Saul’s eyes.

“They have computed a carom shot past Jupiter. The mutineers actually believe that they can steal the Edmund and make it all the way back to Earth alive.

“In the process, of course, they seem hardly to care if they doom the rest of us to certain death.”

VIRGINIA

She sped through Tunnel E, pulling a gray wool sweater over her jumpsuit. It was cold.

Too damned cold, even for her. All the mission crew were “warms”—people who had minimal vascular-seizure response. Virginia’s capillaries did not greatly contract when cooled, which meant she felt comfortable when most ordinary people—“freezers” —would be jittery with chill. The major disadvantage was that “warms” lost heat faster and needed more food. The flip side of that was freedom from fat— “warms” seldom needed to diet.

But now Carl had set the air temperature so low that even the “warms” were chilly. Virginia didn’t know if that really suppressed the algae growth, but it certainly depressed her.

She came into the warmer core bay of Central with relief. The big monitoring screens brimmed with shifting patterns of yellow-green. She read them at a glance—the Bio people were holding their own against the gunk, and the purple forms had eased off. Good. Not that they were the main problem any longer.

Saul was conferring with Ould-Harrad. The big man towered over Saul’s wiry frame, hands on hips, head shaking slowly in solemn disagreement. Saul’s mouth was twisted into a grim, bloodless curve she had never seen before. She snagged a handhold. swerved nimbly, and coasted to a stop beside them.

“I ran the simulation you asked for,” she blurted.

“Good, good.” Saul seemed grateful to turn away from Ould-Harrad. “And?”

“I can disable most of their controls if I can get three mechs aboard Edmund. Then I’ll need five minutes to use them.”

Saul brightened. “Excellent! They’ll be paying attention to loading the sleep slots they demanded, being sure we aren’t slipping them inadequate supplies and so on. Preparations for the Newburn rescue weren’t complete when Ensign Kearns discovered their intentions. So they need more gear before they can leave.”

“Those bastards!” Virginia spat out. “Pushing poor Kearns out the lock—murder! If the mission mainframe hadn’t already been transferred Halleyside, I could get into their control systems and vac them all!”

Saul nodded. “Ferocious, but apt. Alas, they’re on manual controls, hard to override. Still, consider—they haven’t got enough food and air aboard for the entire return flight. They’ve got to be damned sure we give them enough slots to make it back. There are fourteen of them, they say. Now, if we can find a way to distract them, to give Virginia an opening—”

“No,” Ould-Harrad said flatly. “There is little chance of approaching for more than a few moments with mechs. You heard Linbarger.”

“They’ve got to allow mechs close to Edmund when we deliver those sleep slots,” she answered.

Ould-Harrad frowned. “They will watch the machines closely. Surely they will not miscount the number returning to Halley and let three remain.”

Virginia shook her head. “I can do it while they’re loading the sleep slots into the receiving bay. The cables we’ll cut are near that lock.”

Ould-Harrad pursed his lips. “Your numerical simulation—it was complete? You yourself attempted to guide the mechs to the cables and then destroy them?”

“Well… no, I don’t know the Edmund’s systems that well. I let JonVon do it. I’ve been upgrading his mech control and—”

“Then we cannot be sure, you see?” His eyebrows lifted into semicircles above dark eyes, the irises swimming in whites which showed a fine tracery of red veins. “JonVon is not practiced in the direct handling of mechs. Simulations are always easier than real operations. I.”

“Carl could do it,” she said rapidly. “Get him here, have him try my simulation.”

Ould-Harrad’s mouth puckered into an expression of polite disbelief. Then he sighed, nodded, and began speaking spacer quick-talk into a throat mike.

Virginia turned to Saul. “How much time?”

“They’ve given us two hours.”

“That’s crazy! They can’t expect us—”

“They know we can move the spare sleep slots if we start right away.”

“But that appeal to `fellow normals’ offering free passage Earthside. If anyone responds, Linbarger’ll have to wait for them to board.”

Saul smiled wanly, his eyes seeming to remember desperate situations long ago. “A fevered mind thinks all the world can turn on a dime. Besides, they are calling every one of us, ah, normals on thee comm. To demand that we go with them, drop everything, leave immediately—providing we are well, of course.”

“They called you?”

“Oh yes. I was among the first—a doctor, and therefore valuable. They have no shame. I wondered why they demanded to see me on camera—until they abruptly broke off, and I realized.” He chuckled and wiped his nose with a ratty handkerchief.

“Your… flu, or whatever it is.” Virginia felt an irrational irritation at this. “That doesn’t mean you’re really sick.”

Saul grinned sardonically. “To them it does. You know, it is like the plays of Elizabethan times, including Shakespeare. If a character coughs in the first act, you may be sure he has the pox and will die by the third.”

“They’re crazy!”

“Merely because they would not take me?” He laughed. “I must commend their taste, really. Despite my profession, I’ve never truly loved ill people, not in their gritty reality. All their crankiness, their tsuris. I preferred them as abstractions, as problems in genetic art.”

Virginia had to answer his smile. He was incredible—joking in his mild, self-rebuking, almost elfin way, in the middle of a crisis.

Ould-Harrad finished his checking with the tunnel and surface teams. “I doubt it will matter overly, but Carl is coming.”

“Good,” Virginia said. She felt soothed by Saul’s calm, ironic manner.

Well, at least this means he isn’t going to risk his neck going after the Newburn, she thought. Then she felt immediate shame. It also probably means the Newburn crew will drift on and die.

She struggled to think. “I… I still believe my simulation shows it can be done.”

“Can, perhaps,” Ould-Harrad said. “Should—that is another matter.”

“We must do something,” Saul said sharply. “Forget the Newburn for a moment, or that we’ll need the Edmund seventy years from now. Our immediate problem is that nearly all the hydroponics.”

“Yes, yes.” Ould-Harrad raised a hand tiredly. “But one wonders if perhaps giving fourteen people a chance at returning might be worth it.”

Saul rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “We can’t assume the diseases will win! Look.”

Virginia watched him launch into the same explanation he had given her last night, about promising approaches to curing the plagues.

He’s wonderful, and I really shouldn’t carp, she thought. But Saul can be pretty tedious when he switches over to pedant mode.

Feeling the warmth of the big room seep into her muscles, she let herself relax. The wall weather was impressive here, with so much area to use. It was a windswept beach, mid-morning. Beyond the scrolling data screens she watched a blast of wind sweep in from the north, whipping pennants on a distant bathhouse straight out from their staffs. The sky grew dense, purple. Cumulus clouds, moments ago mere puffballs, thickened and boiled, filmy edges haloing dark centers.

Purely by accident, the running program was providing a pathetic fallacy. A simulated storm in the midst of a real crisis. If this were an entertainment—such as they had had daily until the troubles started—there would be sound, even smell and pressure modulations. The choppy ocean rippled and rose, sweeping cloud shadows raced across it. Great icy drops battered the beach, as big as hailstones. A cliff of somber air rolled in, unraveling skeins like yarn, spitting yellow lightning. As if waiting for this signal, tiny speckled sand crabs scuttled from their holes and scurried toward the frothing sea. Lightning flashed again and again—as if God were taking photographs, she thought, bemused, transfixed by the silent rage that curled and spat and sped across the walls. She wished she could hear the mutter of departing thunder, the hiss of rain on dunes.

From the distance a large dog came running, gouging the sand, snapping at the crabs. Mist gathered in wispy pale knots. She yearned to feel the cleansing rain plaster her clothes to her skin, drench her, shape her hair into a tight slick cap. Even in my best sense-sim with JonVon, I can’t completely escape. I’d trade it all for a ticket home right now.

She recognized the longing: to be away from here. To breathe salty air, feel gritty sand, smell the lashing wind. And once she had felt it, she knew how to put it away, turn back to the present. If she had not been able to do that, she would never have made crew. But these Ortho fools are risking the mission for their fantasy of escape.

Carl arrived, red-brown stubble at his chin but showing no fatigue. He drifted to a webbing that served as furniture in low gravity. “I had a mech retrieve Kearns. He’s a frozen statue.”

Virginia said, “Is there any… ?”

“No chance. His cells are ruptured.” Carl sighed, his hand brushing at his face as if to dispel all this as a bad dream. He visibly took control of himself and said with a deliberately calm flatness, “I clamped down security on the surface locks, in case anybody tries to join them.”

“Ah. good,” Ould-Harrad said.

Carl said, “I put Jeffers and some mechs out of sight of the Edmund, armed with lasers.”

“For what purpose?” Ould-Harrad asked coolly.

“Insurance. In case they try something else.” Carl studied Ould-Harrad expectantly. “What’re you going to do?”

“I wish a quick check of Virginia’s simulation,” Ould-Harrad said.

Carl nodded and swung over to a work console. He tapped into the sequence and time-stepped through it, oblivious to their nervous attention. They waited expectantly until he unhooked, replacing the helmet.

“Won’t work,” Carl said.

“Why not?” Virginia demanded. “I spent—”

“Mechs aren’t fast enough in close-up work:”

“JonVon got them to do it!”

“JonVon is swell for minimizing moves, sure. But it doesn’t allow for safety factors or slips. There’re always some in close-quarter work.”

“I could correct, introduce stochastic—”

“Not with the clock ticking,” Saul agreed reluctantly. “If a mech finds some leftover box in the way, it’ll consult JonVon and there’ll be a pause. There simply isn’t enough time.”

Virginia blinked, feeling hurt that Saul so quickly took Carl’s side. “I still—”

“That settles matters,” Ould-Harrad said. “God and Fate act together. We must let them go.”

“We can’t,” Saul said. “The hydroponics, the Newburn, the—”

“I know. There is much equipment we would miss,” Ould-Harrad said. “Perhaps, indeed, the lack will speed our doom. But we have no choice. I will not condone any attack on the Edmund.”

“That’s… crazy!” Virginia blurted.

Ould-Harrad’s face was impassive, distant. “When one faces death, what matters is honor. I will not harm others.”

Saul and Carl shared a look of disbelief and frustration. Virginia thought Ould-Harrad won’t oppose an Ortho rebellion, but if Percells tried it…

“How about if we disable her?” Carl asked casually, leaning back with his hands behind his head, stretching.

He’s given up the Newburn. And deliberately showing nothing about how he feels.

“You heard Linbarger,” Ould-Harrad explained patiently. “If we show any signs of bringing devices out, anything that can be used as a weapon.”

“Yeah, they’ll use the big lasers on it. Sure. But they can’t shoot you if you’re already inside the ship.”

Ould-Harrad said, “As I said, any approach.”

Saul broke in, “I think I see… send them a Trojan horse, correct?”

Carl grinned. “Right. Inside the sleep slots they’re demanding.”

Ould-Harrad’s eyes widened, showing red veins. “A bomb? It could damage anything, hurt people, there would be no control—”

“No bomb.” Carl grimaced. “A real Trojan horse—put men inside.”

There was a long silence as they studied each other. Virginia could read Ould-Harrad’s puzzled reluctance—plainly, the man had decided to accept Linbarger’s demands and simply let the expedition make do for the next seventy years. His pan-equatorial stoicism had won out.

Carl, though, was almost jaunty, certain his plan would work. Saul pensively ran over the many possibilities for error and disaster—but he licked his lips in unconscious anticipation, tempted, almost amused at this sudden hope.

And what do I think? Virginia realized that she had bristled at Ould-Harrad’s assumption that Linbarger had to be accommodated. She had studied the charts the mutineers had broadcast. Edmund had just enough fuel to arc outward in something called a Byrnes maneuver: loop through a close gravitational swing by Jupiter, reach Earth in a high-velocity pass, and attempt an aerobraking rendezvous. But the window for that trick was closing fast, with only a few days remaining.

Is Ould-Harrad play-acting?Could he be planning to duck across to the Edmund at the last minute, go back with them?

“I do not know…” Ould-Harrad began meditatively.

“Think it through,” Saul cut in. “I see one major problem.”

Carl frowned. “That equipment is vital. There’ll be plenty of volunteers.”

“That I do not doubt. But a sleep slot is narrow and shallow. You could not get in with a spacesuit on.”

“So what? I…” Carl’s voice trailed off.

“Yes. The obvious defense for them is to vent the sleep slots in space, to be sure no one is inside.”

Carl bit his lip, thinking. Virginia was acutely conscious of seconds trickling away. She liked Carl’s plan, not least because it would give them something to bargain with. If Linbarger took off, the expedition would have to construct their own biosphere without many vital portions. It was one thing to grow a few seeds under lamps and quite another to start up an entire interconnected ecosystem from scratch. Like starting off juggling with eight balls. Of all the ways there are to die out here, I had not considered simple starvation.

Irritated, Carl spat out a curt, “I hadn’t thought of that.”

A long, agitated silence. Moments falling into an abyss.

Virginia had a technique for dealing with problems under time pressure. When she was first doing detailed simulations Earthside, she had evolved programs so vast that they had to be booked days or weeks ahead of time on huge mainframes. If your program went awry, you could stop it in midcourse. Then there were a few minutes when the system would do housekeeping calculations for distant users. You could hold on to your reserved time, still run your simulation if you figured out the difficulty and managed to fix it in that brief interval.

Under pressure like that, it was easy to clutch up. So she had developed a way of letting her mind back off the problem, float, allowing intuition to poke through the tight anxiety. Focus outside the moment, let the surface mind relax…

Idly she noticed that on the walls the storm had built to a sullen, roiling rage. Wind blew streamers of foam from the steep waves, and huge raindrops pelted the slender grasses on the inshore dunes, crushing them. The dog had vanished, the crabs milled aimlessly beneath the hammering, incessant drops. The heavy air churned, looking too thick to even breathe—

“Wait,” she said. “I’ve thought of something.”

CARL

Slots, he realized, were a lot like coffins. That’s what had always bothered him about them.

He had a small flashlight with him, thank God. He could see the grainy sheen three inches from his face, feel the soft padding around him. The trapped tightness, the constriction, the cold… In the dark it would have been worse. Much worse. He didn’t mind the empty yawning black of open space, free and infinite. This cramped coffin was different.

Carl had felt the gentle tug of acceleration a minute ago and now counted seconds, ticking off the estimated time it would take the five mechs to maneuver across to the Edmund.

There. A gentle nudge forward, pushing him against the grey covering plate. His nose brushed it and a faint torque spun him clockwise.

That would be the deceleration, then a docking turn. Going into the aft hold, almost certainly.

A dull clank. Fitting onto the auto conveyor, probably. The mechs would decouple then …

Five ringing spangs. Good.

Now… if Virginia’s idea was right…

Scraping, close by. A mech grappler caught—clunk—on the hatch’s manual release handle. He could see the inner knob rotate. He braced himself, took a deep breath …

The hatch poked free and whoosh—the air inside the slot rushed out, fluttering the straps over his shoulders and his blue coverall.

He sucked in air through his face mask. Virginia’s risky solution—a small sir bottle, no suit.

His ears popped, despite the pressure caps he wore over them. Goggles protected his eyes to stop the fluid from sputtering away, freezing his eyelids shut. The straps were so tight they bit into his flesh painfully. That was all he had between him and hard vacuum.

The slot hatch had stopped at its first secure point, five centimeters clear. Beyond he glimpsed the stark white glare of full sunlight on the rim of the aft port. His sleep slot was pinned to the conveyor, as he had guessed. He saw a few stars, and a shadow moving on the distant smooth curve of the Edmund’s hull. That would be a mech moving on to pop the next slot, to check for gifts bearing Greeks.

He had gambled that Linbarger would think that was enough precaution. If he was wrong…

And Linbarger was already hypersuspicious, after they had detected and blocked Virginia’s attempt to take over command of the Edmund’s mechs. Ould-Harrad had insisted on trying that so-called easy solution first, and it had failed quickly. Now for the hard way…

Linbarger would want the mechs well clear of the Edmund before anyone ventured into the hold to secure the slots. That gave Carl two, maybe three minutes.

Carl lifted the cover and floated out, curling into a ball as he went. He wore a coverall, gloves, and boots, nothing more.

How long since the air had vacced? He glanced at his thumbnail. Twenty seconds.

Saul had figured three minutes of exposure before he would begin to feel the effects. Then his internal pressure imbalance would get serious, he would become woozy, and anybody coming into the bay could handle him like he was a drugged housecat.

Not that Linbarger and his crowd would waste any time on him. Probably they’d just push him out the lock and wish him bon voyage, like they’d done to poor Kearns. Have a pleasant walk home…

He uncurled, looked around.

The hold bay was empty. They were probably watching the mechs separate and back off.

He repelled off the lock rim and got oriented. The lock’s manual-override seal was a big red handle, deliberately conspicuous, at ten o’clock and across the bay. His ears popped again. His senses were ringing alarms, but he suppressed them all and launched himself across to the red seal-and-flood lever.

Halfway there, somebody tackled him.

The suited figure slammed him backward into the bay, grappling for his air hose. Carl twisted away, jerked free.

Of course. Obvious. Linbarger had put somebody outside, to inspect the mechs as they came in, be sure nobody clung to an underside. From that position the man could see into the hold, too.

Idiot! Carl chided himself for not predicting this.

Ninety seconds left.

They separated, both drifting down the long axis of the hold. It would be ten seconds before either touched a wall. The spacesuited man fumbled for his jets and changed vectors, deftly moving between Carl and the red seal-and-flood.

Carl had no doubt that the fellow could stop him from reaching the lever for a minute or so. The Ortho had jets, air, and all the time in the world.

Dame, it’s cold, too. Carl twisted, looking for something, anything.

There. A set of tools. He glided by the berth rack stretched—and snatched up an autowrench. Carefully he aimed at the figure ten meters away and threw.

It missed by a good meter. Carl could see the man’s face split into a sardonic grin, the lips moving, describing it all with obvious delight for the Edmund’s bridge.

Which was what Carl wanted. Throwing the heavy wrench had given him a new vector. He coasted across the bay, windmilled, carne about to absorb the impact with his legs.

Where was the damned—?

He sprang for it. The fire extinguisher easily jerked free of its clasp. Carl pointed the nozzle at his feet and fired. A pearly white cloud billowed under him and he shot back across the bay, still no closer to the seal-and-flood.

His ears popped again. Purple flecks brushed at his eyes, making firefly patterns …

He struck the opposite wall, this time unprepared. A handle jabbed him in the ribs.

Where was… ? He launched himself at the man, riding a foam jet. Halfway there he cat-twisted, bringing the fire-extinguisher nozzle to bear ahead of him—and slammed it on full.

Action and reaction. He slowed, stopped—and the frothing white cloud enveloped him. He fired again and rushed backward, out of the thinning smoke.

Darkening purple everywhere. The raw light of the berth lamps couldn’t seem to cut through it …

Now, before the roiling fog cleared, he flipped again and fired one more time. He flew through blank whiteness—and struck something soft, yielding.

He grabbed at the man with one arm, bringing around the extinguisher. Hands snatched at him, clawed at his face mask.

Vectors, vectors…

Which way… ?

It didn’t matter. He pressed the nozzle against the man and pulsed it again.

Billowing gray gas.

Cold, so cold…

… A huge hand pushing him backward…

A long second of gliding… the extinguisher slipped away… numb hands… he was tumbling… aching cold in his legs… impossible to see…the purple getting darker…shot through with bee-swarm white flecks darting in and out…in and out…spinning…

—then a jolting stab of pain in his leg, crack as his skull hit decking.

It jarred him back to alertness. He clawed for a hold. Looked up.

The fog was thinning. Directly out through the lock Carl could see the suited figure wriggling, dwindling, trying to get reoriented to use his jets. An insect, silvery and graceful…

The thrust of the last pulse had acted equally efficiently on each of them, driving Carl inward and the other man out.

He sprang for the seal-and-flood. Grasped it, pulled. The lock slid shut just before his opponent reached it, and the loud roaring hiss of high-pressure air sounded for all the world like a blaring, rude cry of celebration.

“I made it,” Carl said into his comm. “The tubes are blocked.” He panted in the close, oily air of the pressurized cylinder.

“Good!” Ould-Harrad answered in his ears. Now there was no indecisiveness, no fatalism in the voice. “Linbarger, hear that?”

“What’s that jackass mouthing about?” carne the chief mutineer’s sneer.

“Carl Osborn has jammed up the fusion feed lines,” Ould-Harrad said precisely.

Faintly the voice of Helga Steppins: “Fuck! I told you to cover the fore tubes!”

Even fainter: “He must’ve crawled through them from Three F section. Shit, we can’t cover every little.”

“Shut up.” Linbarger’s voice got louder as he addressed Ould-Harrad. “We’ll sweat him out of there.”

“You try it and I’ll vent the tritium,” Carl said tensely.

“What?” Linbarger could barely contain his anger. He demanded of some unseen lieutenant, “Can he do that?”

Faintly: “I don’t… Yeah, if he opened those pressure lines into the core storage. He might’ve had time to do that.”

“Without tritium to burn, your fusion pit won’t reach trigger temperature,” Carl added helpfully, grinning.

“You—!” Linbarger’s line went dead.

Carl twisted and made sure the entrance behind him had a hefty tool cabinet jamming the way. He had long-lever wrenches on the two crucial pressure points, ready to crack open the valves. They could come at him from behind, but he could spray a lot of precious fuel out into space before they got the valves closed again. Enough to kill their plans, certainly.

“Are you sure you can do it, Osborn?” Ould-Harrad asked cautiously.

“Yeah.” What do you want me to say? No? With Linbarger listening ?

“Well, this certainly gives us a better bargaining position…

“Bargain, hell! We’ve got ’em by the balls.”

“If they get to you fast enough, perhaps they can retain enough tritium to make a multiple flyby with Mars. Draw lots to use the nine slots they have now. Then.”

“Cut that crap.” Go ahead, give them ideas.

“I’m simply.”

“I said cut it!”

“I’m trying to prevent.”

“It’s not your ass on the line over here, Ould-Harrad.”

He twisted, watching the feeder lines drop away to the left. If somebody wriggled in that way, they might try to shoot at him. But that would be stupid, right in the middle of the fusion core. Damage these fittings and they would take weeks to replace, if ever.

Linbarger’s grim voice said, “You hear me on this hookup, Osborn?”

“I’m right here, just a friendly hundred meters away.”

Silence. Then Linbarger’s reedy, tight voice said slowly, “We’ll fire the start-up pinch if you don’t leave.”

Carl caught his breath, let it out slowly. That was the one alternative he hadn’t mentioned to anybody. It wasn’t smart, because start-up could do real damage if you handled it wrong—and Linbarger had no experience at that. But he had seen the possibility of frying Carl as the hot fluids squirted through this network of tubes. And Linbarger was just desperate enough to do it.

He said as calmly as he could, “You’ll burn out the throat.”

“Not if we’re careful. It won’t take too much fusion fire to cook you up to a nice, brown glaze.” Linbarger was clearly enjoying himself, thinking he had turned the tables.

“I’ll vent the tritium anyway.” Now let’s see how much he knows.

“No, you won’t. The subsystems will shut down those lines as soon as we start up. It’s automatic—says so right in the blueprints.”

Damn. “That’s not the way it’ll work.” Bluff.

“Don’t try that crap on me.”

Linbarger was smarter than Carl had thought. But he wasn’t going to win.

“You’ll never get back Earthside. You’re low on tritium as it is. I’ll blow enough of it to make sure you have a long voyage. You’ll never pick up the delta-V for a Jupiter carom. Even with the sleep slots, you’ll starve.”

“We’ve got the hydroponics.”

“Sure. And no extra water to run it.”

“There’s Halley ice right outside.”

“Try stepping outside.” Carl played a hunch “Hey—Jeffers! What happened to that Arcist I blew out the lock?”

—What Arcist? All I see is bits ’n pieces.—

Silence.

This tit-for-tat couldn’t go on much longer. Linbarger’s voice was getting thin, hollow-sounding. The man’s words came too fast, spurting out under pressure.

Carl bunched his jaw muscles, wondering if he believed his own words. If Linbarger acted, it would be a matter of seconds. Carl would have to choose whether to launch himself for the aft hatch and try to get away, or to use the wrenches. No time for dithering…

“You’re lying.” Linbarger didn’t sound so certain now.

“Fuck you.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I’m starting tritium release now.”

“No!” Ould-Harrad said. “I won’t have it come to this. We had a deal worked out.”

“And you double-crossed us! Percell-lover!” Linbarger barked.

Ould-Harrad said, “I couldn’t let that hydroponics equipment go, you refused to understand that.”

Carl said caustically, “Don’t apologize to that scum.”

“Carl,” Ould-Harrad said, “I must ask you to stop.”

“The party’s over,” Carl said. “Surrender, Linbarger!”

“I think I’ll give you a little pulse of the hot stuff, Osborn. It might improve your manners.”

“The second I hear a gurgle through these pipes, you Arcist prick, I’ll.”

“Stop it! Both of you! We have to work this out.” The African’s voice was frantic.

A long silence. Carl tried to imagine what was going through Linbarger’s mind. The man had apparently concealed from the Psych Board his fanatical hatred of Percells. Or maybe he’d just snapped. Could he think around that now, be halfway rational?

They’ve lost, dammit. Could Linbarger see that? Or would he prefer his moment of revenge?

And Carl would know of it by a whispering in the pipes…

“Okay.” Linbarger’s voice was grating, sour.

Ould-Harrad answered, “What? You agree?”

“We’ll trade the hydro for the tritium and slots.”

“No!” Carl cried. “We have them!”

“Quiet, Osborn!” Ould-Harrad shouted.

“The alternative,” Linbarger said slowly, “is that I blow up the Edmund Halley. Better… all of us here agree… better a quick end… than…”

Carl felt a cold chill at the croaking, slurred, mad voice. It was utterly convincing. He really means it. “Sweet Jesus,” Carl muttered.

First his captain, dead. Now the Edmund.

Ould-Harrad spoke at last. “We… we will make the exchange.”

What is a spacer without a spaceship? Carl wondered numbly. What will we be, when the Edmund is gone? It was too awful to even think of.

“You can offload the hydro stuff,” Linbarger said. “Get Osborn out of there and I’ll set the mechs to doing it.”

“No. I stay here until it’s done.”

Another silence. “Well…” More whispered arguing. Finally, “Okay. You can use those mechs to detach the main greenhouse module as a unit. Make it fast—or we’ll fry that piece of Percell shit.”

Carl let out a long, slow breath. The thought he had suppressed all these long minutes, that kept jabbing him, finally came swarming up: Why are you doing this? You could die, fool.

Now that he let it surface, he had no answer.

“Hurry up,” he said irritably.

SAUL

Wriggling, fluttering in a saline solution, the tiny bests flicked here and there, hunting, always hunting.

Certain substances, flavors, drew them to the equivalent of sweetness. Others repelled. The choice was always as easy as that, a logic of trophic chemistry. On the level of the cell, there were no subtleties, no future to worry about. No past to haunt one’s dreams.

Saul was pensive as he watched the tiny creatures pulse under the fiber microscope. They were the last and most potent of the new developments cooked up during the two months since the mutiny. Biological smart bombs for an unwanted war against Comet Halley.

So many of the rules he had lived by—codes of slow caution when experimenting with the stuff of life—had been pushed aside in order to get here. He envied the little microbes, in a way. For they would do as they were programmed, but he, their “creator,” was left with his load of doubt and mystery.

No. Of course you don’t worry, little ones. Guilt is a teamwork thing—a trait of eucaryotic metazoans—vast collections of conspiring cells gathered to form men and women, societies… gods.

Look at me, tampering with what I barely understand, on the questionable excuse that all our human lives depend on it.

The cyanutes had fully as much history behind them as he did. Their tiny ancestors had spent well over three billion years evolving in Earth’s waters. Then, some few millions of years ago, they adapted to take up a different way of life in another salty soup—the bodily fluids of complex creatures with great, nucleated cells.

How many thousands of my own ancestors did they kill in order to establish that first beachhead? How many trillions of them, in turn, were fought off by my forebears’ immune systems—latched onto by antibodies and transported to destruction, or engulfed and digested by white cells? How long did it take for a truce to be called at last… for evolution to work out a negotiated peace, a symbiosis ?

It was an unanswerable question. But at some point in the past some human being and some ancestral cyanute struck an accidental bargain. In exchange for a minor cleansing function in the lung cavity, the creatures were granted safe conduct from the body’s immune system. They settled down to an innocuous existence, so innocuous, in fact, that they weren’t even discovered until the waning days of the last century.

In our wisdom, we meddled with them, turning them into “cyanutes.” And, Heaven forgive me, I’m not ashamed at all. A hundred skilled, devoted men and women spent half a decade altering the fruits of four gigayears’ evolution. Given special permission, we used the tools of Simon Percell—and forged a useful thing of beauty.

But this!

The creatures on the screen had been changed even more, given jagged new protein coats, snipped and edited with tailored chain molecules, analyzed and reanalyzed by “reader enzymes”… warped by the drives of an emergency nobody had expected.

The job had taken only eight weeks since the mutiny. And, except for Virginia and her biocybernetic familiar, and a few tentative suggestions from brave colleagues on Earth, he had had no help at all.

By all the laws of biology I should not have succeeded. Not without a research team and thousands of hours of careful simulation. Millions of tests. Heaps of luck.

I knew better!

It‘s a wonder that I even tried.

Saul’s eyes flicked over the unrolling data display, seeing nothing but success. The uniformity of it made him more nervous than any flaw. It was too perfect.

I took both the sample cyanutes and the reader units from my own blood. The data on that line goes back more than five years.

There are elements of Halley-Life in the new form… I had to include them.

Saul shook his head. He couldn’t see how that would explain this convenient success.

To the left, one of JonVon’s unbiquitous color simulations turned a complex, jagged chain over and over.

The involute compound sugar was unknown in the literature. Last night, while holding Virginia close, he had told her that the Academy on Earth wanted to name it after him.

“That’s quite an honor, isn’t it?” she had asked sleepily. The cable snaking out from her neural tap looked like a braid of hair, and hardly got in the way.

He had smiled and stroked her glossy bangs. “Sure. They’ve reinstated my membership, too. But naming a chemical after me…”

“You don’t want them to?” she had asked.

“Hell, no!” He’d laughed. “Think of poor Thomas Fruck, with his name tied forever to fructose!”

She was too logy and languid from their lovemaking to do more than reach if back and pinch him for the affront of a joke.

SERIOUSLY, I SHOULD SUGGEST A NAME, he subvocalised. By now JonVon knew their surface networks well enough to deliver clear words most of the time. Saul felt her understanding echo back, amplified, the way her sexual fury and climax had confirmed themselves in his own mind a while ago, like explosions trying to lift the surface of his skull.

“Hnmimm,” she mumbled. He could sense her drifting off into slumber.

…COMET-OSE… came her suggestion.

He had been so offended by the horrible pun that it didn’t even occur to him until later that she must have already been asleep when he heard it.

Whatever its name, the sugar compound was the key… the sweetness he had used to forge a gingerbread cannon.

The missing madman, Ingersoll—by now a legend of the lower caverns—had given him the idea. Not long after he had glimpsed the man grazing on Halley lifeforms in the outer hallways, he had done something admittedly foolish; he had tasted some of the wall growth himself.

The stuff had been sweet, tangy, like lemon drops.

Saul played a hunch. Began some experiments. And here they were, the new cyanutes. They were still good at their old jobs, but now they were also voracious for anything with the special sugar complex… for any invader wearing clothes saying “Halley.”

On the screen the tiny creatures clustered where cometary-viroid-coat factors flowed from the tip of a needle. Instruments showed them gobbling contentedly and multiplying with abandon.

We were due for some good news.

Oh, the Halleyforms would adapt, evolve. This was not the end by a long shot. But it was starting to look as if the acute panic period might be over at last.

What have I missed? Saul wondered anxiously, perplexed. How was it possible to do it at all?

A chime sounded. Everything checked out. Saul pulled out the tube of fully tested cyanutes. From his lab it was a short glide to sick bay, where two lines of people waited along opposite walls to be served by the two med-techs on duty.

One of the queues was shorter than the other, but Saul did not see any Orthos moving over to stand in the Percell line. Ould-Harrad should never have let this system of segregation develop.

People did not stand any closer together than they had to. No one was sure how the cometary diseases were transmitted. Fights had broken out over a cough…or over one man using another’s space helmet without permission.

And every sick call turned up several who were faking symptoms, trying to escape the backbreaking work and drop-dead sicknesses by fleeing into the slots.

Well, at least the lines are shorter than they were a few months back. First, anger over the mutiny took their minds off things for a while. And Carl Osborn’s heroics had suppressed the Ortho-Percell squabbling. The “norms” all knew they owed their lives to a Percell.

Now, if only these new cyanutes work as well as the first tests indicate…

A booth at the back of sick bay opened, and out stepped a woman who smiled and waved at Saul. Marguerite von Zoon looked almost like a different person. Gone were the ravages that were tearing her skin apart two months ago. She had resumed her medical duties, releasing Saul for research.

Saul’s smile dropped when he saw Marguerite’s patient—a younger woman in a gray ship’s suit—who edged past the Walloon physician and hurried away toward the exit holding a cloth to one side of her face. Even turning her head away, she could not completely hide a shimmering, pink rash.

“Lani!” Saul whispered in dismay.

He had hoped that Marguerite’s diagnosis might turn out to be wrong, but there was no mistaking the symptoms of Zipper Pox.

“Lani?” he said, but she hurried by without looking up. These in both lines edged away as she passed.

Oh, Lani.

It was one of those diseases that seemed impervious, so far, to any of the tricks to come out of the lab. Even with his recent string of incredible luck.

It was ironic. While others were fighting to get back into the slots, Lani had begged to stay awake. But the decision was made. Her cooling had already been scheduled for day after tomorrow.

Carl has been a real rat to her, Saul thought. If he isn’t there for Lani’s slotting, I’m going to punch him in the nose.

“Dr. Lintz!”

Keoki Anuenue, the med-tech handling the shorter Percell line, stood up as Saul crossed the waiting room. The Hawaiian momentarily left the side of a dull-eyed man whose ears were packed with cotton, who slapped the side of his head every few minutes as in vain effort to stop the sound of bells.

Anuenue was exceptional even for a Hawaiian—one of the rare Orthos who seemed completely oblivious to both sickness and despair. He seemed never to sleep. Whenever Saul came in, Keoki was already on duty.

He grinned broadly, gesturing down at the vial in Saul’s hand, anticipation in his voice as he asked, “Is that the latest cyanute varietal, Dr. Lintz?”

He thinks I can do anything. So does Virginia. Saul shrugged. And after the luck I’ve been having, who am I to disagree? It was a sardonic thought. He knew something mysterious was going on, and it had little to do with skill.

He held out the vial.

“Here you are, Keoki. Find volunteers the usual way. Only desperate cases, at first. These ought to be useful against the Node Lodes, as well as Sinus Whinus and the Red Clap.”

Anuenue eagerly took the flask. He started to speak, then somebody in the line along the left wall cut loose in a loud, sudden sneeze.

All around the room, people looked up accusingly. It wasn’t me, this time, Saul felt like disclaiming.

As if it were a trigger, more sneezes erupted from the Ortho side of the chamber. The line lengthened as people put more room between themselves and the miscreants.

Saul glanced at the genetically enhanced group. Percells hardly ever sneezed.

They caught the same diseases as everyone else. Saul had tried to explain this over and over to resentful Orthos. If a viroid or other comet microbe was going to kill outfight, it didn’t matter much which group you belonged to.

But Percells’ bodies did not overreact. Their lymph nodes and membranes might swell while the body’s immune system waged war on invaders, but the process was self-limiting. They didn’t balloon up and die of their own overeager defenses.

Simon, he thought. This was the gift of which you were proudest, even though it mystified you, too… that every child you worked on somehow benefited from the same augmentation, whatever genetic disease you had started out working on.

It had surprised everyone, back in Berkeley. They had used DNA strip-readers and molecular surgery to edit harmful genes from sperm and ova of couples desperate to have children. But few had expected the babies who came forth out of those microrepaired cells to emerge so enhanced.

It’s a gift we gave them. A gift with the terrible price of making them different.

“Saul!”

A voice from across sick bay—he looked up and saw Akio Matsudo waving at him from his office door.

Saul glanced at Keoki Anuenue, who grinned. “Go on, Doctor. I’ll find those volunteers, and I’ll let you know before the tests begin.”

Saul nodded, concealing deep within the dread of what he knew had to come, sooner or later. Eventually, his bizarre string of luck would run out. One of his tailor-made symbionts would kill, rather than save its host. And then, no matter how much good he had done before, they would turn on him. All of them.

As they had turned on Simon Percell.

As the mob had burned a university on a mountaintop, so long ago and so very far away.

“Mai kii aku i kauka hupo,” he told Keoki.

Don’t get an ignorant doctor.

The big Hawaiian blinked in surprise, then rocked back laughing. The sound was so rich, so infectious, that several of those standing in line smiled without quite knowing why.

“Coming, ’Kio,” he called to Matsudo. “I’ll be right there.”

The snow-covered slopes of Mount Asahi were as symmetrical as the green pines blanketing its lower flanks. Clouds, like rice-paper boats, floated past on an invisible layer of either air or magic, setting forth toward a setting sun and a dark blue western sea.

Saul was content to watch Akio Matsudo’s weather wall, perhaps the finest in all the colony. Indeed. until Virginia came off shift in two hours, this was just about the best thing he could think of to do with his time.

It beats working, he thought tiredly. For once his mind was not awhirl with ideas, the next experiment to try, the next clue to trace. He sat, zazen fashion, thinking as little as possible.

Something we Westerners have learned from the East… that beauty can be found in the smallest things.

The earthy brown clay tea set had been brought all the way from the shores of the Inland Sea. Its rough surfaces reflected the mute colors of the late afternoon light in a way that could not be described, only admired. The shaping marks on the cup in front of Saul seemed to have been formed on the same wheel as that which turned Creation. It was contemporary with the planets, with the sun.

Entranced, Saul glanced up when Akio Matsudo spoke.

“The wait will be worth it, Saul. Be patient.”

Waiting? Saul thought. Was that what I was doing?

Highlights in the Japanese physician’s glossy black hair shone like Mount Asahi’s glaciers as he fussed over the tea, commenting on the difficulty of boiling water properly in low gravity, what with weakened convection and all. To Saul, the man’s voice was one with the rustling pines.

“I will now pour,” Akio intoned, and lifted the cups delicately.

Saul was not in a hurry to get to business. When the ceremony was finished, and the tea poured, they gossiped over inconsequential matters—the latest fashion in mathematical philosophy on Earth, and the strange propositions being put forward by the Marxist theologians of Kiev. The journals had been full of it, and they both wondered aloud what Nicholas Malenkov would have made of it all.

Akio seemed in much better health now. He had been one of Saul’s first volunteers to take an early version of the retailored cyanutes. It was that or lose him permanently to the infection tearing away at his liver. Now the sickly yellow pallor was gone. He had regained weight. Soon he would even quit using the mechanical endocrine rebalancer that had been keeping him alive.

Saul was very pleased to see his friend healthy and spry again.

I was able to help Virginia, and Marguerite, and Akio. Maybe, later, we can do something for Lani and Betty Oakes, and so many others.

Memory of Miguel Cruz was still a sharp pain. More than anyone else, their commander was needed. But there were limits to what Saul ever expected to be able to do, no matter how lucky he was.

Akio Matsudo put down his cup and carefully removed his glasses to polish them. “Saul, my friend, forgive my bluntness. But I think that perhaps I should explain why I asked you here today. I believe that now it is time for you to go into the slots.”

Saul put down his cup. Akio raised his hands.

“Before you protest, please allow me to explain. There are many, many reasons.”

He raised one finger. “First Watch was supposed to last only a little over a year. The colony’s anniversary is this month. And you were one of the few civilians awake for the entire trip out, on the Edmund. You are losing lifespan. It is unfair to you, who have less of it to spare than the youngsters outside.”

Saul snorted. “What is this, Akio? We may have passed through the worst part, but the staffing nightmare isn’t over yet. With all the people we’ve had to pull, term slot, and even vac-store out on the surface, it’s clear the shifts will have to be longer than planned. You know that argument’s a load of crap.”

Matsudo winced at Saul’s bluntness.

“Yesss.” His agreement sounded more like a suppressed hiss of disapproval. “Perhaps. But I must tell you that Bethany Oakes made me promise, before she herself was slotted, that you would be put away if your symptoms grew worse.”

“They aren’t any worse,” Saul grumbled. “It’s just another bad cold. I think it’s still a leftover from one of your damn challenge viruses. I can tell by the way it tickles before I sneeze.”

He knew better, of course. There was comet stuff inside him, from viroids to latent bacteroids. Some of the variants did not use the Halley sugar complex, and so were doubtless invulnerable to his new silver bullets.

And I’m older than mast. Could be that makes me more vulnerable.

For a moment the contemplative daze threatened to return. The conversation had reminded him of a weird sensation he had had, a few days ago, on examining a sample of his own blood… a feeling that something…

He shook his head. No. This is… He searched for a Yiddish expression and failed. Bullshit. Good old Anglo-Saxon bullshit. That’s the only word for it.

“There is a second major reason.” Matsudo squeezed and covered another cup of sharp, yellow-brown tea for each of them. “Because of the mutiny, this year’s desperate effort will be to build greenhouses on the surface, and farms down in chamber Tau. The hydroponics pod from the Edmundmust be kept alive until new food-production facilities are set up. That is why Evans is being thawed now—he is the best of all the expedition ecologists, and Svatuto is coming out of the slots as his backup.”

Saul noted Matsudo’s pained expression flickering when he had to mention the Edmund. Even more to be avoided was any mention of the Newburn. In all the time since the mutineers had departed, not once had Saul heard anybody utter the name of the lost slot tug, now apparently completely out of reach and growing more distant with every passing day. It was an utterly taboo subject.

“Yes? So it’ll be good to consult with Evans. There are some matters concerning the origin of Halley lifeforms that an ecologist can help with. I’m not certain I can accept the old explanation any longer.”

Akio looked out over the scene of sunset on the Western Sea. The clouds had turned orange and black, breathlessly beautiful.

“You misunderstand me, Saul. This means we will have more medical people awake than is proper in the long run, over forty shifts. Svatuto is a better clinician than you are, anyway. You know that, Saul.”

Saul shrugged. “That’s why I went into research,” he said, reaching for his handkerchief. “Can’t… can’t stand sick people.” The room wavered. Saul shook his head vigorously. Then he turned aside and sneezed.

Matsudo jumped slightly, and finally smiled. “Nobody does that so dramatically. It is that Semitic profundity of a nose, I suppose. Seriously, Saul, that is another reason. Forgive me, but you disrupt everything. People fear your noisy, drippy symptoms, even as they respect your genius. Lieutenant Colonel Ould-Harrad and others think that it would be best for everybody if you should rest for a while.”

Saul shook his head. “I just now realized, you’re actually serious about this, Akio. Right when my work is…” He stopped, unable to find words for how well things were going in the lab.

Then there was also Virginia. Her love is the best thing that’s happened to me in ten years.

The tentative, simulated telempathy they shared through her daring, unconventional biocybernetics was as exciting in its own fashion as his work in bioengineering. They were both accomplishing things that would shake up half-a-dozen disciplines! Why, over, just the last week he had received messages from crusty old Wallin, at Oxford, and even aloof, above-it-all Tang in Peking …

“This is in no way to detract from your accomplishments,” Matsudo said quickly, trying to soothe Said. “You have, in fact, achieved wonders, wonders! I find your methods unnerving, as well you know, but I cannot argue with success. If any of us survive, it will be in no small measure thanks to you.”

Saul shook his head. “There’s more to be done! We have to see if the procedures.”

“And I insist that you underrate your success!” the tall Japanese hissed.

Akio must have been severely agitated. This was the first time in Saul’s experience that he had ever interrupted anybody. The man looked quickly aside. “Excuse me, please. But I have done simulations, and Earth Control concurs. The larger Halleyform organisms—the purples especially—can be kept in check using ultraviolet and your new microwave beamers. The fungoids are now under control using more precise versions of both techniques.”

“And the diseases?”

“The diseases fall off dramatically in nearly everyone who has received your new cyanutes. Tests show there are few actual cures, but the advantage has been given back to the human body’s immune system.”

“So.”

“So your techniques will hold the line! People will fall ill, true. Some will even die—but at a far, far slower rate.”

Then Akio did something quite rare. He looked Saul directly in the eyes.

“I am in awe of your power, Saul Lintz,” he confessed softly. “Another reason you must be slotted is that we simply cannot afford to lose you. There are three decades ahead until the hard work of aphelion. A greater period afterwards. There will be more crises. New, adapted bacteroids and viroids. Please think of yourself as our secret weapon, our reserve against all contingencies.”

His eyes were pleading, asking Saul to accept, and not to inflict any more of his Occidental directness against something that was already decided.

He’s holding something back, Saul realized. Politics? Orders from Earth?

Virginia had spliced press clips for him, over the two months since the mutiny. He had been too busy to more than glance at the news blurbs, but apparently some elements in the media were making celebrities of two particular members of the Halley Expedition.

Carl Osborn and me. We’re the latest sensations, back there.

DOC HALLEY-DAY AND WYATT PERCELL… BATTLING CREEPY

BUGS AND BUGGY CREW…

Could it be that the powers back home can’t afford to have this popular image last too long? Both an augmented person and a former collaborator of Simon Percell in the headlines?

Oh, what a laugh! I sought obscurity and safety out in space—and find neither!

Matsudo looked away again. Saul knew, then, that this was a matter decided far above, and there would be no use inflicting protests on his uncomfortable friend.

He had seen simulations better than Matsudo’s—prepared in stochastic logic by JonVon to his own models. Matsudo was right. Things were indeed getting better…or at lest they would slip downhill more slowly for the foreseeable future. Saul had hoped that it would mean more time to study—to really study—what was going on here.

There was more to all of this than a life-or-death struggle between colonists and native organisms. Much, much more, and he wanted to find out about it.

But how does one fight city hall?

Maybe I could persuade Virginia to desert with me, into the tunnels. We’ll graze on green stuff; like Ingersoll. Raid the animal lockers and thaw some sheep to raise. Maybe plant sorghum down on the south forty and tell the universe to go to hell.

The ridiculous image made him smile, in spite of himself.

“I must have three months.” He began the inevitable bargaining. “There are experiments to finish, and I’ve got to brief Svatuto. Also, Keoki and Marguerite need more training before I hand the lab over to them.”

Matsudo shook his head. “Two weeks. It is all I am willing to… all I can risk you further.”

Saul smiled. “I’ll have to write a training manual for future shifts—on handling the cyanutes and using the microwave disruptor… Eight weeks, minimum.”

After a long silence, Matsudo sighed in acquiescence. “I fear for you, Saul. But I am also selfish. I admit that it will be good to have you here for that much longer.”

The black-haired immunologist looked out over the slopes of Mount Asahi. Sunset faded into a purpling night. Lowering clouds flickered with hints of thunder.

“Flesh is weak,” Akio Matsudo said softly, removing his glasses to polish them one more time. “And it is lonely without friends, where only the snow falls.”

VIRGINIA

As she approached the sleep-slot prep room one of her own poems—if indeed they deserve such a highfalutin’ name!—came rushing into her head.

Okay, you’re brave enough to say it to JonVon. Now do it.

She slipped into the prep room. Saul already lay in the carrier beneath cool pale light, surrounded by cylinders and spheres of gleaming steel. Carl Osborn was helping Keoki Anuenue, the med-tech, work over him. The red nutrient webbing resembled a net of blood vessels projected through the skin, like a demonstration in school. Saul was still awake, though drowsy. His eyes followed her as she walked to his side. Fog curled in chilly fingers around her.

Carl glanced up. “Where the hell have you been! I’ve been listening to the comm. Just as I started, all the mechs went dead.”

“I know.”

“Oh, is it already fixed?”

“It will be, if I give the order,” she said precisely.

Carl blinked. “What’s that mean?”

“I shut them all down. And I won’t bring them back on line unless you and Ould-Harrad honor my request.”

Anuenue kept attaching leads to Saul, oblivious, but Carl stopped and carefully put down his needle-nose pliers. He stepped away, where the tech couldn’t hear. “You’re… threatening us?”

“Let’s call it a promise.”

“Promise! What the—?”

“Either let me slot now, or you won’t get any useful work out of me or the mechs.”

“That’s disobedience! Blackmail!”

“Call it anything you like. Just do it.” Virginia compressed her lips into a thin, pale line.

“We need you.”

“There are other programmers available—unslot one. And JonVon can take over a lot of functions. I’ve upgraded his capabilities.”

“No computer is as good as you.”

Good. Get him to argue rationally. “JonVon’s general organizing structures are better than mine. He also does higher-order selfprogramming. That makes him very adaptable.”

“But your experience.”

“Listen, I’m not negotiating here. I’m demanding.”

Carl sighed and she saw that he was worn down. Not physically—his solid jaw and strong cheeks were ruddy with health, a welcome sight in these days—but mentally. Ould-Harrad is a frustrating commander. Carl was the natural choice for exec officer, but it’s a relentless task being number two to a man like that. And I’m not making it any easier on him.

“You honestly think JonVon will work with another computer wizard? He’s your baby, after all.”

“I’ve instructed him to. I mandated it, using the old mission mainframe. Just as I’ve told him to keep the mechs dead until I give him the word.”

Carl said angrily, “So it is blackmail.”

“Call it a negotiating position.”

“You said you were demanding, not negotiating.”

A shrug. “Skip it. Slot me or else nothing gets done.”

Carl bristled and pointed a finger at Saul. “He put you up to this.”

“No. I never talked to him about it. I… decided on my own.”

Carl’s voice seemed squeezed, diminished. “You… love him that much?”

This was no time to care about anything except results. Carl’s face was reddening, his breathing getting faster. If he saw how unsteady she was, how much nerve it took to do this— “Of course. You’ve known that all along.”

Somehow this simple declaration blunted Carl’s building anger. “You… want to spend the same time in the slots?”

“We belong together.”

Carl shrugged again. “Damned nasty, shutting down the mechs this way.”

“I had to show I mean it. I don’t intend to live without Saul. Particularly since nobody really knows how much longer things will hold together here anyway.”

“We’ve got the diseases licked, Saul says.”

“Yes, for now. But what about long-term effects? We’ve got to be sure we have able bodies for service decades from now. People who can come out of the slots in good condition, ready to work. Saul and I fit that description. You know we can survive.”

She played out the arguments just as she had rehearsed them. There were holes in them, of course, but she saw now that Carl in his disoriented state was vulnerable to her, unable to muster a coherent objection. Perhaps he would, in fact, be glad to be rid of both her and Saul; their love was a continual irritant to him, she guessed.

Carl asked, “Keoki, could you get some more KleinTex solution from stock?” The tech nodded and left.

Carl seemed pensive, almost dazed.

“Carl… I know this is a hard time…”

He blinked, obviously struggling with inner conflicts. “You know, I never pay attention to the people around me… never know what they’re thinking… feeling.”

“No, that’s not true, you.”

“Lani, I never saw her,” he said bitterly. “I was so wrapped up in dreams about you. To see her going into the slots, that damned disease eating her up… I could’ve had some time with.”

“If you’d been a superman, yes,” she said patiently. “We’ve all been run ragged, Carl. You can’t blame yourself for not being all things to all people.”

He didn’t reply, just picked absently at the weave of nutrient tubes and sensor wires that covered Saul. Virginia watched his expression settle into one of sad reflection. He sighed, then looked into Saul’s relaxed face and asked, “You can understand?”

A nod.

“She’s coming with you.”

A slow smile. The lined skin around his eyes crinkled with unmistakable happiness.

She asked Carl, “His speech centers?”

“I can reconnect them if you want. Or call Matsudo, if you don’t trust my fumbling.”

She covered Carl’s hand tenderly, sorry that it had come to this. “No…don’t. I think we understand without speaking.”

Saul nodded.

Carl’s face was blank, numb. He looked from one to the other. Virginia felt pity for him, a man thrust too quickly into the center of events. She was sorry that she had been forced to do things this way. But there was no turning back.

“We’ll slot you within a few weeks,” Carl said evenly, clearly summoning up strength from some reservoir. “First we thaw your replacement, so you can brief her. We’ll have to square it with the sleep-slot committee, argue over whether the replacement should be a Percell or an Ortho—the usual. Should take less than a month. We’ll start as soon as you get JonVon and the mechs in shape.”

She didn’t take her eyes away from Saul. “I’ll assign my personal mech, Wendy, to give JonVon permanent manual function.”

“The details don’t matter. You’ve won. That’s what counts.”

She nodded, unable to speak.

He stood silently in the curling moist fog and cold for a long time. “The people I most cared about, they’re all slipping away…” Then he shrugged. “Y’know… I’m going to miss you two.”