The Ophiuchi Hotline

10

The rumors had been going around for a month; there was finally going to be a trial run, an actual test of one of the possible weapons in the war with the Invaders. When Lilo heard what it was to be, she could not credit it. Surely Tweed would not do that.

But shortly it was official. Everyone was worried, but no one could think of a way to stop it. Tweed was going to remove the black hole from the other side of Poseidon, let it pass through Jupiter, then sit back and see if there was any reaction. The general consensus on Poseidon was that if there was a reaction, it would not be necessary to radio the news to Tweed. The whole system would hear about it soon enough.

Lilo talked it over with Niobe and Vejay, then spent hours with Cass and Cathay. They were all frightened. The question Lilo wanted to resolve was what approach to take. Cathay felt that any attempt to stop the project would be suicide, and said the best they could do was hope the Invaders would ignore it. After all, it was a big planet. It might not hit any of them on the way through.

Lilo strongly disagreed, and was backed up by Niobe, Vejay, and Cass.

"You know what I think?" Lilo asked. "I think the time is never going to be better to try and take over Poseidon."

She waited for the reaction to die down. She was breathing hard, determined to get her point across. If only she could convince them, perhaps she could convince herself. She did not wish to die, and what she was proposing looked dangerous, even to her.

"What I'm saying is, what better time is there to go for broke than when it looks like the alternative might be just as bad? I'm willing to take the chance. What about you?"

The discussion went on into the night, and proved inconclusive. The best Lilo could get was an agreement to discuss the situation further, and pledges of support if she could come up with a plan.

She had one, but it was barely formed. It would have to depend on circumstances as they evolved, but it seemed as though the first necessary step in any plan was to be aboard the ship which would position the hole for its drop into Jupiter. If she could do that, there was time to think of a way to steal the ship and return for the others.

So she approached Vaffa about the possibility of using the ship for the launching of another biological probe. She argued that it would make sense to combine the two missions. The electromagnetic tug could first release the hole on a course to pass through the center of Jupiter, then make a slight trajectory change to position an instrument package for an atmosphere-grazing path. After conferring with her clones and consulting the guidelines Tweed had given them, Vaffa okayed the project. Lilo said that she would need someone to help her, and suggested Vejay. Vaffa quickly vetoed him, on the grounds that he did not have a good reputation. Lilo hastily named Cathay as an alternative. She didn't want Vaffa thinking there was an escape being planned.

She was counting on the fact that, while Tweed might know very well what she would do in terms of planning and preparation, he could not predict how she might react when confronted with an unplanned opportunity. Her policy was to put herself in a place where such an opportunity might occur.

She told Vejay to come up with a means whereby Cathay could kill or disable the pilot of the tug, and, with any luck, take control of the ship. She intentionally made no plans to get rid of Vaffa. Not only did it seem impossible, but she was convinced that planning had to work against her rather than for her. The whole thing would have to be played by ear. She would get onto the ship and remain alert for an opening.

She did her best not to think about it much, because when she did it sounded insane.

Tweed surprised them all, and almost ruined everything. The conspirators assembled hastily when Lilo got the news of what was actually going to happen.

"That's what comes of relying on rumors," Niobe said.

"We should have thought of it," Vejay complained. "We would have been hard up for power here if he'd used our black hole. The standby fusion generator would have carried us, but it would have been tight."

"I just didn't think he cared enough to worry about that," Niobe said.

What Tweed had done was to buy a second hole on the open market at Pluto. It was on its way to Luna to become the ninth orbital power station, but what no one in authority knew was that Tweed planned to pass it through Jupiter before that happened.

It was neat, it was economical; it was typically Tweed. Whenever possible he carried out more than one plan of action with every move he made. The hole, in orbit around Luna, would be enormously profitable to him, so the expense of the project would be justified and absorbed. The huge electromagnetic tug which had accelerated the hole at Pluto would let it go on one side of Jupiter, wait for it to pass through, and pick it up on the other side.

Lilo pointed out to Vaffa that it would still be possible to use the small rocket scooter based on Poseidon to rendezvous with the larger ship as it passed them. Vaffa thought it over, and eventually agreed. The Vaffas might have suspected some sort of plot, but felt secure enough about the scooter. It had the peculiar property of exploding if it passed a certain distance from the gravity well of Jupiter: another of the innumerable precautions against escape.

The scooter was a standard model, little more than an engine with a framework of seats attached. Three of the four seats were filled with silvery bodies as Vaffa matched velocity with the mammoth tug.

They had come in laterally from the front, allowing the tug to catch up with them. None of them wanted to get anywhere near the aft end of the other ship. Somewhere back there, suspended by invisible lines of magnetic force, was a black hole smaller than a pinhead but massing as much as a medium-sized asteroid. It would not do to get too close to it.

Lilo was trying to juggle all the factors in her head, looking for the chance which, when it came, might last only a fraction of a second. One crew member in the tug. Vaffa the only one in communication with him. The homemade gas capsule hidden in the atmosphere probe, the probe strapped to the outside of the scooter. Vaffa's weapon strapped to his side. Times and courses: twenty minutes to castoff, when the tug would let go of the hole and pull away from it; thirty minutes to the course change that would put the probe on the right trajectory to graze the Jovian atmosphere.

Cathay was to try to get into the tug first—the lock would take only one person at a time. After that, it was up to him. If he gassed the man inside, they were committed to trying to overpower Vaffa. They might do it, with the help of surprise.

Ten meters away, Vaffa cast a magnetic line to the tug and warped the scooter in close. The three of them jumped free and began to lash the scooter. Lilo saw Cathay move toward the compartment where the gas bomb was hidden, and tried to get between him and Vaffa.

"I know what you're doing," Vaffa said quietly.

"Inspection," Lilo said, desperately. "We have to—"

"Let me see that." He was reaching for his laser.

Lilo put one foot on the scooter and dived at him. Her head hit him in the stomach, doubling him up. She saw the laser swing by her face, his grip loosened for a moment. She chopped at his wrist, and the gun fell away from them, spinning free.

"The lock!" she cried. "Get in the lock! Hurry!" She couldn't see if Cathay was moving. Vaffa swung at her chin, but the force of his blow turned his body enough so that he missed her. It had been instinctive, but the wrong thing to do in weightlessness. He saw his mistake and was about to switch tactics when he realized he had moved out of reach of the ship and scooter. He grabbed for Lilo's foot as it came by him, just as she reached for a strut on the scooter. He pulled, she kicked, and her hand lost its grip. The two of them drifted away from the scooter, not fast, but there was no way back under their own power. Unless...

Lilo kicked again, hitting him in the jaw. He hung on desperately until she had to stop because she was no longer facing the ship. Her idea was to push him from her and get back that way. But he saw it, too, and as soon as she stopped kicking he started to climb her leg. In another second he would be pushing her away from the ship.

She kicked again, shaking him back to her ankle, and kept on kicking, this time with both feet. His ribs seemed to crunch under her heel as she connected. Savagely, she aimed for the same spot again. He doubled over in pain, and his hand released her. She was floating free, spinning very slowly.

It didn't look too bad, if Cathay could get control of the ship. She saw Vaffa turning end over end at about one revolution per second, then she spotted the tug. She had drifted about fifty meters away from it. It was impossible to tell yet which way she was moving.

Then she heard Vaffa calling the ship.

"Cathay! He's talking to the pilot. You've got to get him before he can call back to Poseidon and tell them what's happened, or..." She stopped, realizing he wouldn't be able to hear her if he was in the ship and in a position to do anything about it. If he wasn't in the ship, it was all over anyway.

Three long minutes dragged by. The only thing Lilo learned for sure was that she was not getting closer to the ship. She was moving away. And she didn't care for the direction, either. Ahead of her, Jupiter was growing, filling the sky with the round circle of the tug exactly centered in it, seen from the stern. Somewhere in the direction she was moving was a black hole.

"You'll get there first," she yelled, feeling lightheaded. "How does it feel, Vaffa?"

There was no reply for a while. The voice that finally came was strained, full of pain.

"Why did you do it?"

"I don't think I could explain it to you. But it almost worked. Still might. I've got my fingers crossed."

There was no answer. Lilo thought she heard a moan. In a few seconds she was sure of it. There was an incoherent noise that stood her hair on end even after she had identified it. It was a subvocalized scream, picked up by the voder in Vaffa's throat and amplified as sheer agony. Then silence. Lilo began to worry. She hadn't hit him that hard.

"Lilo? Can you hear me? Are you alive?"

"Yes, I'm here! You got in!"

"It took me a while to get my radio tuned to the suit frequency. Damn, I wish it was you in here. All these buttons scare me." They had trained him for hours on mock-ups Vejay had built. He could punch in a course, if it came to that, and as long as nothing went wrong he could fly it.

"Never mind about that. You've got to cut the hole loose, and fast. I think Vaffa's dead, and I'm afraid what killed him was the magnetic field interfering with his suit generator. I'm not enough of a physicist to know just what a powerful magnetic field can do, but it didn't sound pleasant. Can you... I mean, in a hurry, you understand? I don't know how long it will be—" She stopped herself when she realized she was panicking.

"Just a minute. I'll do it." She heard him muttering to himself, then a cry of triumph. "There. They're all reading zero. Did that do it?"

"I'll know in a minute. Now we've got to think fast. Neither of us wants to fall into the thing. You're going to have to move the ship a little farther out. Vejay said the gravity field of a hole is very weak at just a small distance, but it increases sharply the closer you get to it. I'll be all right. But you have to save the ship so we can get back and—"

"It's too late for that. I didn't have time to tell you, but the pilot talked to Poseidon before I gassed him. They know we've taken over. They'll be waiting for us. It's no good, Lilo." She could hear him choking. Oh, God. Vejay and Niobe and Cass, waiting outside on the chance Lilo and Cathay would return in control of the tug...

"Cathay, we talked about that. They know what to do. If they're suspected of anything, they'll hole up with Cass and wait it out. We've got to get away now, so we can come back with some weapons we can use."

"You're right. We—"

Everything seemed to happen at once. There was a bright flash behind Lilo. She started to turn, thought better of it. It had to be Vaffa impacting the hole, being condensed by the awful gravity into degenerate matter, releasing all the energy stored in the atoms of his body as raw radiation.

That was bad enough, but ahead of her the tug was moving. A thin spear of light shot from it, angled away from her, and the engines continued to burn.

Jupiter had swallowed up the sky. It was beautiful. Even knowing it would be her death, Lilo had to admit that. And she preferred it to the hole, though her death would not be as quick.

From the time two hours earlier when the tug's autopilot had performed its preset maneuver (the details, the endless details; how could she have thought of them all?), Lilo had been overcome with a paralyzing lethargy, a certainty of death. Not that she hadn't struggled against it; she and Cathay had talked over every possible chance of escape. But when the background of stars began to swing around her in a direction she could account for in only one way, she knew her fate was sealed. She had missed the hole, but not by enough.

Vaffa had missed it, too, but by an even smaller margin. His body had come close enough to be compressed into a speck too small to see except for the light of its annihilation. It lasted only a second, then dispersed into space.

Lilo had not come that close. A hole could be a dangerous thing, though not so much from the danger of falling into it. That was very unlikely, since it was so tiny and the space she floated in was so vast. But a near-miss could be fatal. The strength of the gravity field changed sharply as one neared the hole. If Lilo had fallen into a close, hyperbolic orbit around it, the tidal strains induced by the hole's gravity attracting different parts of her body with varying strength would have torn her apart. Or if she came close enough, as Vaffa had done, the gravity could collapse her body to a pinhead-sized mass of neutronium.

She had been lucky, in a way, but not lucky enough. She would remain far enough away from it to stay alive, but she was definitely in a slow orbit around it.

She had discussed it calmly with Cathay. He was going to try getting her with the scooter until she told him what she had seen when the tug boosted. The acceleration had torn the fragile scooter from its moorings and it had come apart. Then he wanted to move the tug in close, but that was out of the question. Even a superbly skilled pilot would not have dared to get that close to the hole.

In a way, Cathay was suffering worse than she was. He still had choices to make, things to do, and none of them was easy. Lilo spelled it out to him with the detached brutality of one whose fate is certain.

"You can't go back to Poseidon; not now. They'll be waiting for you. You have to hope that Cass and the others are okay. You have to go to Saturn. Go to the coordinates I told you, and sit tight. Broadcast on the frequency I gave you. Parameter is not likely to have moved far from the lab, even in a year. I'm out there, somewhere. You have to find me, and Parameter. They'll help you. You have the tug. You can get weapons somehow. Then come back for the children. Come back, Cathay."

"I will. But I don't want to leave. I can't leave you here."

"You have to. I don't want you listening in when... when the end comes. I don't want that." She felt the panic just below the surface, and made her voice as hard as possible. "Now go. You did everything you could."

It was not until she noticed a faint pressure on her back that she began to wonder how she was going to die.

The pressure built with incredible rapidity. She was slicing straight into Jupiter's atmosphere, like a meteor, but the suit was going to protect her. An orange glow built up around her, became so bright that she could see nothing else. Her spinning motion stopped as aerodynamic forces stabilized her with her back to the planet, arms and legs pulled out in front of her by the drag. The deceleration built up steeply, but she knew she could take a tremendous amount with the suit lung feeding oxygen into her blood.

The suit became rigid. Now the tugging sensations at her feet and hands were gone. The only sensation of motion was the feeling that her belly was trying to meet her backbone. The skin on her face was drawn tightly to the sides, and her breasts were trying to find new homes in her armpits.

She had no way of knowing how long it went on. There must have been a blackout in there, though she did not recall going under or waking up. But the pressure had stopped. She had reached terminal velocity for the upper atmosphere, and was now falling under the pull of gravity, almost weightless. She looked around for the hole, which should have been visible as it sucked in the surrounding gases. Then she remembered that the atmosphere would not have slowed the hole at all; it would be halfway through the planet by now. So it would definitely be Jupiter that killed her.

The air was clear, with towering clouds rising around her. From time to time she felt sharp surges of acceleration as the winds caught her and moved her sideways.

It was a timeless thing, the falling. At first she had followed old habits, speculating on how long it would take her to reach the dark clouds below, what the temperature outside her suit field might be, at what point the density of the gases might cause her to float instead of fall. But she became content just to observe. It was a staggering sight. If she had to die, she could do worse than meet death in such surroundings, alone.

That didn't last. She reached the cloud layer and visibility dropped to zero. There was nothing to see but the silvery hand she held in front of her face to assure herself she had not already died. She wondered if it would be possible to die and not know it.

It began to annoy her that her mind would not stop working. With nothing to do and nothing to see, she began speculating again. What would kill her? Would she survive it all, and live until her oxygen supply ran out? That should be an easy death, gradually losing consciousness and never waking up.

She remembered the exhaust valve on her suit, the metal flower below her collarbone through which waste gas and heat was pumped from her body. It was made from a very tough alloy, but it could heat up, jam, melt—any of a number of things. Death would be quicker that way, and possibly more painful. But there was nothing she could do about it. She felt a momentary regret that she would not make it to the layer of hot liquid hydrogen. That would have been something to see.

Later, more soberly, she realized it would probably be as dull as this lousy cloud layer she was passing through.

But now she burst out of the cloud layer. A vast, dim space lay open beneath her. At that, it was still much brighter than she would have expected from the thickness of the cloud layer above.

For some reason, her fear returned then with paralyzing intensity. There was nothing she could do to prevent it. Some part of her mind had taken another look at her situation, concluded she had no hope of surviving, and did not want to accept it.

She suffered another blackout, or an episode of insanity. The clouds were much closer now, a blend of red and violet shapes fringed with bright sparks—(white, with fluffy gray bottoms)—tumbling and boiling like a cauldron of electric eels.

There were some yellow shapes just visible, darting from the cloud bank below her—(above me, floating in a blue sky)—into the clearer air, then back into obscurity. They were almost certainly alive. She wondered if they were Invaders, or members of the intelligent Jovian race, or simply animals.

(The ground beneath me was soft, yielding. I grabbed a handful of it; it trickled through my fingers. Sand. I writhed deeper into it, trying to bury myself. A breeze cooled my body, and blew the soft white clouds past me in the blue sky. A yellow shape darted from one of the clouds)—and back into the cloud bank again. They were getting closer. Her detached calm had returned to her now, and she wondered if they would try to eat her. It made her eyes hurt to try to look at them—

(Left, right, receding from me, then... Ouch! My eyes crossed, and my head started to hurt. I buried my face in my hands, welcoming the hurting grit I rubbed over my face. I rolled in the sand, over and over, hard beneath me, wetness, sliding)—it was rising, coming directly at her. Her eyes could not define its shape. In the center of it, if it could be said to have a center, was a hole, and in the middle of the hole was a tree—(a tree)—and the feeling of sand in her mouth, water—(rushing over me, rolling me, pulling, in my mouth and nose)— salt and sand and a roaring noise. Disorientation, time running sidewise, nausea building in the pit of her stomach—

I stood up in the surf and swayed drunkenly, naked, soaking wet, dizzy. I took a step and fell over as the ground lurched. On hands and knees, I vomited into the foamy water. I began to crawl, dazed, my whole attention focused on the wet strands of hair dangling down in front of me, swaying back and forth. I saw my hands grip the sand, and they might have belonged to someone else.

The sun was setting. It was the most glorious thing Lilo had ever seen.

She huddled under a clump of windblown shrubbery, hugging her legs close to her. The wind was coming off the sea, and it was cold. Her teeth chattered. It was possible that she would freeze to death before the night was over, and she had no idea of what to do about it.

It was impossible for her to recall when she had decided that she was not dead, that this was not the afterlife. For many hours she had sprawled in the sand, insensible, her mind overloaded with too many impossible things. Rational awareness had returned only gradually, cautiously, ready to retreat at any moment.

The cold had helped. Awareness of discomfort had forced her to marshal her wits, to crawl into the thin shelter of the tree, to draw her body into compactness to combat the chill.

Looking out over the ocean with the sun setting behind her, it had come to her that she knew where she was. Stars came out one by one and flickered weakly. So they did twinkle, it wasn't a fairy tale for kids.

Night fell, and after many hours of shivering and growing hunger, something rose over the water. It was Luna.

She was sitting on the continent of North America, looking out over the Atlantic Ocean.

The land was flat. Lilo had been walking south along the beach for several hours. Once she had gone inland a few hundred meters, but the ground was soft and wet and clouds of insects rose to torment her. Her skin was dotted with welts.

Thus far she had no real plan except to keep moving. She hoped to find some sort of shelter, and possibly plants that she could eat. She had studied some green berries and a type of brown seaweed, tasted both, and moved on. It would take a lot more hunger to drive her to that. The idea of trapping and eating animals was one she was avoiding. All the meats she had ever eaten came from mutated plants. She had not yet considered that she might not be able to catch anything. Part of her mind could not stop thinking that this was a disneyland beneath the Lunar surface. It would be easy to believe that, except for the constant heaviness she felt. Her ankles and calves were throbbing from the gravity and the constant sliding of the sand underfoot.

The beach narrowed to a point; the north arm of a large bay lay to the west. She sank down on the sand and looked across to the land on the other side. It was too far to swim, so she had to decide if she should retrace her steps or strike out along the inside of the bay. There was no way to tell from where she sat if it really was a bay, or if she was on an island.

It was a shock to realize how tired she was. Her head was spinning, and she felt overheated. The sand felt very good as she stretched out on it and rolled over on her side to shield her face from the sun. In minutes, she was asleep.

Lilo woke to pain such as she had never known.

She came to her feet screaming, feeling that she was on fire, frantic to put it out. But touching herself only brought more pain.

Nothing in her life had prepared her for it. The few times she had hurt herself the pain had been easily controllable; help had been as near as the first-aid terminal on every corner. When the pain had gone on for fifteen minutes and gave no sign of abating, she became hysterical and ran blindly down the beach until she fell.

After a while she noticed something. It hurt just as badly as before, but it could be lived with. She sat up, wiped the tears away, and examined herself. She was cherry-red from her ankles to her shoulders. She had received first-degree radiation burns all over her backside.

It had not occurred to her that this could happen on Earth. The atmosphere was supposed to act as a shield against ultraviolet radiation, or else how could life survive? Never had she needed to think about the possible harmful effects of sunlight. The only times she had encountered it, she had been either in a suit or beneath screening plastic in a public solarium.

She could see there were lessons she had better learn.

The land was less marshy now. After following the beach along the inside of the bay for a while, she had decided to go overland when the beach began to curve westward. There had been nothing edible by the water; she hoped for better luck inland.

Lilo noticed that when she moved due north—or as nearly so as she could estimate—she encountered little difficulty. If she went east or west the ground was interrupted with large pits. The trees and underbrush obscured her view of the area, so it was not until she mounted a small hill and could look down that she realized she was moving through the remains of the city. She had been walking down a broad avenue. On either side were regular rows of pits, most of them choked with brambles and half-full of water. Houses had been there, and now nothing was left but the slope-sided basements.

The destruction had been methodical, but not absolutely thorough. There was evidence of subterranean artifacts, half-buried objects of concrete and stainless steel. She found one twisted section of copper pipe sticking two meters out of the ground.

She walked all day, and when there was only an hour of daylight left she came to a place where the bay narrowed and seemed to be more like a river. It astounded her to realize how little she could tell about the land by actually being there and walking on it. The land across the river looked much the same as what she had already seen. Some of it was less than a kilometer away, but there was more in the distance. She couldn't tell if the closer land was an island in the river or a point curving around from the other shore.

But there were two small islands in the middle of the water before her, and she was sure they were artificial. Looking closer at the hill she stood on, she discovered masonry. There had once been a suspension bridge crossing the river; she was sure of it.

She went down the hill and explored its sides, hoping to find the entrance to any hidden room that might be there. Darkness was approaching, and she hoped to find some kind of shelter. But there was nothing.

A large spotted cat looked down at her from the branches of a tree. Aside from sea gulls and crabs, it was the first animal life she had encountered. Lilo knew something about animal species, but was unable to place this one. It seemed to have jaguar blood in it, but was more the size of an African lion. She turned her back on it and started off again.

Something made her turn around.

She saw the cat out of the corner of her eye, then face to face. It was on the ground, running at her with impossible speed. Its head zoomed larger and larger in her vision. It opened its mouth and leaped.

Things happened too fast for Lilo to follow. She remembered hearing the sound of an impact, and the cat hitting her, knocking her over. There was a confused vision of the cat gnawing at its hind leg, and blood spurting out around a long wooden shaft. Then the cat was up and moving, and so was Lilo. The next thing she remembered was being three meters up in a tree with her hands bleeding.

There was a human down there, struggling with the cat. It had him by the arm, and he was hacking at it with a small ax. She saw the cat fall away, and the man straighten. He glanced up at her, then down at his forearm and at the cat, with its head split open, still twitching. Lilo slowly came down from the tree.

"You're only a boy," she said in surprise. He glanced at her again, nervously, but apparently without comprehension. She began to wonder if he really was a child.

He was short, not even two meters tall. He could have stood under Lilo's outstretched arm. His hair was blond and he wore brief leather garments and shoes. She dug through her memory of ancient racial types, and decided he was Scandinavian. His face was long, with a high forehead.

"Thank you for what you did," Lilo said. "But you don't understand, do you?"

He looked up at her and smiled. Three of his front teeth were missing.

"I don't think I've ever seen anything as dirty as you are," Lilo said. "Except possibly me." She kept her voice friendly, and the fact was that she was not afraid of him. Then she wondered if she ought to be, and moved back a step. She had made two mistakes already, with the sun and the cat, and didn't want him to be the third. She tried to remember something about primitive tribes on Old Earth. The few scraps she could recall did nothing to make her think she could trust him.

He said something, and she thought she could recognize a few words. He nodded and grinned at her, made a few gestures that confused her until he pointed at the sun repeatedly.

He was speaking a corruption of American, and probably talking of the approaching night. Lilo was delighted. American was supposed to have come from the same roots as English, or was it the other way around? Lilo was not a student of history. But she did know that her own System Speech was a mix of English and Russian roots. She thought she could learn to talk to him.

She decided to follow him to see if he had food and shelter he would share. He seemed to approve when he looked back and saw her. She had to keep reminding herself that he could be dangerous, especially if he was going back to a tribe of others like him. But the fact was that she had no instincts to make her wary of strangers. The thought of him doing violence to her was so foreign that she soon forgot about it.

He took her to a concealed cavern. It was reached by concrete stairs beneath a thicket of bushes, and was large and flat on the inside. She thought at first that it was a basement that had retained its roof, but when he lit a fire she saw the place for what it was: The design of a train station for short-range rapid transit was still very much the same in Luna.

Lilo was wondering what to expect of the man. Her knowledge of the lives and customs of barbarous peoples was near zero. She did, however, recall some stories of how women had occupied a social position distinctly different from men, back in the days before routine sex changing had obviated the whole question. She wondered if he would want to cop, then, with a shock, wondered if he felt it might be his right to do so. He would get a big surprise in that case, she promised herself.

But he seemed a little in awe of her. He kept glancing at the hair on her lower legs, and when she stood up he gaped as he looked at her. Lilo soon discovered that he was in pain from his wounds. She looked at his injured arm. He didn't protest, and when she smiled encouragingly, he smiled back. It didn't look serious—just four deep punctures and a few ragged cuts.

Once again she had to stop herself. Such a wound on Luna would be of absolutely no consequence once the pain had been stopped. Here, it might take days to heal.

His name was Makel, and five days later he was dead.

The wound never healed. He tended it with water and various leaves and ointments, but each day it grew worse. It began to stink.

Lilo now understood her oversight, and cursed her stupidity. But considerations of sterility were as alien to her as the predatory instincts of the wild cat that had nearly killed her. Luna had been, from the very first, a germ-free environment. Rubber gloves, face masks—even boiled water, which she might have used to treat him—were unknown in Lunar surgery.

He remained vigorous until the last day, ignoring the spreading infection. Every day he hunted, and she went along with him. There was not time to learn a great deal from him, but she picked up some basic survival tactics. She learned to be always alert. It was a different world out there, and it would kill her if she gave it the chance. She learned which berries and fruits to eat, which roots to dig.

Finally he collapsed in a fever. She stayed with him, wiping the sweat from his brow, giving him sips of water when he asked for them. She stripped him and bathed him, and found that her first impression had been correct. He was not an adult, but not a child, either. He must have been in his early teens.

In the middle of the night she discovered that he was cold. She had no way of knowing how long he had been dead.

Lilo cradled his head in her lap and rocked back and forth, crying quietly. She had never seen a human die. She kept trying to tell herself that it wasn't her fault, but she never did believe it.