Cover design by Victoria Green

SERIAL

A NEW ORDER OF THINGS, Part III of IV, Edward M. Lerner

NOVELLA

KREMER'S LIMIT, C. Sanford Lowe & G. David Nordley

NOVELETTES

WITHERSPIN, Alexis Glynn Latner

THE KEEPER'S MAZE, Joe Schembrie

ENVIRONMENTAL FRIENDSHIP FOSSLE, Ian Stewart

STRING OF PEARLS, Shane Tourtellotte

SHORT STORIES

TOTAL LOSS, James Hosek

THE SOFTWARE SOUL, Brian Plante

WILLIES, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

THE TELLER OF TIME, Carl Frederick

SCIENCE FACT

MESSENGERS FROM THE EARTH'S CORE? THE GREAT PLUME DEBATE HEATS UP, Richard A. Lovett

READER'S DEPARTMENTS

THE EDITOR'S PAGE

ANALYTICAL LABORATORY RESULTS

THE ALTERNATE VIEW, John G. Cramer

THE REFERENCE LIBRARY, Tom Easton

BRASS TACKS

IN TIMES TO COME

UPCOMING EVENTS, Anthony Lewis

Stanley Schmidt Editor

Trevor Quachri Associate Editor

EDITORIAL: WHEAT AND CHAFF by Stanley Schmidt

THE ANALYTICAL LABORATORY

WITHERSPIN by ALEXIS GLYNN LATNER

IN TIMES TO COME

SCIENCE FACT: MESSENGERS FROM THE EARTH'S CORE? THE GREAT PLUME DEBATE HEATS UP by RICHARD A. LOVETT

TOTAL LOSS by JAMES HOSEK

THE KEEPER'S MAZE by JOE SCHEMBRIE

KREMER'S LIMIT by C. SANFORD LOWE & G. DAVID NORDLEY

THE ALTERNATE VIEW: PLANETS OF BINARY STAR SYSTEMS by JOHN G. CRAMER

THE SOFTWARE SOUL by BRIAN PLANTE

WILLIES by MAYA KAATHRYN BOHNHOFF

THE TELLER OF TIME by CARL FREDERICK

ENVIRONMENTAL FRIENDSHIP FOSSLE by IAN STEWART

STRING OF PEARLS by SHANE TOURTELLOTTE

A NEW ORDER OF THINGS: PART III OF IV by EDWARD M. LERNER

THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by TOM EASTON

BRASS TACKS

UPCOMING EVENTS by ANTHONY LEWIS

One of the most useful things about history is its way of putting present problems and propensities into perspective. Consider, for example, Sir Isaac Newton, the seventeenth-century English scientist and mathematician widely (and with good reason) considered the most important person in the entire history of science. His most significant work was summed up in his book usually known by the abbreviated title Principia Mathematica and described by Isaac Asimov (and many others) as "the greatest scientific work ever written."

Just what a landmark it was is hard for a modern person to fully appreciate, if only because so much of what it says now seems so simple and obvious to even a beginning student of physics and is taken for granted in virtually all everyday scientific work. At the time, though, none of it was obvious and hardly anyone else had come at all close to codifying so much so concisely. What we now see as its simplicity was its greatest virtue; nobody previously had realized it could be summarized so succinctly. Part of it was the precise, detailed description of the way everything moved and responded to forces in three brief, simple laws (two of which, in today's notation, are further consolidated into a single short equation), and in particular how things fell under the influence of gravity. Not just mundane objects on Earth, either; perhaps Newton's greatest intuitive leap was the realization that gravity acts in exactly the same way between any two celestial bodies as it does between, say, an apple and the Earth.

Almost incidentally, as part of the process of working these things out and confirming that they agreed precisely with all the observations available to Newton, he invented calculus--one of the most powerful and elegant of all mathematical tools, and still the everyday language of many fields, not only in the physical sciences but in some areas of biology and even economics. He also did groundbreaking work, eventually published in a separate thesis, Opticks, on the nature of light, including the discovery that white light is a mixture of such colors as red, yellow, and violet, and the invention of a telescope using a mirror instead of a lens to avoid the chromatic aberration that had plagued earlier scopes.

Do all of these monumental accomplishments mean that Newton should be revered as a scientific saint and whatever he said taken as the last word on the matters whereof he spake? Of course not. A person with the benefit of the ensuing centuries of research by others--the last century in particular--might reasonably say that Newton's theories contained "gaps," though Newton and his contemporaries could hardly have known about them. His laws of motion, for example, describe reality less and less accurately as you examine smaller and smaller or faster and faster objects. When they're small enough and/or fast enough, you need relativity and/or quantum mechanics--but nobody in Newton's time had ways of seeing objects that small or that fast.

His optics was based on a particle model of light, and we now know that some phenomena are much better explained with a wave model--in fact, the models generally used now incorporate both wavelike and particle-like aspects. The gaps in Newton's optics were more serious than those in his mechanics, because optical phenomena not explainable by his particle model were already known in his time. Francesco Grimaldi had observed diffraction, albeit rather crudely; Newton chose to ignore it because the effect was small (because of light's small wavelengths, we now say) and inconvenient. And Erasmus Bartholin had observed birefringence, or double refraction, but couldn't explain it with either particles or waves (because wave theory was not sufficiently developed at the time). So even during Newton's life, people (including him) knew that his optical theory didn't fully explain everything. But for a considerable time, though some scientists still pushed a wave model, most rode the Newtonian optics bandwagon, apparently in large part because his mechanics was so robust that many found it hard to dispute his other ideas--a likely instance of "treating him as a saint" delaying further progress in one field.

But his incomplete optics was by no means the least "saintly" of Newton's intellectual endeavors. Most of us have read that he "dabbled in alchemy," but he did far more than dabble. Particularly in his later years, he devoted a lot of time and effort to experimentation, none of it successful, aimed at things like transmuting lead into gold. He wrote, as Isaac Asimov put it, "half a million worthless words on chemistry." He was also deeply religious (albeit in some ways heretical, secretly rejecting some key tenets of his church that would have got him in serious trouble had he done so publicly) and wrote even more theological speculation about the possible meanings of obscure biblical passages. He was a "young-Earth creationist" and did his own calculation of the day of creation, coming up with a figure of about 3500 BC.

Should we accept that date, or accept his pure-particle model of light, because such a great scientist believed them? Not at all; the extreme power and usefulness of his mechanical theories do not in any way validate any other ideas he may have had that were less powerful, less useful, or just plain wrong. Should we reject his mechanics because they were put forth by someone who spent a lot of time and energy on "the occult"? Not at all; his belief in some kinds of nonsense in no way invalidates the ideas he produced that were by far the best anyone had conceived up to his time and that still stand up to extensive testing and scrutiny today. (And Newtonian mechanics does just that. The discoveries that led Albert Einstein to develop relativity did not prove Newtonian mechanics was all wrong and had to be scrapped, but only that it didn't cover all possible situations and needed to be expanded and generalized. Relativity becomes indistinguishable from Newtonian mechanics under a wide range of everyday and not-so-everyday experience, and Newton's mechanics can now be viewed as a special limiting case of Einstein's.)

Each idea must be judged on its own merits, and not on the personalities or reputations of the people who propound or embrace it. Just as the same plant produces both valuable wheat and inedible chaff, a single person quite often does or believes some things that are real and true and valuable, and others that go nowhere and may even be outright nonsense. And just as with wheat, a sensible person does not discard the whole plant, but welcomes and uses the wheat while discarding the chaff--not maliciously, but just because it isn't nutritious. Doing that, of course, requires learning to tell the difference--which, in the case of ideas, means learning to judge which ones actually enable us to better understand the universe or live better lives, and which ones don't.

The difference is not always as clear-cut and obvious as we might like. Some ideas are of limited value but can serve useful purposes until someone develops more refined ones. Some that don't pan out are not clearly bad at the time, but simply turn out not to go where their pursuer hoped they would. In Newton's case, his mechanics was and remains of great value, even though later experiments found gaps where it needed to be expanded. His optics was good enough to be useful for solving certain kinds of problems with high accuracy, though even he knew that it could do nothing for others. If pressed, he might well have acknowledged that it would probably be eventually replaced by something that could handle both kinds of problems.

His alchemy could well be viewed as serious scientific efforts to lay the groundwork for chemistry, but the breakthroughs necessary to make a real science of it would have to wait for others to make them. However well-intentioned his efforts in this area may have been, in terms of results, they went nowhere of lasting value. And his efforts to calculate the date of creation had nothing to do with science, proceeding instead from the assumption, so relentlessly drilled into practically everyone then that hardly anyone would have thought or dared to question it, that everything the Bible said had to be literally true.

Newton, of course, is merely one example; the principle applies to practically everyone and everything, in science or other endeavors. Nikola Tesla made enormous contributions to the understanding and application of electromagnetism; the whole huge power grid on which practically everything in our civilization now depends rests upon them. But late in life he went off on what sounded like wild tangents, making bizarre and unsubstantiated claims that led many to assume he had gone "off the deep end." Some of those claims still lie untested in his notebooks, and among them may be more valuable contributions; but we can't assume that because of his earlier accomplishments. Nor can we rule out the possibility; but even if the later stuff is all purest nonsense, it detracts nothing from those earlier achievements.

Albert Einstein did more than anyone for several centuries to revolutionize physics, but was unable to accept some of the ideas that still later physicists found it necessary to develop. His rejection of those ideas, despite his stature, did not invalidate them.

One of the first things I learned as an editor, reading all the manuscripts that came to a magazine, was that hardly any writer is always at the top of his or her form. Some are more consistent than others, but many have produced both duds and masterpieces. The masterpieces don't redeem the duds, and the duds do not diminish the masterpieces.

Anyone who chooses to read all this as an allegory for our times is welcome to do so, but my essential point is quite simple and widely applicable: ideas--any ideas--can be meaningfully judged only by their own merit. And that is determined by how well they stand up to testing, how well they improve our understanding and our lives--not by who first said them, who accepts them, or where they are written.

Copyright 2006 Stanley Schmidt

"My political ideal is democracy. Everyone should be respected as an individual but no one idolized."
--Albert Einstein

"Everyone thinks of changing the world but no one thinks of changing himself.
--Leo Tolstoy

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Peter Kanter: Publisher

Christine Begley: Associate Publisher

Susan Kendrioski: Executive Director, Art and Production

Published since 1930.

First issue of Astounding January 1930 ©

Stanley Schmidt: Editor

Trevor Quachri: Associate Editor

Mary Grant: Editorial Assistant

Victoria Green: Senior Art Director

Shirley Chan Levi: Art Production Associate

Carole Dixon: Senior Production Manager

Evira Matos: Production Associate

Abigail Browning: Manager, Subsidiary Rights and Marketing

Julia McEvoy: Manager, Advertising Sales

Bruce W. Sherbow: VP, Sales and Marketing

Sandy Marlowe: Circulation Services

Advertising Representative: Connie Goon, Advertising Sales Coordinator, Tel: (212) 686-7188 N Fax:(212) 686-7414 (Display and Classified Advertising)

Editorial Correspondence Only: analog@dellmagazines.com

[Back to Table of Contents]

Thanks again to everyone who voted in our annual poll on last year's issues. Your votes help your favorite writers and artists by rewarding them directly and concretely for outstanding work. They help you by giving us a better feel for what you like and don't like--which helps us know what to give you in the future.

We have five categories: novellas, novelettes, short stories, fact articles, and covers. In each category, we asked you to list your three favorite items, in descending order of preference. Each first place vote counts as three points, second place two, and third place one. The total number of points for each item is divided by the maximum it could have received (if everyone had ranked it 1) and multiplied by 10. The result is the score listed below, on a scale of 0 (nobody voted for it) to 10 (everybody ranked it first). In practice, scores run lower in categories with many entries than in those with only a few. For comparison, the number in parentheses at the head of each category is the score every item would have received had all been equally popular.

NOVELLAS (2.86)

1. "Sanctuary," Michael A. Burstein (3.93)

2. "The Diversification of Its Fancy," John Barnes (3.03)

3. "A Few Good Men," Richard A. Lovett (2.96)

4. "Chandra's Pup," Bud Sparhawk (2.70)

5. "Audubon in Atlantis," Harry Turtledove (2.51)

NOVELETTES (0.87)

1. "NetPuppets," Richard A. Lovett & Mark Niemann-Ross (2.15)

2. "Mars Opposition," David Brin (2.08)

3. (tie) "In the Loop," Brian Plante (1.22)

"Of Kings, Queens, and Angels," Rajnar Vajra (1.22)

"Do Neanderthals Know?," Robert J. Howe (1.22)

SHORT STORIES (0.57)

1. "Alphabet Angels," Ekaterina Sedia & David Bartell (1.79)

2. "The Inn at Mount Either," James Van Pelt (1.58)

3. "Letters of Transit," Brian Plante (1.43)

4. "Prayer for a Dead Paramecium," Carl Frederick (1.32)

5. "A Christmas in Amber," Scott William Carter (1.14)

FACT ARTICLES (2.00)

1. "Mission to Utah: A Science Fiction Writer's Adventures at the Mars Society Desert Research Station," Wil McCarthy (4.26)

2. "The Prehistory of Global Climate Change," Richard A. Lovett (2.89)

3. "Big Brother Inc.: Surveillance, Security, and the US Citizen," Laura M. Kelley (2.25)

4. "Gene Doping and Other Olympic Scandals of the (Not-So-Distant) Future," Richard A. Lovett (1.97)

5. "Where Are They?," Thomas Donaldson (1.85)

COVER (2.00)

1. November (for Sun of Suns), by George Krauter (3.63)

2. May (for "Footsteps"), by Vincent Di Fate (2.91)

3. January/February (for The Stonehenge Gate), by Vincent Di Fate (2.62)

This year fact articles had a conspicuously strong winner; covers, short stories, and novellas had clear winners but not landslides--but the first-place in short stories is a notably strong showing by a new pair of collaborators. Novelettes showed some very tight competition, with a very close race for first and a three-way tie for second.

The number of votes was pretty good, but since AnLab votes are so useful to everyone concerned, we hope to get even more next time. Use e-mail or "snail mail," whichever you prefer, but please vote! (Please be careful to vote in the right category, as listed in the annual Index. Sometimes a few votes are wasted by being cast in the wrong category, and those simply can't be counted. If you didn't use the online voting on our website [www.analogsf.com] this year, you might want to try it next time; it makes that problem virtually impossible!)

Virginia Brekhus, of Valrico, FL, is this year's winner of a free one-year subscription in a random drawing from all ballots received. Next year that could be you--and the more votes we have, the more the results mean!

[Back to Table of Contents]

Human beings excel at creating complications--both in their surroundings and in themselves.

Wendis was a realm of wind, always, and frequent fog, and at aphelion, the wind and fog were cold. Nia Courant was glad to be wearing a supple but warm field jacket today. Martan seemed content with only a thin windjacket, wrapped in grim memory and oblivious to the chilly weather.

The cool air smelled of wet rock and pine needles. Their breath condensed into visible wisps. The trail twisted around a flat boulder where a gorge dropped below the path. On the far side of the gorge a waterfall leaped from a rocky rim high above the overlook to a foamy pool far below.

The water's path slanted. It looked like a vast crystalline scarf trailing behind the incessant rotation of Wendis. "Canting Fall--the highest waterfall in the Wend Range," said Nia.

Martan didn't quite smile, but the lines of his face relaxed. "You were right. This is beautiful."

"And peaceful, and private, and you promised to tell me about your enhanced abilities." Nia seated herself on the flat boulder. "Start with just one?"

"If you insist." Martan sat beside her, depositing the knapsack that contained their lunch. "The university is there." He pointed up into the fog. "Seventy degrees spinwise."

"How do you know?"

"I excel at situational geometry--the relative geometry of everything around me--including closing distances."

"That would have been useful in your previous life."

"With you, I'd like to forget my past," he said quietly.

Damn. She'd invited him to the Canting Fall Overlook to demonstrate trust in him, in the hope that he would open up to her. Instead she was feeling trust. And a great deal of attraction. He sensed it. He reached toward her face.

"No!" She drew back. "I know about that one!"

He looked stung. "You don't understand it. Yes, I am wired for artificial telepathy through the neo-nerves in my fingers. But I never use it except when I need it."

"Like three weeks ago?"

"That was an accident. I didn't mean to--" he faltered.

Invade my mind. Find out the most painful secret of my life. Derail our romance. Shocked indignation washed over her again, and it still had an undertow of fright.

"I didn't think. It was a--a kind of reflex." He made an odd, one-shouldered shrug.

"Don't touch me," said Nia.

"It's not like hearing, always sensitive." He jammed his hands into the pockets of his windjacket. "It's not a sixth sense at all. My telepathy stays off until I turn it on."

"Does it work only through your fingers?"

"Just through the tips of my fingers, I swear."

"All right. Don't put your fingertips on my skin."

Martan's shoulders drooped, but he nodded. His acceptance of Nia's resolve encouraged her. She put her hand on his upper arm, feeling the contours of supple muscles under the thin jacket. "See, I'm not asking for a total embargo on touch."

His lips quirked.

Come on, smile. She had seen him truly smile only once before, but it had been as dazzling as the end of an eclipse.

A grating warble broke the silence. Martan tensed. A dark winged shape flitted in the fog above them.

"Condor," Nia said.

"No. It has a crested red head. That's a Faxen bird." He snatched up the knapsack. "It's a carrion eater, but in the early colony days on Faxe they called it the deathbird. The species is intelligent enough to create carrion. We better get away from these trail drop-offs."

Martan moved with the fluid coordination of an athlete, or a predator, on the steep trail as it zigzagged down from the edge of the gorge. With much less grace than Martan, the Faxen scavenger loosely flopped in the air above them. Martan scowled. "Unpleasant species, and in no danger of extinction on Faxe. Why in God's name would they have it in a park?"

"For one thing, this is not really a park, except for the part of it called Haven. For another thing, it's not really under anyone's control. You don't believe me," Nia observed.

"Hah! Everyone on a dozen worlds has heard the hype about finding danger, adventure, and romance here. Pick a theme, pick a dream, wend your way, play a game, win or lose the prize of your life, in the Magic Mountains!"

"Saying Magic Mountains makes you sound like a tourist. To insiders, it's the Wend Range, or the Wends, or the Strange Range."

He frowned. "In my travels I saw the Rings of Ruin, the blue star of Goya's Sea, and the Lights of Vere--and other beautiful and terrible things. I'm not very interested in an amusing park for tourists. Or what to call it."

"It's not always amusing. Since portable communications devices are forbidden, visitors have to handle anything that goes wrong on their own, unless they can find a park ranger," Nia said. "Haven is the lowest sector, not really a zone, because access is uncontrolled and the park rangers are easy to find. All of the zones have some degree of real danger, and more danger the higher you go in the zone numbers. This is Zone Four, and we could slip and break a leg. Or the Faxen bird could dive at us and try to knock us off the edge of a cliff, if that's what its instincts are."

"Hah. They just allow a little risk to pique the interest of jaded interstellar travelers."

Nia counted six separate misconceptions in what he was saying. Unfortunately, he wasn't the type to argue constructively. He'd stonewall. "All right, it's a park--like Zaber, Specter, and Chance are mountains." Invisible in fog, Specter's unnatural peak loomed above them.

Point taken, he clamped his mouth shut.

When they came to a log serving as a footbridge over a cold, turbulent stream, he extended his arm to her. As soon as she stepped onto the log, she felt perilously off-balance. Slipping off!--her planet-born reflexes shrieked. She clutched Martan's arm. For people who hadn't been born in spingravity, Coriolis effect was the poltergeist of Wendis--invisible, unpredictable, and sometimes destructive.

Steadying Nia, Martan walked over the log slowly, precisely, and backwards.

"Superb coordination in spingravity must be another ability of yours," Nia muttered when her feet rested on level ground again and her heart stopped tripping.

"Yes," he said with a half-smile. He tended to smile and gesture in an odd, one-sided way. Not always the same side. It was as though part of his soul smiled and another part stayed secret.

With a cascade of wingbeats, a small gray bird fluttered out of the fog, alighting on a rock by the stream. It bobbed its whole body up and down several times. Then it strolled out into the swift stream, submerging itself further with each unruffled step until the crown of its head disappeared under the icewater.

"What was that?" Martan asked.

Nia checked the Magic Mountains Guidebook. "It's called an ouzel. That's a species from Old Earth."

"Some of the amusing oddities here are authentic?"

"Most of them are." Nia touched the guidebook's access button. Its floppy pages reconfigured into a pocketable square the size and texture of a folded handkerchief. She put it back in her jacket's breast pocket.

The trail led to a lawnlike meadow that cradled a frosty pool. Canting Fall's waters slanted into the pool with far less commotion than an equally high waterfall planetside. That was just as well, since cold spray would not have been pleasant in weather this chilly.

"Good place for a picnic." Martan raised an eyebrow. "Can we just enjoy it while we eat--no questions asked?"

The Engineers' Guild maintained the world and gave it Earthlike seasons by varying the flux of heat and light. When Wendis neared aphelion in orbit around its star, the engineers caused it to have winter, and the weather was more stable than in any other season, clear and bright, reminding Nia of her home planet, Azure. She had packed an Azure-type lunch of synthmeat sandwiches and hot kavva. She let herself fantasize that she had a less complicated life, on a terraformed world with normal gravity, with an uncomplicated male companion. After lunch, Martan stretched out on his back on the dry, cool grass, near the empty knapsack. Nia sat cross-legged beside him.

The Canting Fall fell slower than the eye insisted it should, and twisted as it went. From this close, it looked like sculpted crystal. It reminded Nia how perplexing her existence really was. Martan attracted her very much, but he had been a killer--not born, but made. But he had repented of it. But he could read her mind with a touch, if he wanted to. But he needed her.

But he was what he had been.

She kept her consternation to herself.

Through a rift in the clouds, light from the sunspar flooded the meadow. The traveling sunball was just west of midspar. A bank of rhododendrons shielded the meadow from the cold spinwinds. Nia felt warm enough to unfasten her jacket. Deliberately keeping her tone light, she said, "Wildway is the part of the Wends most like wilderness on Earth."

He gave her his one-sided smile. "Until you look up and see the foothills on the far side, with the university's towers and the hospital dome."

She'd seen those sights from Wildway on clearer days, but she'd never seen anything like him. He had medium brown skin and dark brown hair, and eyes so dark that the irises looked black, even in sunsparlight. Could that be evidence of his visual enhancement?

Martan's gaze met hers. "When I was little, I never imagined a woman like you."

At some point, soon, she'd ask him where he had been a little boy--presumably in the Faxen Union, on one of the five partly terraformed, incompletely civilized worlds under the dominion of imperious Faxe. "What do you mean?"

"Your blue eyes and silver hair. I didn't meet any Azureans until after I left home."

Azure was a half-terraformed but quite civilized world, not a part of the Faxen Union, but in close enough proximity to the Union to be acutely aware of Faxe's power and politics. "Even here in Wendis, lode-silver hair is far from rare," Nia pointed out.

"Huh. Next year the trend-following young people of Wendis will change their hair to a different color. But yours is real." Reaching up, he touched a long stray curl. "I can tell by the way the strands catch the light." He twined her hair around his finger.

The slyly possessive gesture shot a thrill through Nia. Damn! Aside from (surely not because of ... ?) his scary past and special abilities that included telepathy, he fascinated her. She should remain aloof until she better understood him. But she would be warmer in his arms. She let his arm slide under her jacket. He obediently kept his hands on the fabric of her shirt as he pulled her into a close embrace.

Then he jerked away. "Something in your pocket moved!"

A green tendril dangled out from under the flap of one of the main pockets of her field jacket. Unfastening the pocket, Nia lifted out an untidy little bundle of leaves and tendrils. "What are you doing in there?" she asked it sternly.

Martan sat back. "What is a plant doing in your pocket?"

"It's a hugwort--an alien species they recently discovered at the xenobiology field station on Jumala." She placed the hugwort on her knee. It balanced there like a small, potless and badly misplaced houseplant.

Martan leaned closer. "No roots?"

"It has a single root, of a sort. See? In the middle of the leaves, here, what looks like a tuber but it feels like a mouse, fuzzy and warm."

The hugwort wriggled out of Nia's grasp to scramble down her leg and onto the grass. Both of Martan's eyebrows went up.

"They're mobile. And incredibly cute. Even Professor Zeng's official write-up lapsed into phrases like 'enchanted morning glory.' He gave me one because I'll need to design some legal protection for them, to save the species from poachers and the illegal pet trade."

"Can you design legal protection for me?" Martan said suddenly.

Nia was surprised and pleased, and careful not to let it show. She said levelly, "Yes, though you're a stranger legal case than it is."

"I am not stranger than an enchanted morning glory!" Martan said with offended dignity.

"But it never killed anyone," Nia said.

A shadow flopped in front of the sunspar. Martan cursed it under his breath.

"There are plenty of Faxen flora and fauna in the Wend Range," said Nia. "They thrive in the same conditions as Earth creatures. Faxe was the new Earth--the Promised Land on the other side of the stars--when it was first colonized. Too bad it's become a police state."

"I of all people know that. I was the sharpest tool of the state against its enemies. In the end, I defected." Nia knew that part of his story, though only from a dry medical report. He had defected to Wendis under the cover of a fiery explosion. It had taken the Wendisan doctors months to heal him, while they catalogued all the physiological features that made him what he was. "The price I paid to defect was that I almost died. Does that count for something?"

"Yes, it does." To define exactly how much it counted for would take the best work of her whole career in interstellar law. To win Martan the legal freedom to leave Wendis without fear of arrest and deportation to Faxe would take better work than she had ever done before. It would vault her into the elite circle of those who shaped interstellar law. She was unsure how she felt about Martan--her feelings were a highly charged muddle--but she was crystal clear about what she wanted from him right now: information about himself. "Was there a formal word for the kind of operative you were?"

He laughed humorlessly. "Not among insiders. A hellhound is a hellhound."

Well! That was the first time he'd voluntarily uttered the word to her.

The hugwort ambled toward the bank of rhododendrons. It wouldn't get lost; it had a talent for exploring new places and finding its way back. Smuggling itself in its owner's pocket for an outing was a new trick, but Nia was glad it had done so. The hugwort had somehow cracked Martan's reticence to talk about himself.

Hellhound. People across a dozen worlds and particularly those in the lonely way stations between the worlds had heard of Faxe's hellhounds. Very few people had knowingly looked a hellhound in the eye and lived, and she was one of them.... A shiver went down Nia's back. She made sure not to let it chill her voice. "Please tell me what hellhounds can do. It doesn't have to be personal, you. Just say what your kind can do, if it's easier for you."

"It's not. We were brain-trained to give nothing away."

"Brain-trained?"

"Juvenated and then retrained in thinking--and feeling. The doctors in the University Hospital believe they undid the dehumanizing parts of the brain-training, while they were putting me back together. They couldn't give me back the memories that were stripped away in the juvenation, but they think I can learn to be human again. Is it really unthinkable for us to start again where we stopped three weeks ago?"

Caught off guard--still processing the implications of what he'd told her about brain-training--she said, "I'm a university lawyer, advising the university on what to do with you, since you're in its employ. The ethical aspect of having a relationship with you is not a problem."

"Ethical aspects don't matter to me."

"That is a problem!" she retorted.

"Then help me understand ethics--or law--the way you see it. Give me a second chance with you. I--"

A green streak darted out of the bushes. It scurried toward Nia. Climbing up her jacket to its pocket, it stuffed itself in, and managed to fasten the button with a tendril, which it then retracted within the pocket.

"What kind of intelligence do they have?" Martan asked.

"No one knows. I've never seen it do anything like that."

He looked at the rhododendrons from which the hugwort had emerged so suddenly. His spine went stiff. "Get up. Are there real predators here?"

Nia pulled out the guidebook, which unfolded itself back to the natural history pages. She scanned the list under Animals, Biological.

"There's a big animal behind those bushes. Is it a trick?"

"This says Wildway harbors a few mountain lions. Young male lions may become aggressive. If you encounter one, just move away slowly."

He shoved her toward the open end of the meadow, away from the bushes. She was still reading the guidebook. "But that's only in spring, not winter. I don't see where--"

"The deathbird is circling overhead."

"You hate it because it reminds you of Faxe?"

"It's too focused!" he hissed.

"Things in the Wends can go wrong," Nia said slowly, "what the insiders call witherspin. It's never happened around me, but I know what to do." She flipped to the orange section of the guidebook. When she touched the schematic map for their location, a bright series of arrows appeared on the map. "We're in Zone Four right now. From any zone, you can always reach Haven. The door to Haven is that way."

He herded her along, looking back over his shoulder.

"Around these little trees--there--it's in that cave."

Martan stopped short. "Not good. No way out."

"Look at the back of the cave. Those numbers mark two gates to higher zones, but the bright orange door leads to Haven, and it'll open as soon as we touch the doorplate. Come on." She went to the orange door and demonstrated.

Nothing happened.

"It's not working right?" she said unbelievingly.

Martan cocked his head. "Something heavy is moving. I hear dead leaves crackling."

"I don't hear anyth--"

"I do! Can we use the gates?" he demanded.

"The zone gates don't let visitors change zones without permits, but I have a university authority key." Nia whipped the small cylinder out and inserted it into the Haven door's keyhole. Again nothing happened.

"It is stalking nearer."

She wasn't sure she believed him. But something had given the hugwort the scare of its little life. Something was wrong with Haven's failsafe door.

A concave part of the cave's rocky back wall displayed 5. A convex part of the wall said 9. Nia inserted the key in the unobtrusive slot under 5.

The concave wall rotated, taking them with it.

Harsh daylight flooded their eyes.

"Desert--cliffs?" Martan sounded incredulous. "The other place was--"

"Valleys full of fog and mist and soft green plants." Nia crossed her arms. "This one is sand and glare and spiny plants that bleed when you break them. Some things here shock you if you touch them. We're in the Wendway called Inferno. The fauna and flora are from the most hostile alien world ever colonized by humanity."

To one side, the land fell away. They were on the knees of Mount Zaber, close--too close for comfort--to the precipitous canyon between Zaber and Specter.

"Valles Avendis," said Nia.

Martan's gaze jerked up. Deeply scored, reddish rocks climbed the steep flank of Zaber. Far above and east of their zenith, Specter's summit was swathed in clouds. The sunspar ran straight through the clouds, but the brilliant sunball had traveled well west of Specter. It was mid-afternoon in Wendis.

Behind the sunspar, the foothills of the Wend Range were swaddled in fog and hung overhead like a barrel-vault. From here they couldn't see the university, much less the rest of Wendis, not the city to the west, or the farms to the east, or the shallow green bowl of the Celadon Sea. It was as though they had stepped out onto a hostile alien world.

"Incredible," said Martan.

"Welcome to the Wend Range. The way the gate system is designed, most animals and plants can't move from zone to zone. People shouldn't. It's disorienting in the extreme," said Nia. Then she heard a coarse rasping sound. The zone gate was revolving back around.

"Come with me," said Martan. He took her wrist in an unbreakable grip and scrambled, pulling her along, up the precipitous slope.

"Stop! What are you doing?"

"Finding cover and a vantage point to watch the gate."

His strength startled her. She had to climb with him or be dragged along. Fright flared in the back of Nia's mind. If she struggled and broke free of him she might fall--and it was a long way down to the bottom of Valles Avendis. "Don't believe the hype," she pleaded. "Bad things seldom happen to ordinary tourists. Not unprovoked predator attacks!"

He hauled her up alongside himself on a shelf of rock and said vehemently into her ear, "I was predator and prey for seven years. I know unhealthy attention when I feel it." Finding a niche in the cliffs screened by a spiny plant with shiny purple leaves, he slithered in and pulled her in after him.

"Don't touch the leaves!"

"I won't. You needn't. Look." He pointed below them, where a black bird raggedly circled in midair. "That is the same deathbird, and now it's here."

Nia had often seen gulls ride the winds beside the chilly new seas of Azure. Here in Wendis, with nothing but spingravity--a counterfeit of planetary gravity--some birds managed a counterfeit of flight that typically looked comical. But now she found the deathbird's flight disturbing to watch. Its head turned from side to side as if scanning the harsh landscape. For the first time, she felt afraid of it. "Birds sometimes flutter-fly over the barriers," she murmured. "Of all things in here, the birds are the most free--they fend for themselves although their nests are protected."

"Their young are poisonous."

"You're being paranoid," she whispered. "There's no reason for things to go witherspin because we're here. As far as anyone in Wendis knows, you're just an academic."

"Faxe sends revenge a long way," he said under his breath.

"Here?"

"Our handlers never sent us in here."

"Of course not. The insiders in the Wends don't want anybody else's games going on." She rubbed a bruised knee. "And the price of sabotaging normal operations in the Wends, to make an outsider have an accident, is so steep that it's almost hypothetical."

His glance flickered to her. "Hypothetically, how would it work?"

"An enormous sum of money would come from Outside. Things would go witherspin. Rangers distracted, busy elsewhere. No tourists around--" She gulped. Even for winter in the Wends, it was strange how few other visitors they'd seen today. She made herself finish the thought. "Whoever it is who has rich, remorseless enemies is fatally injured or simply disappears. Anyone who's arrested was an unwitting pawn, the legal system turns into a house of mirrors, and charges are never brought."

"I have enemies. All the followers and kin of every enemy of the state I executed. And the Faxen secret intelligence agency, since I defected."

She shook her head impatiently. "What lives in the Wends is extremely dangerous too, and cares nothing about the politics of colonized planets."

"That's ridicu--" His face hardened. Far below them, the gate was turning again. A huge, tawny cat with fangs as long as its head stepped out.

Nia clutched Martan's arm. "That's Old Scratch! The sabertooth tiger from The Most Dangerous Game in Zone Nine! It's a robot programmed to be a savage predator--"

"Robots can be hijacked," he grated. "Deathbirds can be trained."

Nia's heart pounded. "We've got to get to Haven."

"Give me that book." He scanned a page and frowned. "This makes no sense. It looks like we have to go uphill to find a door to Haven. But higher zones are more dangerous."

"Don't confuse uphill with upzone! Almost every zone has an incredibly irregular border that somehow runs all the way from sea to one of the summits--"

"I see. Uphill now, hurry."

Wind blew strands of her hair across Nia's face. She wasn't resisting Martan now, but the rocky slope was rough and increasingly steep. Martan caught her when she tripped. "This is enough less than full Wendis spin-gee to botch my coordination," she admitted bitterly.

"I won't let you fall," said Martan.

They came to what looked like a rockslide, a field of rocky debris. Martan started to pick a way through. He froze as a gaunt, ugly, dog-like creature sprang out of a crevice in the rubble and confronted them, growling.

"Infernal jackal!" Nia whispered.

Stepping forward, Martan flung his arms out threateningly. He grimaced. His teeth flashed in the hard bright sunlight. The animal snarled back, but it retreated. Martan bounded on up, keeping Nia close to him.

Uphill from the rockslide, Martan scooped up some rocks and stuffed them into the knapsack. "What is an infernal jackal?"

"One of the few terrestrial species that thrived when colonists from Earth introduced them on Inferno. Back there, you--your teeth--" Nia stammered. Martan gazed at her expressionlessly, which unnerved her further. "I thought I saw ... maybe not."

He shouldered the knapsack, now slightly lumpy with a cargo of rocks. "Not like what the big cat has. But yes, I can morph, in a few small ways."

She hadn't imagined it: Martan had showed the jackal a neat sharp pair of fangs. She felt lightheaded.

"I retracted them right away," Martan said.

Snarling erupted behind them, and a scrabbling sound, and then a yelp, abruptly cut off. Had Old Scratch met the jackal? Nia felt dread ball up unto a sick, cold lump in her stomach.

"Hurry. Uphill." Martan held a large, edgy rock in one hand. But what good would rocks do against the giant cat?

Mount Zaber confronted them with cliffs of deeply folded stone with dark recesses. Nia opened the guidebook. "To keep going upward from here, we would have to zone up."

"But there's a door to Haven, where?"

"That way. The door is inside the mountain."

The deathbird slanted down from the sky to flap in a lopsided circle above them, as if announcing their location. Hardly breaking his stride, Martan hurled his rock at the bird. The rock traced a line so straight it might have been drawn in the air with a ruler. The rock connected with the bird's red head. Trailing purplish blood, the deathbird flailed its wings and tumbled away over Valles Avendis.

"So much for that." Martan sounded satisfied. Taking Nia's arm, he shepherded her into the deep fold in the red cliff. In cold shadow deep inside it, they found the mouth of a tunnel that slanted down into the mountain. Martan slowed them both to a fast walk. "And if this door doesn't work either, like the last one?" he asked conversationally.

Nia was skirting panic like a ball circling the rim of a hoop, but she forced her mind to work logically. "If it doesn't work, we're in the center of a hideous plot, and there'll be a nasty surprise in Six. No. To Seven."

"But that's an even higher zone. Isn't it even more dangerous?"

"Yes. But I've been there before. And they control their own gates."

A single orange arrow illuminated the smooth floor of the tunnel. This way to Haven. Nia drew in a deep breath of hope.

Further in and down, and the daylight faded. Finally it seemed completely dark in the tunnel to Nia, but Martan steered her around invisible obstacles, one of which rattled unpleasantly. The passageway took a dogleg turn in an alcove where 6, 7, and 10 shone in the dark. "The Haven door shouldn't be much further," Nia said eagerly, just before her foot splashed into cold water. She recoiled with a gasp.

"Subterranean lake," said Martan.

Nia's hands shook as she opened the guidebook, which helpfully self-illuminated. "It does show a lake, but in winter it's supposed to be small--it's not supposed to block the door to Haven except in spring--"

"Put that thing away and be quiet," Martan said in a sharp whisper.

"But--"

He clamped a hand over her mouth and held her still. "I hear the water rising," he said softly. "We can go back outside or we can use the upgates. With Old Scratch out there, outside sounds worse than gating up."

Nia nodded.

"You're shaking. Cold? Scared?"

She nodded. She felt butterflies in her stomach, butterflies with wings of cold lead.

"I can deal with danger," he breathed in her ear, "though I didn't expect it today." He rubbed the back of her neck.

Eager to be calmed, defended, saved, she held on to him tightly.

"Scratch is in the tunnel," Martan said. "Give me your key. Back to the upgates. now!"

They made a wild dash in the dark, veering toward the upgate marked 7. When Martan thrust the key into the keyhole, the gate illuminated. Nia saw the huge robot cat loping down the tunnel toward them just before the wall circled around them and sealed them off from Inferno.

Nia shook with relieved tension. The two of them had just backed away from saber-toothed death into a normal translating elevator. The translator had slick sides, grab bars, and bright green footprints glowing on the floor to indicate which side would be down for the ride.

Four of the glowing footprints on the floor were big paws with long claws, and there was a pair of cloven hooves.

Keeping a protective arm around Nia, Martan held onto a grab bar. Coriolis force pushed them both against one wall as the translator descended smoothly in the spingravity of Wendis. The translator then moved sideways-spinwise, and the pseudo-gravity increased slightly

The translator began to slow. "What next?" Martan asked. His tone sounded casual and interested, the tone of what's for dessert?

"You'll see." Nia hurriedly smoothed her hair, fastened up her jacket, and brushed the red rock dust of Inferno off them both. "I handle this one."

The door opened to reveal a high-ceilinged room with painted walls and beveled doors. A high desk loomed at the end of the room. Behind the desk sat a figure with flowing robes over a misshapen body and a flowing beard over a misshapen mouth. Martan's eyes widened. Whatever he had imagined his next challenge would be, he wasn't expecting this.

Here goes--something. Nia stepped forward. "May we enter the Fair Country?"

"Go away, Silver," the Gatekeeper answered in a disinterested tone. Behind him, the tallest door in the room, the door to the Fair Country, embellished with jewels, stood firmly shut.

Nia answered, "My Fair name is Canter."

"Do say." The Gatekeeper leafed through the tome on his desk in front of him, an electronic book designed to look like an antique codex. "Very well. Who is he?"

"This is--" she hesitated. "Night." It would be a good nickname for Martan here, a memorable name that meant nothing. Martan nodded. Following her lead.

"Bring him back in Fair time. Go away now," said the Gatekeeper.

"No. Night is not a tourist. He's a Traveler, and he has political asylum in Wendis."

The Gatekeeper stared at Martan with piercing, mismatched eyes, brown and pale blue. "Very well. Watch your step."

The jeweled door glided open onto a patio decorated with potted citrus trees with glossy leaves. They entered the patio, and the door snapped shut behind them. Nia sighed in relief.

Almost inaudibly, Martan asked, "Why did you tell him?"

"I did not use the h-word, but I did tell the truth, which is the best course of action where the Gatekeeper is concerned. He's an important personage here."

"He looks deformed. Is that a disguise?"

"No." Nia walked to the edge of the patio, overlooking a valley full of tall trees, brown and evergreen. In the heart of the valley nestled a cluster of stone, wood, and glass structures with ridged roofs and numerous weathervanes. She rifled through her memory for everything she knew about the Fair Country, its geography and its perils.

"That village is an attraction for tourists," said Martan. "They don't get killed."

Nia was tall for a woman, taller than most Wendisans, which sometimes made her more conspicuous than she wanted to be, but with Martan her height was an asset: she could look him directly in the eye. "At Fair time, tourists are off limits for the local predators. It isn't Fair time now. But I think you're a match for the locals. Let's go."

A staircase spiraled away from the edge of the patio, coiling down through a hundred feet of thin air to the ground below. Nia gritted her teeth at the sight of it. Planet-born people never completely adapted to spingravity and its Coriolis effect. You'd think you were accustomed to it and then you'd take an embarrassing pratfall, especially on stairs and ladders, and the problem was worst in the Strange Range, where the spingravity lessened or increased with higher or lower terrain. A pratfall on the Spiral Stair could be fatal. "You first."

Martan started down the stairs with effortless ease. Nia followed, grimly holding his shoulders to steady herself. Her brain registered subtle discrepancies between how the stairs looked and how they felt, and her planet-born reflexes cried imminent peril. After a few steps Nia gave up and closed her eyes, trusting Martan more than she trusted her own reflexes.

He said, "You did a good job talking us into here. You hold up to danger better than I would have expected."

"Well, you're better tempered in real danger than in a nice park. How wonderful. Some people who enjoy danger join the Star Rangers, others find work as police officers or emergency doctors. You became a hellhound!"

"Hellhound was not a career choice. My whole family died in an anti-Union insurgency. I was in the Faxen Union army and stationed on Goya. My family lived in Delagua on Estrella."

Oh. Delagua, Estrella. An ordinary colony on a half-terraformed world, but it had been near a military base of the Faxen Union where Disunion terrorists detonated a nuclear bomb--an ancient, hideous weapon that left a radioactive scar. Ecologists from the university had established several outposts from which they were calibrating the wound to Estrella's ecology. Nia had never really thought about radioactive wounds in the hearts of Delaguans who'd been away from home at the time. "You were young and bereft, and insane with grief and anger?"

His shoulder twitched. "Something like that."

Illusions that aren't, Nia explained while they went down the Spiral Stair, finding that talking took her mind off the Stair. Word games with high stakes, predators that might take a personal dislike to you. That kind of thing made the Fair Country more dangerous than Inferno. Imagine a festival with all kinds of exciting fake dangers that can become real if they want to.

Martan conceded that the whole zoned park was dangerous. Why did it attract tourists?

Because danger tends to focus people, Nia explained. Facing danger makes people feel alive, and superior to anyone who succumbs to the danger. That was a potent brew of human motivation, and tourists paid well to partake of it, keeping the Wendisan economy afloat.

"There are that many tourists that stupid?"

"Don't tell me you never enjoyed trading in danger! You enjoyed Inferno, too."

"I like obstacle courses. The more dangerous the better."

Nia's mental list of his hellhound abilities included supersensitive sight and hearing, exceptional strength and coordination, superior coordination in spin-gee, and a knack for situational geometry. With skills like that, Nia could imagine a perilous obstacle course being exhilarating. "Whether you realize it yet or not, you're in the right place for you," she told him.

Wendis hadn't always been full of dangerous games. In the beginning, two thousand years ago, it was a magnificent stargoing research habitat with nine sealed ecological zones. Its name had been Adventus. But a lot of history happened to Adventus since then. During a thousand-year research voyage, better and faster starflight was developed and human colonists radiated across the stars ahead of Adventus. When it reached this part of the galaxy, it found a flourishing interstellar civilization of terraformed planets. The huge, worn-out old engines were removed, and it became Avendis, orbiting around a small golden sun, a city-state with a busy starport, university, and the nine-zoned ecological research park

Centuries later, a black asteroid collided with Wendis with disastrous results. It tumbled. The ecological zones were ruptured, many people and animals died, and the port was out of commission for decades, economic ruin following physical disaster. The engineers stabilized the spin, the scientists repaired the park as best they could, and, as one of very few possible ways back to economic health, the city-state remade itself as an interstellar amusement park. Wendis.

These days some people called it Dis for short. Which was a short, handy word--and an ancient synonym for Hell.

If she never descended the Spiral Stair again in three lifetimes, it would be too soon, Nia thought when they finally reached the bottom.

A narrow lane paved with stones led to a cottage set back in trees. It was a well-camouflaged university research station, and her key got them in.

They found an attendant on duty. "Hey, I know you--you're the proctor!" The voice sounded like a university person. But the body was an animated replica of an ancient suit of armor, with a metallic grill for a face under a helmet topped by a fluffy white feather.

"Do I know you?" Martan asked.

"Sure! You come through the High Street pub every night at undergraduate curfew hour. I wear my city shell then, of course."

"The blue racing shell."

The suit of armor nodded, making his feather bob.

Crossing the stars for new worlds had left the human genome rifted with radiation damage. When genetic damage surfaced in a newborn child in Wendis, it was corrected, if possible. The worst cases were implanted in mobile life-supporting mechanisms. Martan had probably seen some baby cyborgs scooting around in the hallways during his own long stay in the University Hospital. Some of the doctors were adult cyborgs themselves. "Why change shells?" Martan asked.

"It's a Fair costume." Nia leaned against the wall with her arms crossed. "An ancient knight."

The feather bobbed agreement. "I'm doing doctoral research in anthropology here."

"And you work as the university's station attendant, right? We need to contact the university," said Nia.

"I'm not supposed to--"

"We have a serious problem, and we need to contact the university!" she snapped.

"But you must be Nia Courant from the University Counsel's Office. I have orders not to send out any messages that might indicate that you're here, but give you a message."

"Then what is it?"

"I wasn't supposed to open it unless I saw you." Tiny lights flashed behind the metal grill under the plumed helmet. "Wow!"

"What?" Nia demanded.

"The University Counsel says you're both in grave danger. And I should give you the latest highway advisory. Lessee--uh-oh! The highway robbers are out today."

"Oh, no," said Nia, feeling a cold shock of fear.

"And--wow! Old Scratch has been trying to get in the Back Gate!" The tiny lights behind the grill sequenced excitedly. "The Counsel says get back to Haven as fast as you can, however you can, and whatever you do, don't get separated. What's going on?"

"It's none of your business."

"Is there going to be an abduction? Can I watch? I could use one for my thesis--"

Taller than the cyborg, Nia stepped close enough to glare down at him and she let anger heat her voice. "You will help us as much as you can, and if you don't, I will file charges of malfeasance in the conduct of university business and violation of the Honor Code, and you'll be lucky to merely be kicked out of the university!"

He stepped back with an audible clank. "You mean this isn't a simulation?"

"No, it is not!" Nia turned on her heel and said to Martan, "Up to the observation deck." That meant climbing a narrow vertical ladder. Martan climbed close behind her to steady her, guiding her shoe to the rung when her foot fumbled in thin air. Damn the spin-gee!

Martan said, "It seems pretty clear that I'm putting you at risk. You should stay here with the cyborg. I'll take care of myself."

She shook her head. "If the Counsel said we're both in danger, she meant it."

"Can't she call in help?"

"No. No one runs the Wends. We're on our own."

They emerged on an observation deck. The hillside rose behind the deck, forested with beech and oak and eucalyptus trees. Tall trees flanked the deck and even grew through holes in the surface, making the deck look like a treehouse. A compact weather station with a whirling wind gauge perched on one of the guard rails.

From here they could see the Highway curving up from the foothills and on through the nearby village. Twilight was settling into the deepest parts of the valley. Soft yellow points of light gleamed in the village. Further uphill, the Highway ran through grassy meadows toward the snowy summit of Zaber. The sunball was on the verge of setting behind the mountain's bulk.

Nia said, "This part of the Fair Country resembles Old Europe, and my looks fit in better here than anywhere else. You look like everybody everywhere. We better not go downhill on the Highway, as tempting as that is. Not with the highway robbers on the move. We can follow the highway up through Davos. That's the real name of the village. Then we'll take the Fair Lane to the tram station and ride the tram down to Haven. At least I hope so. If something goes wrong with that plan, there's the low road. It starts in the village and goes underground. But the low road is dangerous as hell."

"This is a very strange place," said Martan. But he had a slight smile, like somebody looking at a long-loved, much-missed place he'd just returned to. But it wasn't the village he was smiling to see again after long absence, it was the face of danger.

With his head cocked, Martan seemed to be assessing the sounds around them. Nia only heard a few birds, a rustle of wind in the trees, and just at the edge of her hearing, one of the air handlers in the hillside. Martan heard more than that. "Where the lane leaves the Highway there are big animals with metal harnesses, and voices. Men on horses, I think, coming this way."

"The highway robbers! Let's get out of here!"

Instead of going back into the university station, they scrambled down a tree to the ground, then went downhill toward the village, slanting away from the lane and the highway robbers. Fallen leaves, wet and limp, muffled their steps. "We aren't dressed like locals," Nia said. "I hope there are a lot of other visitors in Davos today. Anyway, the only way up the highway is through the village."

"Will everyone and everything in this place be against us?" Again a light, interested tone, the tone in which anybody else might ask if the dessert menu included ice cream.

"Not necessarily," Nia said curtly. "We're caught in a danger game. The zone we skipped was the one called Warway, and I've never been near the war games, and I'd be useless there. But here I know the rules. No, everything and everyone won't be against us, not if we play the game well."

Nia reviewed the guidebook's pages about Davos to make sure she hadn't left something important out of her calculations. At the edge of the village, the highway arched up over a bridge above a sparkling little river that tumbled down the heart of the valley. In the middle of the bridge was a conspicuous plastic trapdoor. The bridge itself was made of rough fauxstone. Interested, Martan stopped to examine the material on the far side of the bridge.

He abruptly looked past Nia, alertness flashing across his features like light reflecting on polished metal. She whirled. Something was climbing out of the trapdoor. Huge, humanoid, wet, and covered with matted hair, it lurched toward them.

Nia dashed to the nearest alleyway. Martan loped after her. In the mouth of the alley, Martan deftly caught and stopped her. "Just stand back and I'll deal with--"

"Don't bother." As they peered out of the alley, the matted monster shuffled back and forth near the end of the bridge, then lumbered back to disappear through the plastic trapdoor.

Martan wore a baffled expression. Nia suppressed an urge to laugh. "That was the troll. It's not supposed to go more than twenty paces from water, those are the rules."

He started to say something, but then his face reflected sharp alertness again. He wheeled around toward two men who were rushing out of depths of the alley. One of the men sprang toward Martan with a knife in his hand.

The other man lunged toward Nia. She twisted away while Martan met his attacker halfway. An instant later, Martan's attacker was slamming into the nearest wall and sliding to the ground. Nia darted behind Martan. Martan delivered a lightning-fast kick to the second man's groin. The attacker doubled up with a yowl of pain. Martan seized the attacker by the throat and hair, yanked him upright, and glared into his eyes. Then the only sound in the sudden silence and stillness was a faint gurgling noise from the attacker semiconscious on the ground. The one Martan had by the throat mouthed inaudible words.

Nia realized that Martan was doing a hellhound interrogation, ransacking the man's mind. Shaken out of her shocked immobility, Nia pulled Martan back by the shoulders. "Don't kill him! If we kill a native, they'll all turn on us!"

Martan let go of the attacker, who collapsed like wet paper. In one fluid motion, Martan picked up a knife on the ground--Nia now remembered seeing him kick it out of the hand that held it--and shouldered their knapsack with its load of rocks again--she thought it had slammed into at least one of the two men at one point. She had never seen anybody move so fast or fight so well. In all likelihood the attackers hadn't either.

Spiders of anxiety skittered up and down Nia's spine. "Come on. Come on." Martan ran with Nia through the alley into a slightly less dank and narrow street. She said, "We are far too obvious. It's our clothes. We've got to do something about that."

Martan raised his eyebrow.

"This way." She threaded her way through the open-air market, closed for the day. The market and the houses and shops nearby were deserted, like the stage set they were. These buildings were mere facades, garish, quaint, and empty.

"Did you inflict--" Why mince words? She knew what he was. She had to find out what he'd done. "Did you wreck his mind?"

"No. He'll wake up with a hangover and a hole in his memory, that's all."

Nia started breathing again. Hellhounds interrogate to get information, she thought. "Did you find out anything?"

Martan nodded. "They're bounty hunters. Past the prospect of collecting a bounty, he was vague about the why. He was clear on who they were after, though. You and any male companion of yours. They knew exactly what you look like. They were after you."

"Me?"

"I can blend into in any crowd, anywhere, but your looks really stand out. I think whoever offered the bounty had the idea of using you as a marker."

A corner of Nia's will wanted to stop and panic, but that was not a useful idea. They had to find real help. She picked an inconspicuous hinged gate and yanked it open to enter a street behind the facades.

"You might thank me for saving you from those thugs," he said.

"But you enjoyed it," she retorted.

Located out of the line of sight from the tourists' deserted marketplace, this looked like a typical neighborhood in the city environs of Wendis. The residences were cozy glassbrick houses, the farthest uphill reached by latticeworks of stairs fringed with potted plants. Each house had a trilingual Wendisan address plate beside the door. The air smelled like any Wendisan neighborhood at suppertime: stir-fry and curry.

The few people on the sidewalks noticed Martan and Nia--visitors in expedition clothes more suitable for the wild zones of the park--but the Wendisans had business of their own and were unconcerned about a couple of purposeful visitors. Nia found the house she was looking for, with a distinctive blue door where the address plate read ELZEBET SELLER. A shiny bellbar underscored the name. Nia pressed the bar harder and longer than she meant to.

The door was opened by a heavy-set, gray-haired, dark-skinned woman with pleasant, rounded features. "Canter! Quick--in." Elzebet secured the door behind them.

Nia was so relieved to see Elzebet that she felt herself shaking. "This is Night, and--"

"Oh yes, Canter's Knight! The park is witherspin today, and you two are in trouble, but it seems you can take care of yourselves. Now you want some garb so you'll blend in better here! I told my friend Vendana (she's the Gatekeeper's Chief of Staff, she called me right after you left the gate--jumping over from Inferno with Scratch on your heels!) 'Vendana,' I said, 'she'll have sense enough to come to my house as straight as she can get here.'"

Elzebet escorted them to her showroom, which was crammed with colorful clothing arrayed on racks. "These are sorry times, that's all I'll say! Imagine an unsanctioned danger game breaking out in broad daylight with two unwitting university people! Mark my words, an investigation of this will go all the way up to City Council, but that won't help you today--you'll have to rescue yourselves, dear, and I'll do what I can to help. Well, well, you two are the same height! Let's see what I can find for you to wear." Elzebet disappeared into her showroom.

Martan asked Nia, "How well does news travel here?"

"Fast as photons. Tourists can't have communications devices, but the Denizens do and use them incessantly."

Like a wide fish flitting through the tight crevices of its home reef, Elzebet emerged from her showroom with thick clothing piled high in her arms.

"Start with him. I need to use your lavatory," Nia said.

Elzebet's lavatory was a nice little room, too small for the ubiquitous curvature of Wendisan architecture to be noticeable. There was a sweet-smelling bar soap and a real cloth hand towel. Suddenly, in that cozy and familiar place, the shock of danger came home to Nia. She put her head in her hands and sobbed.

An unsanctioned danger game, Elzebet had said. The so-called Most Dangerous Game, even with Old Scratch being a part of it, wasn't really the most dangerous game in Wendis. The most dangerous game in Wendis was this. An undesigned game with unknown players playing for high rewards--money, lust, revenge were recurring themes--and playing for keeps.

Nia's tears mixed with the dust of Inferno on her face. The mixture stung her skin. She struggled to regain her composure as she washed and dried her face. Then she opened the lavatory door and froze. She couldn't face any more of this day. She wanted time to stand still. Fresh tears welled up in her eyes.

She heard Elzebet talking to Martan. "Try this one on. Now, I've heard that the new proctor of the university has a fine talent for melting into a Wendisan crowd. He slides into a nightspot in the port looking like a port worker, finds the undergraduates who shouldn't be there, and he's scanned their ID's before their lookouts utter a peep of warning. Good for you. There's too much trouble for young people to get into in that port. Well now, that color does bring out the gold undertone in your skin. A cloak is what a Wendisan man would wear up here tonight, and you've got to act the part if you're to pass for Wendisan."

"I can do that," said Martan's voice. "How did you meet her--Canter?"

"I know her real name is Inanna," Elzebet confided. "That's a fine Wendisan name for a woman and it was her great-grandmother's. Inanna Riga was a famous actress and singer, and I'm old enough to remember the sensation when she upped and married a man from Azure, but Inanna Riga bequeathed her Wendisan citizenship to her great-granddaughter, so that's all right. This cloak will be perfect for you after I adjust it. It's smart fabric, so I can split and rejoin this seam--just stand still. 'Nia' sounds just like a good proper social nickname in Wendis, so she's Nia Inanna to her friends here. A few Wendyears ago, she'd just come to work at the university, and we needed someone to play the role of a Europan queen in the Ascendance Fair. Her legal assistant was on the Fair Committee, and told us his new boss was from Azure with the classic Azurean looks; the pale skin, blue eyes, silver hair. And any good lawyer is a good actor! Everyone immediately realized that she'd be the perfect queen, and she agreed to help us out. She made such a good impression on everyone that she earned a Fair name."

"Canter," said Martan.

"I'm sure Azure is a respectable place with decent people, but really, it's one of those thin new worlds, stretched across a great big planet. She's too extraordinary for it. This is a better place for her. Wendis is nice and thick, like baklava. There! Now the fit is perfect, and it won't get in your way whether you fight or fly."

They'd already had to fight and to flee, and it wasn't over, Nia thought miserably. Was it just bad luck that had made everything go witherspin around them today?

Or was it less arbitrary and more ominous than bad luck? Still standing in the lavatory door, she suddenly recognized a chain of logic as strong as steel.

Only a few days ago, she'd made the initial inquiries for the background legal information she might need to establish Martan's human rights under Faxen law. Now an enemy knew he was here. She'd been careful not to be specific enough in her inquiries to let out the secret that he was alive in Wendis. But maybe she'd not been discreet enough. Maybe there had already been suspicions that the explosion Faxe's hellhound disappeared in hadn't been quite fatal.

If so, then she herself had unwittingly made the first move in the game, not knowing how swiftly the countermove would come. That was the critical core of what was happening today. Martan's enemies wanted him badly. Possibly they also wanted to preempt what she could do within the law to win him human rights and freedom from Faxe. So when she made the mistake of bringing Martan out of the university--one of the safest, best protected places in Wendis--into the wild Wends, a bounty was offered and the hunt was on.

Nia's tearful exhaustion crystallized into focus. The University Counsel said get back to Haven as fast as possible. That was all that mattered right now. Later, Nia wanted the end game to be on her own territory--interstellar law--and she intended to win. First, get out of the park.

She returned to Elzebet's showroom.

Wearing a dark green cloak with a geometric embroidered pattern, Martan gave Nia a slight bow. Somehow he had become a Wendisan man, poised in the spin-gee, relaxed and charmingly sly. Elzebet said, "Look at that. He can imitate the Wendisan male slouch!"

Martan was no skulking assassin. He could blend in with a Wendisan crowd, find out secrets, probably outfight almost anything in the Wends. They would make it to Haven, Nia thought, with fierce new hope.

Elzebet said, "For you, Nia Inanna, I have this nice thick shawl. Since your jacket isn't bulky, the shawl goes right over it and it's not obvious that there's a field jacket under the shawl. You'll be glad of the layers tonight with the wind chill. Doesn't midnight blue look good on her? You move like a visitor, you can't hide that--but this is what a visitor with style might wear."

Nia stroked the material. "How much do we owe you?"

"You can't pay for these things with Wendisan yen," Elzebet replied. "For Denizen garb, it has to be native currency. You must cross my palm with silver."

"We don't have any," Nia said in sudden dismay.

Elzebet chuckled. "Oh, but you do." At the kitchen table in her private quarters, Elzebet proceeded to cut some of Nia's hair and rearrange the rest. "There. Paid in full. You look just like a fashionable interstellar visitor, not a university officer. And five years younger, too."

Martan, who had watched the haircut with fascination, nodded agreement.

"Now," Elzebet said, "go to the entertainment quarter and blend in with the other winter visitors until morning!"

"But I was hoping--" Nia stopped. Better not to say too much about their plans. "Can you give us any other advice?"

"Think twice about going down the Highway, or up it. The highway robbers are out and about. Old Scratch has been seen prowling around the Back Gate. I won't be surprised if the Wild Hunt rides tonight. The Huntmaster would give anything to bag Old Scratch. But the Wild Hunt is no time for anyone to be on the Highway," Elzebet said darkly, "least of all a pretty girl. Some in the Hunt are neither sane nor humane, when they're wilding."

"I know." As the Wendisan authorities smilingly told tourists, as they held out forms to be signed, releasing Wendis from responsibility for injury, monetary loss, and accidental death: Welcome to the Wends. Some tourists ended up being pieced together in the hospital, or dead on arrival. More rarely, but not never, Wendisans got killed in the Strange Range. Nia slowly reached into her jacket pocket. "Would you keep something safe for me?" She took the hugwort out. But it clung to her buttons. It thinned and spread out as she pulled it, but it refused to let go.

"What in all the worlds is that?" said Elzebet.

"An enchanted morning glory," said Martan.

"It's a species the university biologists found on the planet Jumala," said Nia.

"Look at those leaves--just like the glories outside my back door!"

"It may be a created organism, a teratism," said Nia, losing her struggle with numerous wiry green tendrils. "They think there was a lost human colony on Jumala. On Jumala the ecosystem is bizarrely dominated by plants. There is some evidence that an ancient colonist mixed Terrestrial genes into a Jumalan life form, before the colony died out."

"Teratism or not, dear, it's certainly attached to you."

"It may be hurt already," said Nia, "and there aren't many like it."

Martan sniffed the hugwort. "It doesn't have any bruised leaves. It's not all that fragile. It wants to take its chances with you."

Nia reluctantly returned the hugwort to her pocket, untwining the last tendril from her index finger. She wrapped the shawl around her shoulders. "We've got to go."

"Have this too." Elzebet fastened the shawl with a slim golden pin bearing two faceted stones. "It's a nice finishing touch and a token."

Nia gratefully closed her hand around the pin. "Will you be safe after we leave?"

"I live in the Fair Country. My door is better defended than it may look to you, and I'm staying behind it until this trouble blows over. Remember, now, I say wait for tomorrow before you try any more gates. You can easily pass for two of two dozen lovers romancing in the Fair Country tonight. At least, use those Wendisan yen of yours to get a good supper!"

They were two of thirty people dining on the restaurant's patio. The windows and door of the restaurant, closed against the cold night air, leaked syncopated music. From the patio around them came the murmurs of other diners and the clinks of cutlery in use. Naturally enough in the outdoor chill, Nia had her shawl's hood up, covering her telltale silver hair, and she attracted no attention at all. But her nerves stayed strung tight.

Martan pointed to her plate. "Are you going to finish that?"

"How can you eat?"

"I might need the calories later."

She shoved the plate, with a third of a trout and two thirds of the rice, toward him. "I can't feel hungry when I feel in danger."

"You may not be in much danger. They may just be using you as a marker, remember?"

"But if it were me, and I wanted to extract you from asylum in Wendis by foul means, I'd capture or kill the only lawyer in Wendis who understands interstellar law well enough to defend you against Faxe. I made the first inquiries for legal background information just five days ago. I was very careful, and I didn't expect it to precipitate something. But it might have."

He held her eyes in his own dark gaze for a long moment. "Eat. You might need calories later too."

She nibbled a curry bun from her side dish. "Are your modifications psychological and mechanical or genetic?"

"Does it matter?"

"There are legal protections for cyborgs. The gene-changed are a lot harder to protect, because they're a lot harder to deal with ... and unpopular. Wendis has treaties with a few gene-changed communities. You aren't a species, are you?"

Martan shrugged.

What had he told her earlier, about brain-training to make hellhounds reluctant to spill their secrets? "If I know what you are, I can help you," Nia persisted.

It seemed to take effort for him to say, "Martan is an alias. No radiation-mutated ancestors on Old Mars. I have old Earth normal genes. The changes were mechanical and psychological. The doctors here could have undone the mechanical changes--except--I didn't want to lose all I can do."

Nia felt as though he'd opened a window into his soul and she'd seen one of the main cogs in his being. "You wanted to be a hellhound, but a redeemed one?"

"You could say that. What's so funny?"

"The university hired you as proctor," said Nia. "You can see in the dark and hear fog flow. You have a grip impossible for a normal person to break. Those undergrads sneaking to forbidden places after curfew don't stand a chance."

"Unfair advantage?"

"Doesn't matter. Your predecessor was an incompetent political appointee. The whole faculty and administration of the university is glad to have a capable proctor for a change. They just don't know how capable!"

Martan divided the last of the tea between her cup and his with a flourish, making the amber liquid slant to its destination instead of allowing porcelain to click on porcelain. Even if he'd had to struggle to say the truth about himself, he liked being admired for what he truly was, Nia thought. There was a lot to admire. "And you're polished. You're well educated. You fit in with the university culture. I thought you said you were born on Estrella."

"Estrella is backward, all right, but I had a first-rate education after my juvenation and training. Lessons in etiquette, too. If we came off like jackals, we'd never accomplish anything." He smiled.

Nia smiled back. Not just a slinking assassin, she thought, and not a monster. In fact, he was wonderful.

Martan said, "I just remembered something. The thug thought a Jeng Family was behind this--that the Jeng Family had a bounty on us. One of the enemies of Faxe I eliminated was named Jang. Could there be a connection?"

Nia sat back, suddenly uneasy. "The Jeng Family has relations Outside. Some of the Outside Jeng are very rich from interstellar trade, but not particularly political, that I've ever heard about. Jang might or might not be an Outside variant of the family name. What did your Jang victim do to get on Faxe's list of enemies of the Faxen Union?"

"He was a religious cultist. A Shandiist."

Nia could hardly believe her ears. "As in Shandy? Do you know about Shandy?"

"Some kind of supposed god."

"More like Satan. And Shandy has worshippers in the Wends." As if they needed an unholy new twist in this game! "The low road is out. We don't dare go that way, not if Shandy's followers might be behind all this."

Martan surreptitiously emptied her dipping sauce and his onto the remaining rice, and ate it in large spoonfuls.

"What are you doing?"

"The sauce is mostly oil. Good source of calories. Let's wander over to the edge of the terrace and admire the scenery, while I listen."

Martan's supersensitive hearing must have picked up something, and he wanted to listen away from the noisy patio, Nia thought, getting up from the table with him.

A wrought iron railing at the edge of the terrace offered a scenic view of Davos. The village lay on the slopes of its mountain like a thick rug shimmering with soft warm lights, apparently peaceful. But Martan indicated the far side of the village with an unobtrusive tilt of his chin. "I hear your Metal Man. The anthropologist. He's running on the highway into town yelling, the crusaders are coming."

Nia recoiled. "Oh no! That's worse than highway robbers! They could lay siege to the village until every visitor is handed over!"

"Maybe by warning everyone in earshot, he's trying to warn us," said Martan. "We better get out of here."

A tall fence separated the village from the forest on this end of Davos, but a silvery stream--a tributary to the small river in the center of the valley and village--raced downhill under the fence, flowing through a tall tube as a shallow clear layer of water.

They dropped down onto the stream and waded uphill, through the tube, into the forest. On the other side of the tube high banks rose on either side. The streambed was smoothly pebbly. It would wash away their scent if something came after them that could smell spoor. But the water was snowmelt, and icy when it flowed into Nia's shoes. "My feet are cold--"

At that moment, something separated itself from the dark bank ahead. It loomed up over them. It grunted gloomily.

Martan glared up at the troll. He pulled out the thug's knife, ready to use it.

From behind Martan, Nia grabbed his upper arms. "No!"

"Why not?"

"Watch." She took Elzebet's golden pin with garnet stones off the shawl. She held the out to the troll.

It stooped. A huge blunt thumb and index finger delicately closed on the pin and took it. Then the troll chuckled and shuffled back into a den in the steep bank.

Nothing but a reek like wet dog mixed with curry came out of the troll's den as they hurried by. The troll did not reemerge.

"What was that all about?"

"It's the rules," said Nia. "Give him jewelry or coins and you can pass."

Martan swore under his breath and slipped the knife back into his pocket.

Nia promptly tripped on a loose stone, going down on one knee with a chilling splash. Martan helped her up. A quarter mile further upstream, they crawled up the stream's bank. Nia was shaking with cold, and her knee hurt.

Martan sat down with her and wrapped his cloak around both of them.

"I want to be home in my own bed tomorrow morning with this a bad dream!" Nia said through chattering teeth.

Martan rubbed her knee and held her close. He felt incredibly, miraculously warm. Nia gratefully rested in his arms.

They were high on Zaber. Low-lying fog dimmed the distant city's lights to a misty gleam. But the center of the huge cylinder of Wendis was clear. The whole length of the sunspar was visible along the axis. It was night in Wendis now, and stars and nebulas streamed through the spar, images that imitated the cosmic environs of Wendis. The cylindrical city-state rotated once every five minutes, but to anyone in the sway of the centrifugal spingravity the cylinder seemed fixed in space, an immutable frame of reference, with a river of stars flowing through its long crystal heart.

The most distant mountain in the Wend Range, Mount Chance, had a jagged peak that gleamed in the starlight. Specter loomed higher and nearer, made of darker stuff. All of the mountains of Wendis were curved like waves--and all of them had vertiginous blank backsides--but only Specter carried the pattern to completion. The black summit of Specter curled around the spar.

Martan was looking up at the mountains too, with observant eyes that had seen other great and beautiful wonders, as he'd told her only a few hours that felt like a lifetime ago.

Some interstellar wonders were very small. Nia checked her jacket pocket under the shawl. "It's all right. It may not be so eager to smuggle itself along on an outing next time."

"Where to now, Inanna?" he said.

He'd never called her Inanna before. Maybe he liked the name. She liked hearing it in his voice. For the first time in her life, that very Wendisan woman's name felt like it belonged to her. She was in the middle of the most dangerous game in Wendis, with a companion who was as dangerous as anyone in the Wends, but willing to follow her lead when she knew the way better than he did. She said, "The last tram to Haven leaves at midnight. We're in the highlands already. If we cut cross country to the Fair Lane, we'll have time to catch the tram."

They started across a meadow carpeted with short, springy grass.

"What if something goes wrong with the tram plan, too?" asked Martan.

"At the top of Zaber is Lover's Leap."

"That sounds suicidal."

"It isn't. If you leap off, you fall down the back side of Zaber into a net in Haven. But I'd never live it down at the university."

He may have been imagining the net with as much distaste as she was. That or something else was distracting him from listening for warning sounds. Nia and Martan both registered hoofbeats racing up behind them at the same moment, too late.

A shape like a slender white horse dove between Martan and Nia, knocking Martan backward. It sidled on mincing hooves, pushing Nia away from Martan. Starlight glanced on a sharp, fluted horn.

Nia tried to duck around the unicorn. Very pretty and very assertive, the unicorn blocked her, dancing sidewise on long delicate legs, driving her further away from Martan.

"Stupid beast!" Martan exploded.

Nia called back, "He's not stupid. I've met him before. He won't hurt me, but he's herding me. Prince, stop that!"

"We don't have time for this!"

"You tell him!"

Martan seized the unicorn's horn. Prince furiously tried to shake loose, but Martan kept his grip on its horn and bared his fangs while staring Prince in the eye.

Flank muscles tensing, the unicorn jumped straight backward. Martan let go of the horn just in time not to be carried along. The unicorn whirled and bounded away with its tail flowing like a gossamer pennant behind it.

"He got the point," said Nia, rejoining Martan.

They scrambled up the rocky bank to the Fair Lane, which was paved with flat fauxstones. The Lane curved uphill, offering easy going the rest of the way to the tram station.

As they paused beside the lane, Nia wondered about the unicorn's reaction to her, and Martan's reaction to the unicorn. Had that been two males fighting over her? Prince had certainly been radiating male attitude. And now so was Martan, who had not retracted his fangs. Nia reached out to Martan's lips, exploring his fangs with her fingertips. "Oooooh. Sharp."

"Do you want me to put them away?"

"I'm beginning to think I find them strangely attractive."

He kissed her fingertips and pulled her closer.

Then an ululating sound ripped through the air, like a wail from a raw brass throat. Nia groaned. "It's the Wild Hunt. We can't go to the tram now. That's in their territory. God help us if someone told them what you are. Your pelt would be a bigger prize than Old Scratch!"

"How do we reach Lover's Leap?" Martan asked

"Up the lane, and turn at the intersection onto the High Road, and up and up and up."

The Wild Hunt horn sounded several times more, and more wildly, but not any closer. The Hunt was staying on the other side of the Fair Country, in the rough terrain near the Back Gate where Scratch had been seen earlier. Old Scratch might be a prize they could not resist.

"Better Scratch than me--or you," said Martan.

This high on Zaber, the air was thin and bitterly cold, the gravity low and hard for Nia to manage. She slipped her hand into Martan's. She'd stopped being afraid of him. She was afraid, but not of him.

"Your hair is exactly the same color and texture as the unicorn's mane and tail," said Martan.

She shrugged wearily. "Probably the same genes. The unicorn is a teratism that dates pretty far back. Some of my distant ancestors on twenty-first century Earth had silver hair, but it was early genetic engineering rather than a naturally evolved trait. Everyone else now believes the old families on Azure are pure Earth-original genetic material. But that's not exactly true. Family secret. Don't tell." Her family's secrets must seem like feathers compared to the weight of the secrets on his shoulders, she thought.

Martan stroked her wrist. "You see, it's not automatic," he said. "All of my fingers are touching your skin, and nothing bad is happening."

"I saw what you did in Davos," she answered, but she didn't pull away.

"I really had to dig," said Martan. "There wasn't much in his mind for me to work with, because he just wanted a fat bounty. My telepathy drives along the tracks laid down in someone's brain by pain, shame, and anger. The enemies of Faxe tended to have a royal road for me in their minds. That last night when we were together, as soon as I touched those scars on your back, I knew somebody had hurt you, and then you told me it was an early and very unsuccessful experiment in love. It carries pain and shame for you now. I instinctively reacted to that, and made you explain everything. But you are the last person in the universe I intended to Interrogate. I'm sorry."

It made sense. He made sense. Finally she said, "You told me you made a drastic, emotion-driven, foolish decision at a young age. Well, so did I. It's in the past now."

"If you say so."

She squeezed his hand.

Martan said, "It was an Interrogation that made me defect from Faxe. I hunted down my last enemy of Faxe, and when I interrogated him, I found that he was a principled man, not a nihilistic terrorist. Things he knew about Faxe shocked me. I broke the Interrogation off--ran away--and tried to end my life in an explosion. Except I didn't die. Wendisans rescued me. Then the doctors reconstructed me, learned all about my hellhound modifications by repairing the damages. They restored my abilities. It's more than telepathic interrogation."

"I understand that now." A hellhound was a subtle tool as well as an effective and terrible one. No wonder Wendis had been interested enough to rescue Martan, repair him, and finally offer him asylum and a useful job. It was very much the tradition of Wendis to gather up resources, human or otherwise, that added value.

"I like the things I can do. But I'm not Faxe's hellhound now."

No, she thought, he was not a Faxen hellhound anymore. He might just be a Wendisan hellhound.

They rounded the bony flank of a rocky hill. The High Road ended just ahead at a fragile-looking swinging footbridge suspended over a chasm.

A figure like a winged gargoyle crouched on the anchoring post on the near end of the bridge. Both the bridgepost and the gargoyle looked made of pale marble and were of incongruously imposing size compared to the spindly bridge.

Nia drew close to Martan. "Watch out for the guardian Angel," she whispered.

As they approached the threshold of the bridge, the guardian Angel watched them with live, shifting eyes. Martin pulled out the thug's knife. The Angel's head turned toward them as they went by and stepped onto the slender bridge.

"Suspended at forty-five degrees to the axis. That may make it a little challenging for you," Martan murmured. "Walk fast but lightly, smoothly."

With every step, it felt as though a subtle, invisible spingravity finger nudged Nia's foot toward the edge of the bridge. It made her fear falling off. Panicky, she said, "It feels--"

"Close your eyes."

With her eyes closed, Nia clung to the arm Martan put around her waist, guiding her. He glided right behind her, his footfalls so light that they didn't even seem to register on the bridge.

Music and faint laughter drifted up from the deep valley far below the swinging bridge. Colored lights swirled on the valley's floor. That was Karnivale down there. No carnival for anybody who fell off this bridge.

"We're past the middle," Martan said in a low voice. Nia heard a flapping sound behind them. "Now hurry--" Martan shoved her the rest of the way to the end of the bridge, where she felt solid rock under her feet and stumbled.

Martan whirled with the knife ready in his hand.

The guardian braked in midair with flapping wings. He dived onto the anchoring post. With long, bony hands, he grasped the knotted ends of the bridge and unfastened the ropes. Dangling from the Fair Country end, the bridge slowly fell away.

The guardian spoke. "The way is closed."

Nia shuddered. Even more than the deathbird, the way that winged parody of a human being flew in the air of Wendis looked hideous to her. But Martan didn't seem fazed. Holding her hand, he backed away from the bridgepost, trading glares with the guardian Angel all the way to the foot of a long stairway carved into the vertical face of rock at the high end of Karnivale.

"Up to the top of Zaber," Martan told her. "It's not far."

Nia shook her head, despairing. This looked even worse than the Spiral Stair. The frigid wind galed and sighed. The ends of her shawl fluttered. Her muscles fought for balance, and she forced herself to suppress motions too forceful for the low spingravity.

Martan coaxed her up a step at a time. He ceaselessly scanned the stairs and the air for danger. "What is that thing?"

"He's not a thing. He's human. There are two groups of genetically changed--or deranged--humans in Wendis. One is the Children of Bane. Like the Gatekeeper. The other is the Angels. They're Shandy's Angels."

"Do say," Martan replied, with a cold ironic note in his voice that she'd not heard before. But then she'd never heard him contemplating a sentient enemy.

Nia dared one look back. The guardian Angel glared up at them with his wings cocked.

One minute of inattention on Martan's part and the Angel would fly up to knock them off the stairs. But Martan's alertness didn't waver.

On the first landing, hidden from the bridgepost by a fold of stone and out of the wind, Nia stopped. Her leg muscles trembled with fatigue, and the knee that she had bruised in Inferno and again in the stream near Davos throbbed. Icy tears tricked down her cheeks. "I can't take much more of this."

Watching the air with the knife in his hand, Martan kissed the side of her face. "I'm sorry. If I'd known, I would never have let everything today happen to you."

She said, "I knew it might be dangerous to help you. I just didn't think it would be this much, this soon, like this. But ... I knew." She leaned against him. Elzebet's cloak smelled like the Fair Country, spice and smoke.

She'd known, and she'd made the first move of this perilous game herself, by sending out inquiries into areas of interstellar law that might have bearing on the human rights of hellhounds. And her motives had been a tight braid of ambition, compassion, and sexual passion. How very Wendisan. Wend your way, play a game, win or lose the prize of your life in the Magic Mountains....

Martan sounded calm. "I will get you home tonight. I promise." He pulled out the guidebook from her jacket's breast pocket. "Be our lookout for a few minutes."

Nia anxiously watched the windy air.

Martan leafed through the guidebook's pages. "Zaber's peak has very unusual properties," he said. Faint accordion and zither music drifted up from Karnivale. He turned a page. Suddenly Martan hissed, "This thing is transmitting! I feel it. Only when a page turns--and only sneaky little packets of data."

"Telling someone where we are?" Nia's mind reeled.

Martan hurled the guidebook into the valley. It fluttered away on the winds over Karnivale. "I memorized what I need," he said. She felt his back muscles tense up and his breathing change, deeper and harder. He was spring-loading for a fight.

The stairs ended on the wider crest of Zaber. Starlight shone blindingly on a thin blanket of snow. Nia located Lover's Leap, a scalloped terrace protruding from the top of Zaber.

It was roped off and posted with signs.

CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE

NO TRESPASSING

NO SAFETY NET

"Company," Martan said flatly.

Nia turned around to see four humans standing up from the snow, wearing arctic-white hunting garb and masks, with weapons in their hands. A harpoon was flying through the air toward her.

Martan shoved Nia down onto the snow. The harpoon harmlessly skimmed his shoulder. He tumbled over Nia's back, skidding over the vertical edge of Karnivale valley. She grabbed for him, missed, and watched horrified as he fell. But not far. He slid toward a tiny shelf of rock. His feet landed there. Terror for his safety choked Nia's throat. But he coiled onto the shelf like a spring, balanced on the balls of his feet, safe. But he had nowhere to go.

Nia forced herself to roll toward the hunters, to get to her feet. She must not let them know he was safe, just below the edge. She had to get their attention away from him. She took a shaky step in the low gravity. The hunters advanced. One of them shook out a huge net.

Out of the corner of her eye Nia registered rapid motion just before Martan hurtled into her. He collided hard with her and launched them both into the air. He'd jumped up from his narrow perch with all the power he had. He'd broken both of them free of the low spingravity. With his arms wrapped tightly around her, they coasted upward from the peak of Zaber.

The mountain rotated away. The hunters gestured excitedly. But they didn't shoot another harpoon. Nobody in Wendis would dare fire a weapon toward the spar at the center of the world.

The spar was a torrent of brilliant stars channeled inside a thick crystalline tube. It mesmerized Nia. The heart of the spar was filled with translucent threads, conduits for a sunlike pulse of golden light by day and a million starlike pulses of silver light by night. It was blindingly bright up this close. The air around it was warm. Nia felt numb awe as she saw the spar up close, and closer yet.

They were going to collide with it.

Martan reached out and put his hand on the spar. His arm absorbed their momentum. Electrical fields swirled around his hand on the spar's clear surface.

With a forceful shove, Martan propelled them away from the spar.

Now they fell at the same slow rate at which they'd ascended from Zaber. As dazed as if she were dreaming, Nia saw they were coasting rimward on the other side of the spar from the peak of Zaber, where the distant hunters had dwindled to angry little toys. Martan and Nia fell rimward, down, and down. But it didn't feel like falling. It was dreamlike flying, free from spingravity. The whole vast cylinder of Wendis rotated around them.

Martan shrugged off the knapsack, which still contained rocks from Inferno. He slung the whole thing away from him, changing their course so that they coasted rimward at a different angle. "Hah! We'll land safe!" he exulted.

Now Zaber rotated back around.

Zaber morphed into an immense white wave looming over them, closing in with terrifying speed. Nia screamed. Martan twisted around to cushion the impact with his own body. The steep slope of Zaber slammed into them and buried them in snow.

They rolled back out into the air. Nia coughed and spat snow. They slid downhill. Snow slithered through Nia's clothes.

Martan shouted a curse. "No rock--no roots--can't stop!"

They kept sliding downhill toward a dark flat blur on the mountainside. A fragment of Nia's mind worried what the dark blur was--it looked familiar--bad for some reason--

Nia, Martan, and the snow traveling with them spilled into an ice-rimmed lake. Frigid water shot through Nia's clothes like driven nails.

Martan hauled Nia up, getting her head out the water. She coughed. The lake came up to her collarbone, and it was shockingly cold. "Aaaah!"

"This way!" Martan gasped.

She staggered toward shore leaning on him.

"I think we're safe," said Martan.

Shaking uncontrollably, Nia looked at the shoreline. It was familiar. It was also lined with people staring excitedly at them. "Robin Lake in Haven," Nia stammered past chattering teeth. "Winter stargazing. We are safe here. Oh, cold! Oh no!" She fished the hugwort out of a pocket full of water. It clutched at her fingers with all of its tendrils.

They waded out of the water onto a smooth sand beach. Water spilled off Nia's shawl and flowed off Martan's cloak, as the fabrics rejected the water.

"Here!" Martin flung his cloak and her shawl around them both. He twined his fingers through the hugwort's tendrils and between Nia's fingers. He embraced her, and he radiated heat. Another special hellhound ability, Nia realized. Raise body temperature. Survive immersion in cold or snow or ice water. She held onto him, sharing his elevated body warmth. The hugwort relaxed its grip on Nia's fingers and twitched its tendrils, flinging water off its leaves like a wet bird shaking its plumage dry.

"A flying ambulance just landed," said Martan. "Don't forget I kept my promise to you."

Nia held his face. "You--are--wonderful!" She kissed him. He responded instantly, but he held back, implicitly asking how much kissing she wanted and how long. Her answer was more and very.

"What happened?" said an ambulance medic pushing through the cluster of people. Voices answered, "They fell down the mountain--caught in an avalanche--" A child piped, "They fell from the starspar, they did, they did!"

"Anyway, they seem to be all right," someone remarked.

Nia broke off the kiss but whispered to Martan, "More later!"

Then there it was, finally, with ice water dripping from his hair onto his face, he gave her his end-of-an-eclipse smile.

They shook off the curious star-gazers, including one who seemed to be an ambulance-chasing reporter, by ducking into the Robin Lake boathouse. Since it was winter, the boats were tied and covered. Martan led Nia along the floating dock in the darkness, unerringly reaching the far end of the long boathouse while the reporter and other curious citizens were still blundering around near the door they'd entered by.

Martan was breathing hard, and he was shaking. "Hungry," he whispered, while the boats around them creaked and muttered in their moorings. "Used up a lot of energy."

Nia cautiously cracked open a back door of the boathouse. She saw a crowd of people scattered on a slope of Zaber that faced the city. Viewing the glittering skyscrapers and shining scraps of fog that filled the far end of Wendis like a geode, these people hadn't noticed anything sliding into Robin Lake behind them. Nia put her shawl over her hair and led Martan by the hand. They merged into the crowd.

Sweet smoke led Nia to a food vendor's booth. She bought a fried cake and six winter rolls. Martan ate the rolls while the cake cooled, then wolfed down the cake. Then he smiled.

"Happy now?" Nia asked.

"You were right. It's the best obstacle course that ever existed. That was a good run. I'm very happy."

Nia liked being right. But she was aware of Zaber's bulk curling up toward the spar, looming over them like a live, imposing presence. "You know you have enemies up there."

He smiled again, with a glint in his eyes. "Dealing with enemies was what I was made for."

He had his idea of an exciting challenge. Nia had hers. If the Jeng Family tried to pursue a vendetta against Martan, they would find themselves in serious trouble with the Wendisan legal system. Nia would see to that. If the Shandiists weighed in, then things might get legally very exciting--as well as dangerous. But when you could play danger games in the Wend Mountains and win, it was only natural to have both bad enemies and good friends and allies.

"What about you? Happy?" Martan asked, stroking the side of her face.

"I'm so glad we made it down, but I'm worn out," said Nia. She was trying to ignore her scraped skin, muscles taxed into painful knots, and fatigue building to crushing proportions.

A quarter of the way around Wendis from here, the university stood on the low hills, surrounded by a decorated wall that was also very functional, designed to keep students and scholars from outside worlds safe from the dangers of Wendis. "You said you wanted to be in your own bed tomorrow morning, and it all be a bad dream, but I'd like for you to come home with me," said Martan. "The proctor's apartment is secure by design. And I made security improvements since I moved in."

To reach the university only took a short walk downhill and then a brief slidewalk ride. There was a narrow Proctor's door in the wall beside the university's main entrance. Martan's keys opened the door and then locked it with several layers of security.

"Happy," Nia murmured, falling asleep in Martan's arms in the safe darkness of the proctor's apartment. Win the prize of your life in the Magic Mountains.... "Very happy."

Copyright 2006 Alexis Glynn Latner

[Back to Table of Contents]

Our September issue features a wide variety of stories that turn familiar ideas and situations on their heads, challenging you to think about them in new and perhaps uncomfortable (but entertaining) ways. Richard A. Lovett's "A Pound of Flesh," for example, offers a scary way an old truism might be put to all-too-practical use. Rajnar Vajra's "A Million Years and Counting" stars a protagonist as outrageously alien as you've seldom seen elsewhere but likely come to expect from Vajra--yet in the end perhaps much more familiar than some would like to admit. John G. Hemry's "Kyrie Eleison" is a tale of reunion in an age when humanity has expanded far beyond the Earth, wherein a rescue team discover a startling example of "making do" twisted to sinister new ends.

Kyle Kirkland's fact article is "The Right Stuff: Materials for Aerospace and Beyond." What you can build depends, of course, on what materials you have available to work with--and we're just now seeing the beginnings of some new ones that are not only very exotic, but very "talented." Finally, of course, we'll have the sweeping conclusion of Edward M. Lerner's four-part novel A New Order

[Back to Table of Contents]

For vacationers, Hawaii means paradise: a fertile chain of volcanic islands, bedecked in rainbows and flowers, bathed by the Pacific Ocean. But geologists would love the islands even if the climate weren't so appealing. That's because they are the most active volcanic area in the world, in a region where, for years, it appeared that volcanoes had no right to be. Hawaii was a tropical paradise that, quite simply, seemed as though it shouldn't exist.

Then, in 1971, a Princeton University geologist named Jason Morgan offered a bold explanation: suppose there's a hotspot on the surface of the Earth's core. Why, we don't know. Maybe it has something to do with the way heat escapes from the core's interior, or perhaps it's simply due to a pocket of radioactive materials. Whatever the cause, the spot acts as a geological hotplate, producing a thermal plume that rises through the Earth's mantle until it eventually punches through the surface and emerges as--hurrah!--a big volcano. Since hotspots can presumably be anywhere on the core, hotspot volcanoes can be anywhere on Earth.

By the end of the twentieth century, this once-revolutionary theory had become conventional wisdom. But is it true? Sometimes, universally accepted theories are the ones that least stand up to challenge: consider the fate of the Ptolemaic view of the Solar System or the pre-Einstein view that the speed of light was fixed, relative to a stationary ether.[1] Now, a small group of geophysicists are unleashing a firestorm of controversy by arguing that the hotspot/ mantle-plume theory might not be as correct as everyone has presumed.

The birth and death of such theories is simply part of the cycle of science. But many geophysicists are rooting for the old theory to hold correct. Many years ago, Jules Verne's classic novel, A Journey to the Center of the Earth, postulated an expedition to the Earth's core in which the explorers descended the mouth of Iceland's Snaefellsjökull volcano, and kept going downward for a long, long way. In the (scientifically dreadful) movie The Core, modern explorers took a faster route via an extraordinary burrowing machine.

Real scientists have no hope of such adventures. But if the hotspot theory is correct, they don't need them. That's because the core--or at least material that has been in contact with it--may have come to them via hotspot-derived plumes. "If there are no plumes, it will be a great disappointment," says Donald J. DePaolo of the University of California, Berkeley. "The romance of plumes is that they are messengers from the bottom of the mantle, and they may be our only chance to get direct information on what's down there."

Peeling the Onion

To understand why the theory is under attack, we must begin with a primer on the Earth's interior. It is comprised of three basic layers. The uppermost is the lithosphere (also called the crust), which is where we live, drill for oil, dig mines, and collect samples for laboratory analysis.

The lithosphere is comprised of two basic subdivisions: seabeds, which are made of relatively dense basalt and are only about ten kilometersthick; and continents, which are made of lighter-weight granite and which can be up to sixty or seventy kilometers thick. Both, of course, contain numerous impurities, ranging from sedimentary rocks and precious minerals to organic matter such as oysters, tree roots, and Analog readers.[2]

Beneath the lithosphere is the mantle. It appears to have two distinct sub-layers (called the upper mantle and the lower mantle) with a boundary between them. This is important because the boundary may impede the movement of plumes rising from the lower mantle, and it definitely impedes our ability to figure out what's going on below it.[3]

The mantle is denser than the crust, so the crust floats on top of it. Although the mantle's average temperature of about 2000 °C is hot enough to melt rock, the rock is under so much pressure it remains solid. (Unlike ice, rock expands when it melts, which means that pressure prevents it from doing so.) However, the mantle rocks are very slightly plastic, which means that they can flow--very, very slowly.

Because it is heated from below, the mantle contains convection currents, like a very thick, slow-boiling stew. "Slow" is the operative word. Most scientists believe that plumes are the racehorses of the mantle world, and are galloping along at a pretty good rate if they hit speeds on the order of a foot per year.[4]

It is only when a hot portion of the mantle comes close to the surface that the pressure drops below the critical threshold at which it finally melts. Geophysicists refer to the resulting liquid as "the melt." Most people call it magma.

The mantle is about 2,800 km thick. Beneath it lies the core, which also appears to have two layers. The core is the least-understood part of the Earth, but all that matters for us is that it's hotter yet (about 3000 °C), and that there is a distinct boundary between it and the mantle. Just as the burner of a stove provides the heat that causes your dinner to boil, heat from the core drives the mantle's convection currents. Hotspots, if they exist, simply provide unusually strong focal points for the same process.

When the mantle's convection currents reach the lithosphere, they buffet it like bubbles floating in a hot tub. The result is that rather than being a single eggshell layer coating the entire planet, the lithosphere is broken into about thirty plates, each moving independently in a process called plate tectonics. Sometimes plates bash into each other, producing enormous mountains, such as the Himalayas. Sometimes they grate against each other, producing zones such as California's San Andreas Fault. Sometimes, they rift apart, allowing magma to upwell from below, and on still other occasions, one plate dives beneath another, melts, and comes back to the surface a hundred miles or so away as a chain of volcanoes, such as Oregon's Cascade Range.

Plate tectonics works perfectly well without mantle plumes. But the standard theory doesn't give you Hawaii, because Hawaii is smack-dab in middle of a plate.

If a mantle plume were to erupt beneath a stationary plate, the result would be a single, enormous volcano. This, in fact, is one explanation for why Mars, whose crust is one large, unmoving plate, sports enormous volcanic cones such as Olympus Mons. But if a plume erupts beneath a moving plate, what you'll get is a chain of volcanoes, as the continuously upwelling magma punches through first one weak spot and then another, as the crust drifts by. The young, active volcano (or cluster of volcanoes) will be at the site of the plume. Farther away, extinct volcanoes will form a nice, nearly straight line, marking the direction in which the plate is moving.

In Hawaii, this is precisely what you see. The Pacific Plate is moving northwestward at about seven centimeters per year, or seventy kilometersper million years, and the islands run in exactly the right direction. Farther out, beyond the last island, the line continues in a string of underwater mountains known as the Emperor Seamounts.

As you move down the chain, the islands (and seamounts) become increasingly old--exactly as they must if the theory is correct, because the farther you go, the longer it's been since they were atop the hotspot. The islands also get smaller, but this doesn't mean the hotspot has changed intensity; rather, the inactive volcanoes have been eroded until nothing remains but stubs.

There is one anomaly, but it is easily explained. About 4,000 kilometers from Honolulu, the Emperor chain shows a distinct kink--a 60-degree bend to the northward. How can a hotspot track produce a kink? Easily, it turns out. Crustal plates are always bumping into each other, and the collisions can cause them to change course. Presumably, something deflected the Pacific Plate at the time these volcanoes were active, causing it to start tracking at a new angle. The kink is one of those anomalies that reinforces a theory because, in retrospect, it should have been predictable.

Hot LIPs

The mantle-plume theory is the type of insight about which most scientists can only dream. In one simple stroke, it explained all the puzzles about Hawaii. Needless to say, geologists soon began applying it to other anomalous volcanoes. Today, there are at least 73 suspected plumes, according to a list compiled by Don L. Anderson of the Seismological Laboratory at California Institute of Technology.[5]

The most obvious candidates are island chains: the Galapagos, the Canaries, Tahiti (and associated seamounts), the Azores, and many more. Another candidate is Iceland, although it's a bit different because instead of being a chain of islands, it's a single big one: more like Olympus Mons than Hawaii. The explanation is that Iceland straddles the rift between the North American and Eurasian plates, so that while plate tectonics are ripping the island apart, its center stays put, atop the hotspot. This allows the hotspot to keep pumping magma upward, continuously filling the gap.

In principle, there is no need to postulate a hotspot to explain Iceland: something similar occurs at any place where crustal plates are pulling apart. But Iceland is unique because of its size. Something is pumping up a lot more magma there than elsewhere, and hotspot hunters believe they know the answer.

So far, we've only looked at plumes that erupt beneath the sea. What would happen if one encountered a continent? Rather than a chain of islands, you should get a swath of lava flows. The best known of these (presumed) continental hotspots is the Yellowstone Hotspot, which appears to have originated beneath eastern Oregon, Washington, and California. From there, its track moved eastward (as the continent moved westward), creating the Snake River Plain. Now, the plume provides heat for Yellowstone's geysers.

The Yellowstone Hotspot also illustrates what hotspot believers expect to happen when the core develops a new hotspot. At a rising rate of a foot per year, it takes several million years for the plume to reach the surface. En route, traditional theory says it should develop a mushroom shape, with a broad, flat head, and a thinner stem.[6]

When the plume hits the surface, that broad head should produce mammoth "flood" eruptions spread across enormous areas--and this is precisely what we see in the inland Pacific Northwest. The region is dominated by flood basalts, up to 15,000 feet thick, sprawling across an enormous chunk of Oregon and Washington, plus pieces of California and Nevada.[7]

After the plume head comes the stem, which can continue to fuel eruptions for as long as the hotspot persists, possibly for many millions of years. But it's narrower than the head, so downstream from the flood basalts, the plume track should narrow to about the width of the stem, typically believed to be on the order of 100 kilometers. Again, that's what you see with the Yellowstone Hotspot, as the track crosses Idaho to its present location.

Once scientists started looking for locations where plume heads might have erupted, they found many. Two of the most famous are the Siberian Traps (one of the world's largest volcanic provinces) and the Deccan Traps (in India).[8] Similar regions can also be found under the sea, where they are called large igneous provinces or LIPs, and often mark the start of plume-related island chains.

How Hot is Hot?

Scientists are human. They love nifty theories that explain lots of seemingly unrelated things. So it's not surprising that the hotspot theory was popular. For years, nobody doubted it. And then, heresy. Shortly after its thirtieth anniversary, the theory came under attack.

I was at one of the scientific conferences where the battle was first joined. Unfortunately, the symposium title didn't say anything about fisticuffs, so I went to sessions that sounded more Analog-appropriate, like "Wet Mars," or "Astrobiology." A fellow journalist later told me that what I missed had all the flavor of a fifth-grade playground "debate."

"Yes, it is a mantle plume!"

"No, it isn't!!"

"Yes, it is!!!"

"No, it isn't!!!!"

Or words to that effect. The tone, undoubtedly, was civil (there were no actual fisticuffs), but the rebels were saying that one of the underlying theories of modern geology was hokum, and believers in a theory rarely take kindly to such suggestions the first time they hear them.

By 2004, the debate had gathered momentum but also become less polarized. Even hotspot believers were realizing that there were important questions to be addressed.

One has to do with how hot a plume needs to be before it can rise through the mantle and create an eruption. Until recently, nobody appears even to have asked. Then one of the leading hotspot opponents, Gillian R. Foulger of the University of Durham, England, calculated that for a mantle plume to rise properly, it must be at least 200 °C to 300 °C hotter than the surrounding rock.[9]

Foulger's calculation is interesting, but it's merely a tidbit of computer-modeling information until it's married to the geophysical study known as petrology.

Despite the similarity in words, petrology has nothing to do with petroleum. Rather, it's the study of how magmas crystallize into rocks.[10] Geologists have long known that different volcanoes produce subtly different lavas, thanks to differences in the temperature and chemical composition of the magmas that feed them. Petrology uses these differences either to look backward--from the rocks to the melt from which they were derived--or forward, from the melt to the rocks.

When petrologists examine the rocks erupted from presumed hotspot volcanoes, the results are mixed. Data presented at the Fall 2004 meeting American Geophysical Union indicate that the lava from Hawaii's currently active Kilauea volcano probably comes from a source hot enough to be a mantle plume. In fact, petrologist Paul Asimow of California Institute of Technology went so far as to say that he had never seen a plausible model for a "cold" Hawaii.

But Iceland is a different matter. Isotope ratios indicate that its magma probably originates deep in the mantle (although not necessarily at the bottom), but the petrology shows it to be no more than 100 °C hotter than its surroundings. This means that while there's a hot lump beneath Iceland, it's not hot enough to be a plume. Petrological studies of older parts of Iceland indicate that the magma source may be growing cooler with time. If so, this might mean that what's beneath the island now is the remnant of a plume that's in the process of petering out. Or maybe it's something entirely different. At the moment, nobody knows for sure.

CAT-Scanning the Globe

Raffaella Montelli is part of a team from Princeton University that's trying to look directly at plumes, using a technique called "seismic tomography."

Tomography is simply imaging. When doctors do it to the human body, it's called computer-assisted tomography (CAT) and uses low-intensity X-rays to build three-dimensional images by scanning the body from multiple angles. Seismic tomography attempts to use seismic waves to do the same for the interior of the Earth.

When an earthquake occurs, seismic waves travel to seismometers all across the globe, moving not only through the crust, but also through the mantle. The hotter the rock, the slower they move. This means that once you know the exact time and place of any given earthquake, you can figure out how fast the signal traveled to each station. Add in a great many earthquakes from different epicenters and some heavy-duty computing, and you can start mapping the "slow" spots.

The problem is resolution. "We don't have a big choice of where there are earthquakes," says Norman H. Sleep of Stanford University (who was not part of Montelli's team). "So we have problems the doctor doesn't have." Also, he adds, "X-rays go in nice straight lines. With seismic waves it's like watching ocean waves veer after they hit a pier."

Montelli's group generated instant controversy when it published its first set of scans in Science, in early 2004.[11] Sleep said that looking at the images was about like using someone else's eyeglasses to watch a press conference or panel discussion. "You'd probably be able to tell that there are people up here," he said, "but you wouldn't be able to identify us. The tomography is like that--just tantalizing."

Foulger was less charitable. Very few seismologists believe that the tomographic images had enough resolution to actually show anything, she said. "I think the only people who put any faith in them are non-experts," she said, "or the people who do the models."[12]

In December 2004, Montelli was back. This time, her team expanded the analysis to include two types of seismic waves, called S-waves and P-waves, improving the resolution. What she had, though, was just as tantalizing as ever. In some places, plumes appeared to descend all the way to the core. Others were decidedly odd: broken off, disconnected at the boundary between the upper and lower mantle, or bending sideways as though swaying under the influence of other currents.

Based on her new tomography, Montelli claimed to have found "well-resolved" plumes in six oceanic locations (Ascension Island, the Azores, the Canaries, Easter Island, Samoa, and Tahiti) plus "robust" findings in three others (Cape Verde, Cook Island, and Kerguelen Island in the South Pacific). More interestingly, she found an incipient plume--not yet reaching the surface--beneath the Coral Sea.

Other plumes, however, including Iceland, appeared to be confined to the upper or middle depths of the mantle, indicating that they may either have shallow sources or be tapering out.[13]

Skeptics are still not convinced that she is seeing actual plumes or plume fragments. That's because temperature isn't the only factor that can create seismic "slow" spots. Other possibilities include unusual rock composition, melting, and relatively high water content--any of which could occur beneath volcanically active areas, with or without a plume.

Bow Waves and Foraminifera

Without better tomography, the plume debate is branching in new directions as scientists seek innovative new ways to test the plume theory.

One test comes from Norman Sleep. Sleep, who was one of the early skeptics, set out to disprove the theory at its source: Hawaii. (Like many geophysicists, he figured that if Hawaii isn't a hotspot, nothing is.)

Sleep was intrigued by the fact that the seabed near Hawaii has a large bulge, about 1,000 meters high and 1,000 kilometers wide. Something similar shows up along the track of the putative Yellowstone Hotspot. Hotspot theory viewed these bulges as uplift zones, created as the crustal plates plow across the upwelling plumes. But the swells extend upstream of the hotspot--well ahead of where the plate is supposedly tracking across the plume. Sleep didn't believe a plume could create something that looked so much like a bow wave, so he modeled it, and got a surprise: his model predicted exactly the features seen in Hawaii and Yellowstone. This unexpected result convinced him that Hawaii and Yellowstone probably are the result of plumes. But, he is quick to point out, this doesn't mean that everything that's ever been catalogued as a hotspot really is one.

Another unusual test comes from Peter Clift. In another paper delivered at the Fall 2004 meeting of the American Geophysical Union, Clift explained that he is trying to test the plume theory by examining fossils in seabed sediments laid down on top of those undersea plateaus called LIPs.

If large igneous provinces really are created by plume heads, the eruptions that formed them should not only have flooded the seabed with lava, but also have uplifted it. All eruptions create uplift, but plume heads should produce unusually large amounts.

When an eruption ends, the seabed slowly subsides. Again, this is normal, but if the uplift was unusually large, the rate of subsidence should be unusually rapid.

Clift realized that he could test this using a class of fossils called foraminifera. These single-celled creatures have hard shells, which accumulate in marine deposits. Different types live at different depths, which means that cataloging the foraminifera in a sediment tells you the depth of the water in which it was formed. Doing this for each sediment layer gives you the LIP's initial depth and its rate of subsidence.

Unfortunately, the results are mixed. Some LIPs are subsiding quickly, as expected. Others are subsiding more quickly than the average ocean crust, but not quickly enough for the plume model. And still others are subsiding more slowly than the surrounding crust.

One explanation is that LIPs (or at least, some of them) don't represent plume heads. Another is that when a plume head hits the underside of the crust, part of it may stick there, crystallizing into buoyant rock (such as granite) that keeps the LIP from subsiding as expected.

Support for the latter interpretation comes from Yi-Gang Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who studied his country's Emeishan region, conventionally believed to have been created by a plume head.

Like Clift, Xu was looking for signs of ancient uplift, but since he was working on land, he couldn't rely on foraminifera. Instead, he hypothesized that the rising plume should have elevated the landscape in a dome-shaped formation before the lava broke through. Since plumes move slowly, this pre-eruption uplift should have persisted long enough to have been subject to erosion--and the higher the dome's center was, the more it should have eroded.

Luckily for Xu, the lava emerged through a layer of limestone that was probably uniformly thick. By measuring how much of the limestone remains in various places, it's therefore possible to map the areas of highest erosion, creating a crude contour map of the uplift. (Erosion would have continued after the eruption, but at that point, it would have been the lava, not the limestone, that was eroding.)

What Xu found precisely matched his hypothesis: the limestone is thinner at the center of the volcanic region than at the edges in a nice bull's-eye pattern that strongly indicates a central uplift. In addition, trace element analysis of the basalt itself indicated that the center was hotter than the edges--also consistent with a plume. Finally, seismic tomography indicates that the crust is 55 to 64 km thick in the volcanic zone's center, but only 35 km thick at its edges. This, Xu believes, reveals the remnants of the plume head sticking to the bottom of the crust--exactly what Clift needed to explain his anomalous LIPs.

Propagating Cracks

All of this research indicates that the plume theory is likely to withstand its challengers. It's hard to imagine that Hawaii isn't the result of something at least very much akin to a hotspot. The same would seem to apply to Olympus Mons.[14] At the same time, it is likely that when the dust settles, the theory will have had its wings clipped--possibly severely--and that many regions once viewed as hotspots (perhaps including Iceland) will prove to be something else.

Foulger's main complaint is that when everyone jumped on the plume bandwagon in the '70s and '80s, nobody really looked into alternative theories. Instead, the "great love affair with plumes" encouraged geologists to try to fit everything and anything into the theory, without asking whether there might be simpler explanations.

Foulger and her colleagues offer several alternatives that deserve to be studied in greater detail. One is that hotspot volcanism originates from exotic accidents of plate tectonics in which large chunks of seabed break off mid-plate and are drawn deep into the mantle. She also suggests that you could get flood basalts such as the Siberian Traps from "lithospheric delamination," which would occur if the bottom layer of the crust somehow broke free and allowed hot mantle rocks to fill the void.

Another theory is that the features we see as plume tracks might be created by "propagating cracks" that began at one point in the seafloor (or continent) and gradually unzipped over the course of millions of years.

James H. Natland of the University of Miami points out that the Pacific Ocean has 10,000 seamounts, most of which nobody has attempted to link to hotspots. Many of these can't possibly be the work of plumes because they lie in long ridges that erupted more or less simultaneously along their entire length.

Natland's belief is that when the Pacific Plate was younger (and smaller) it was subject to stresses that produced fissures that cracked over long distances, all at once. Later, different stresses began producing sequential eruptions that look like hotspots but aren't.

To spur further research, Foulger has helped create a website on mantle plumes: www.mantlepumes.org. Some of the material is technical, but much is accessible to the average reader.

From a science-fictional perspective, the hotspot controversy is a fascinating example of the scientific process at work. It could also make the subject for a truly ghastly movie. Imagine what would happen if a previously undetected plume head rose beneath Washington, D.C., or if terrorists found a way to create a new hotspot. As the plume rose, the entire East Coast would bulge upward. Port cities would become plateaus. Rocks would crack and lava would inundate everything.

It would be the greatest disaster movie of all time! Of course, in reality, you'd get thousands of years of warning (that "new" plume in the Coral Sea isn't going to erupt anytime soon), but in the realm of bad science fiction movies, when was the last time anyone worried much about minor technicalities like a few thousand years?

Meanwhile, actual scientists continue to wonder whether plumes are messengers from the Earth's core. If they are, real science fiction can raise the question of what they're trying to tell us.

So far we have no idea, but the one thing I'm sure of is that if I were investigating a planet like Mars, I'd love to have samples from Olympus Mons. And what an adventure it would be to climb it to collect them!

Copyright 2006 Richard A. Lovett

[1 Ptolemy was the ancient astronomer who developed a complex Solar System model with the planets revolving around the Earth. Ether was the invisible medium through which light waves supposedly propagated, like sound waves in air.]

[2 Okay, so I'm being cute. Some folks would say that the biosphere is a thin layer, distinct from the crust. But crustal geology and biology are strongly enough linked (think about the processes that form coal, oil, and limestone, for example) that this is an artificial distinction.]

[3 As we'll discuss later, our primary way of "looking" at the mantle is by the way it conducts seismic waves from earthquakes. To the extent that seismic waves reflect off the boundary rather than passing through it, all you see is the boundary.]

[4 There are old science fiction stories that feature deep subway-like tunnels through the mantle. From a physics point of view, these stories are fun because, if the tunnel carries a hard enough vacuum and the train has low enough friction, it's a quick, low-energy way to go thousands of miles: you simply let the train roll down the hole, gathering speed as it goes, until it reaches the bottom and is carried back uphill by its momentum. From a geophysics point of view, though, the concept is nonsense. Not only does it require a monstrous air-conditioner to keep from melting the train, but the tunnel walls need to resist pressures that make those in the deepest ocean trenches seem trivial. If you accomplish all of that, you still have to deal with those pesky mantle currents, which are going to throw the tunnel out of alignment. Of course, those old stories were written back before anyone had dreamed of mantle currents, so the authors can be forgiven for overlooking them.]

[5 Anderson's list, with latitudes and longitudes, is at www.mantleplumes.org/CompleateHotspot.html.]

[6 At least one recent model indicates that the mushroom shape may not always occur, but that doesn't mean it isn't common.]

[7 Basalt is a common volcanic rock. It's black, dense, and can flow for great distances.]

[8 In volcanology, a "trap" is a type of lava.]

[9 She appears to have done a good job with the calculation because I've never heard anyone argue with the result.]

[10 The similarity comes from the fact that both words use the Greek root "petra,"]

[11 "Finite-frequency tomography reveals a variety of plumes in the mantle," Science, 303, 338-343, January 16, 2004.]

[12 Even non-experts weren't too thrilled. Several of my friends are science writers for major newspapers, and the talk in the pressroom was that you could see anything you wanted in the Science data. It's one thing to write about such things for a sophisticated Analog audience; it's another to try to condense it to 600 words for a general audience. There's a reason you never read about this over your morning cup of java!]

[13 Or, as mentioned earlier, maybe the imaging simply cannot trace them through]

[14 Many scientists also think there are hotspots on Venus, but if that's the case, the process works very differently than on Mars. Rather than forming recognizable volcanoes, the Venusian features are flat, circular plains that look suspiciously like impact craters. The only real problem with instantly classifying them as impact craters is that they're big--which means that they must date from the dawn of the Solar System. They're also very sharp and pristine, which means that if they really are that old, the surface of Venus must be nearly as erosion-free as the Moon's: a conclusion that many planetary scientists reject. For more on this topic, go to www.mantleplumes.org and click the link labeled "Planetary." This site also presents alternatives to the plume hypothesis for the formation of Olympus Mons.]

[Back to Table of Contents]

Are you sure it can't come to this?

Pain was just beginning to seep through the medication. It was enough to bring Gary Carter back to consciousness. His eyes squinted against the bright lights and the realization that he was in a hospital emergency room brought back his memory. There had been an accident.

He remembered the yellow Ford Escape turning left right in front of him. He remembered seeing a look of panic on the woman's face, cell phone glued to the side of her head, as she saw Gary's '89 Geo Metro approaching. For some insane reason she stepped on her brakes! If she had just completed the turn she would have cleared the intersection and Gary would have missed her. As it was he had no choice but to slam on his own brakes. Wheels locked, he skidded across the drizzle-covered pavement into the passenger side of the SUV. He remembered the woman's scream over the crunching of metal.

Then he must have blacked out because the next thing he remembered was the paramedics and some firemen working to extract him from his car. Speckles of his own blood dotted the steering wheel and dashboard; the front end of his subcompact was crushed like a beer can on a cowboy's forehead at the end of happy hour.

He vaguely remembered the paramedics telling him his legs were going to hurt before he blacked out again. Now as he looked down at his legs it was obvious he had broken them both.

"You're awake, Mr. Carter," said a cheerful voice. Gary turned to see a young, dark-haired, unshaven face looking at his. A laminated ID card hanging around his neck over his green scrubs read "Dr. Morgan." He was looking at a flat screen monitor near the bed, on which some broken white sticks were visible on a black background. It took Gary a moment to realize they were his legs.

"That's me?" he asked.

"Afraid so. Still, I've seen worse. The surgeons should be able to fix you up. We've got you in some splints now to keep the bones from moving around, but once we get you to an OR they'll put on a few plates, some screws. Bad news is you'll never be able to clear airport security again." Morgan laughed but stopped short as he realized Gary wasn't appreciating the joke. "I'll, uh, check what's keeping the surgery consult," said Morgan. He smiled briefly before disappearing behind a curtain.

Gary leaned back and tried to take a deep breath. Soreness was beginning to creep into places he hadn't realized he'd hurt until just now. Kate was going to be pissed. Not only about the accident, but his wife had wanted him to trade in his old Metro for years. She was always worried that if he were in an accident he would get killed. He was in for a well deserved "I told you so."

"Mr. Carter?" asked a nervous voice. Gary was expecting another green scrubbed ER person but instead a small man was peering around the hanging curtain. The man's eyes darted around the hospital bed taking in the IVs, patient monitor, splints, and the radiographs still displayed on the video monitor. His manner reminded Gary of a scared ferret, unsure if it was safe to cross the room lest a cat intercept him from behind a potted plant.

"I'm him," answered Gary, "At least what's left of him."

"Oh my, this is quite out of the ordinary, I'm afraid," prefaced the ferret.

"And you are?" led Gary trying to figure out what this was all about.

"Ah, yes." He reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a card. He went to hand it to Gary. Unfortunately Gary's right hand was strapped to a board to keep his IV from pulling out and his left was covered with a large padded bandage with a pulse oximeter probe clipped over his middle finger. The ferret, undaunted, slipped the card between two fingers of Gary's right hand. "Bernard Crawford," he said, "Chicago Casualty. Your insurance company."

"Wow," realized Gary. "This is out of the ordinary. I haven't even called our insurance agent yet. You guys certainly give prompt service."

"Actually, the hospital called. I was in the building for another client and, uh, thought I'd take care of this right away, but I see you're, uh, still, uh, awake."

"Well, I didn't hit my head that hard and despite the pain medication, my legs are throbbing just enough to remind me what happened."

"Well, Mr. Carter," Crawford fidgeted, keeping his eyes off Gary, "I regret to inform you that based on the situation and damage incurred, we are determining your case to be a total loss. I'm very sorry."

"Well," realized Gary, "I pretty much figured that after seeing the damage myself. But even the police office agreed it was the other woman's fault."

"Well, I don't deal with fault, Mr. Carter--just the numbers, you see."

"Of course," said Gary. "I don't think I'll be driving for quite some time, so it might be better to settle up after I've had some time to recover. I know it was an older car, but it must be worth something."

"Car?" repeated Crawford, confusion creasing his forehead, which was starting to bead with sweat.

"Yes, my Geo. You said it was a total loss. I assume I might still get a thousand or so out of it. It was in pretty good shape despite the mileage."

"Oh, no, Mr. Carter. You have this all wrong. I'm from Chicago Casualty. I represent your major medical carrier. I'm the adjustor that has been assigned to assess your injuries and make recommendations regarding your care."

"I'm confused," said Gary. He tried to adjust his position in the bed and get a better look at the business card stuck between his fingers. The movement intensified the pain in his legs. He waited for the wave to pass and noticed Mr. Crawford becoming more uncomfortable, his fingers ringing the handle of his briefcase. "You did say that my case was a total loss?"

"Yes, I'm afraid so. I've been over the estimates three times. I'm afraid I can't justify the needed surgery and rehabilitation based on your life expectancy and the current value of your body parts."

Gary widened his eyes and stared at the insurance man.

Crawford continued. "We will cover five days of minimal hospitalization with adequate pain medication to keep you comfortable, but after that time, I'm afraid we must insist that you, well, stop receiving medical care and we be allowed to salvage the body for any useful parts to recoup our expenditures to this point."

"Expenditures?" asked Gary, "All they did was put in an IV and wrap my legs with these splints. This must be a joke. Is there a hidden camera around here?"

"No. No camera. But the expenses so far have been considerable, Mr. Carter," began Crawford. He set his briefcase on the side of the bed and opened the clasp. He pulled out a small tablet PC and tapped on the screen a few times. "Here it is," he announced with a smile on his face. He seemed much more comfortable now that he had some numbers to look at, rather than Gary's confused face.

Gary blinked a few times. This must all be a hallucination from the pain medication. This couldn't be happening. Insurance companies didn't treat people like cars and salvage them for parts. They had to pay for his care. That was why he and Kate had paid premiums every month. They had to fix him up. They were insured through Kate's work since Gary had his one-man computer programming business. Her company had changed insurance providers just a few months ago because of increasing costs, but that was nothing unusual. It had happened every few years. Sometimes it meant they had to change doctors, but this situation was insane.

They had gotten a packet of materials when the new insurance went into effect, but Gary had just filed it, never bothering to read the pages and pages of coverages and exclusions and fine print. He just assumed like every other health insurance policy, it would allow them to get whatever coverage they needed. He had heard of people being denied coverage for experimental treatments, but this was a couple of broken legs and some cuts.

Crawford began to read from his display, "Let's see ... $5,435 for emergency field treatment at the scene of the accident." He chuckled to himself. "Talk about high liability insurance: those guys are covered to the gills." He saw Gary's serious expression, cleared his throat and continued, "$675 for transportation to the emergency room, $3,125 for diagnostic CT scans and radiographs, $8,432 for blood work, IV medications, consults and emergency care. Oh, and $422 for the splints--each, that is. Not including your five days minimal hospitalization, you're already at $18,511. We estimate your daily hospital bill to be around $3,300. That will be a total expenditure by our company of $35,011. So you see, Mr. Carter. Chicago Casualty has been quite generous in providing you with quality emergency treatment and care up to this point."

"But you're supposed to make me well."

"Well, that's not exactly what the policy says, Mr. Carter. Did you read the policy?"

"Nobody reads those things," argued Gary.

"We are only required to provide complete care in the event that recovery is imminent and full and the technology exists and is in common use. In other word, we can't do a head transplant until they become a codable procedure on the reimbursement form."

"But the doctor said they would be able to repair my legs."

"Furthermore, Mr. Carter, if a patient shows no signs of recovering, such as in a persistent vegetative state or requiring heroic measures to sustain life, we may elect to discontinue medical care."

"Again," argued Gary, "I'm still here. Brain is fine. No machines keeping me alive..."

"I'm not finished, Mr. Carter," interrupted the ferret. He cleared his throat and returned to the legalese he was reading. "If at any time, the cost to sustain a patient's condition or to repair damage exceeds the patient's intrinsic value, or treatment would not result in recovery of the patient to a value exceeding the costs, the insurer may decline paying further medical costs and attempt to recover costs as obtainable from the removal and distribution of body parts from the corpse."

Crawford smiled, satisfied with the explanation and obviously confident that his assessment was correct.

"To quote a famous Monty Python line," answered Gary, "I'm not dead yet."

"For the purposes of your health insurance policy, Mr. Carter, you may as well be."

"You can't just kill me for parts."

"We wouldn't kill you. In fact it is better if the parts are harvested while the heart is still beating, for the major organs. Eyes and bones and cartilage and skin keep for quite some time."

"I must be dreaming," concluded Gary.

"To be sure, usually when we declare a patient a total loss, they are already brain dead. But since the brain adds no intrinsic value to your corpse according to my tables, technically you are worth more as parts than if we fix you up."

"Not to me," Gary retorted.

"Mr. Carter. The policy is clear."

"You can't get a doctor to do this, it's crazy."

"We have our own surgical technicians that do the harvesting."

"Don't I have to consent?"

"Not if you are a total loss. I admit the wording of the policy is not specific to your situation, but the way I interpret it we have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders and policyholders to cut our losses in your case and obtain as much salvage value as possible."

He tapped the screen again. "Now, considering your age and previous medical conditions, we can estimate values for certain organs and parts."

"I thought it was illegal to sell body parts," muttered Gary, not realizing he was arguing in favor of his body having no value.

"Oh, we don't sell them per se. There is an allowable harvest, storage, distribution, and transportation fee that our subsidiary, which does all that stuff, is allowed to charge. The organs are of course free to whoever needs them, but we are entitled to some reimbursement for our trouble."

"Of course," growled Gary,

"Heart and lungs come in at $2,568. Your previous history of smoking greatly reduces the value there."

"I quit ten years ago!"

"Still, the tables show a 70% reduction in value. Let's see ... liver, $3,211. That could be more if you were an abstainer, but we don't get many of those these days. Kidneys top out at $4,299 each, not a bad deal. Intestines and pancreas fetch about $6,849. Corneas at $355 each. Skin is too old for much use, but bone banks can make use of the long bones. However, since you have broken several of them, we can only get about $1,200 for the whole lot. Cartilage is likely all shot as well, but that wouldn't add more than a few hundred. That brings us up to $23,136. Subtracting from the $35,011, that leaves $11,875 in the loss column. Now if you had been a client for more than five years we could have credited you some unused premium contribution, but in your case I really have no choice."

"You're going to deny me medical care for $11,875? That's insane. I'll just put the balance on my credit card. Heck, a new car will cost me twice that."

Crawford placed his computer back in his briefcase. "That's not the way it works, Mr. Carter. If we did approve repairs, we're looking at almost two hundred thousand dollars in additional charges over the next year. I'm afraid we couldn't take the financial risk of continued insurance considering potential complications and your history of needing medical care."

"But this is the first time I've ever had to be in the hospital," Gary argued.

"Exactly, Mr. Carter. You've been with us for less than three months. At this point, without surgery and rehabilitation, you're costing us an extrapolated yearly cost of $140,044 on a premium of $3,567. Numbers don't lie, Mr. Carter. I'll see you in five days," he added as he left.

Gary slumped into the gurney. His wife was really going to let him have it now.

"I told you so," said Kate Carter with a touch of anger, but also relief that Gary was alive and appeared to be okay. Gary had been moved to a room on the third floor. The nurses were strangely subdued around him and he even felt a little neglected. Kate gently stroked his hair, avoiding the bandage on his forehead. "Are they going to have to operate?" she asked.

"There's a problem with the insurance," said Gary, still trying to think how to explain the situation to her. He still couldn't fully comprehend it himself.

"I told David not to switch. He thought it would save the company a few thousand bucks. Don't worry, we'll get it straightened out."

"I don't know about that," answered Gary.

"What do you mean?"

"They said that I was a total loss."

"You are a mess. Look at you: two broken legs, cuts and bruises. That car was a death trap. An accident waiting to happen."

"No, not a mess, a loss. They're writing me off. I'm too expensive."

"Your car?" she asked quizzically.

"No. It was the guy from the health insurance company. I'm a total loss. It would cost more to fix me than I'm worth, so they want to pull the plug and sell off my parts."

Kate's expression turned from confusion to amusement. "Very funny, Gary. Had me going for a second. Those pain medications aren't helping your sense of humor."

"It's not a joke," said Gary. "I wish it was."

Kate looked more closely at her husband. "Gary?"

"What are we going to do?" he asked.

"We'll pay whatever the insurance doesn't cover. How much could it be?"

"It's not a matter of cost, Kate. Apparently they are entitled to withhold medical expenses and recoup the losses."

"That can't be legal," realized Kate.

"It doesn't sound right to me either."

"Excuse me," interrupted a voice from the door. "Mr. Carter?"

"That's me," said Gary.

"I'm Dr. Wilson. I saw your chart at the station and since I'm the orthopedist on call, I thought I'd check in. Sorry I wasn't here sooner, no one paged me we had an emergency." The surgeon walked into the room as he flipped through pages in the chart. He was tall and young. His hair was black and wavy and his coat was immaculately white and pressed. A stethoscope hung around his neck. "Both legs, eh? Still, the radiologist's report is hopeful. We should be able to get you back up in six months or so."

"I thought..." started Gary.

Dr. Wilson looked up. His eyes widened to address his patient's concern.

"I thought the insurance had determined me a total loss," answered Gary.

"What?" spat Wilson. "That's ridiculous, you're not even in a coma. Let me check your insurance page." He flipped ahead, stopped, and squinted down at the page. Flipped back, then forward again. "I've never heard of this."

"Of what?" asked Kate.

"Well, on rare occasions, people's insurance coverage runs out or the doctors and insurance company agree that further treatment is pointless, but your husband here isn't in that position. It must be a mistake."

"That's what I thought, but the insurance guy went over the numbers. He seemed so analytical."

"Can't you just go ahead and fix him? Doesn't the hospital have the ability to help people without insurance?"

"Well, if you had no insurance at all, yes, we'd be obligated to provide care and repair the fractures, but you do have insurance and the insurance company has the option to cut their losses."

"That can't be right," moaned Kate. "Can't we just cancel the insurance? It's not like we couldn't pay for it ourselves over time."

"The matter is out of my hands, I'm afraid," pointed out the surgeon. "When it comes to financial matters, the hospital administrators don't like to get into battles with insurance."

"So they're just going to cut me up for parts?" asked Gary.

"Once they stop paying for care in five days, you're not going to feel much like living, especially as the bones start to heal back together in abnormal positions. Heck, you might get lucky and have a bone marrow embolism and it will be over like that."

"You're a doctor," said Kate in shock. "How can you let this happen?"

"If there was a way to do this, I would," said Dr. Wilson. "But my hands are tied. If I touch your husband I will not only be fired, but every insurance company in the country'd blacklist me. Worse yet, I can't even bill for this consultation." He closed the file and walked out of the room.

"This is insane," muttered Kate.

"That's what I've been saying," agreed Gary.

Kate turned and watched Dr. Wilson return Gary's chart to the rack at the nurses' station. After he walked down the hall to the elevators, she slipped over to the nurses' station and lifted the folder, tucking it against her chest as she scurried back into the room. She started flipping through the pages until she found the section she was looking for.

"What are you doing?" asked Gary.

"All these insurance policies have loopholes and exceptions and twisted procedures and rules. Maybe there is a way to beat them at their own game." She pointed at the record. "Here is the insurance page. You look this over. I'm going home to get our copy of the policy. We'll figure out something."

"You think we can beat this 33insurance company at their own game? Maybe we need to call the police or insurance board or something."

"If we can't find anything we'll have to, but maybe we can find something that will make them reclassify you from a total loss," suggested Kate.

"Okay," Gary said. "It beats being chopped up for parts."

Gary and Kate spent the evening reading and rereading the policy. The language was so legalistic and twisted it took them several times through to adjust their thinking to match that of those who had written it. Kate was surprised to find that the policy only covered families for the first 2.2 kids. Their formula for determining care for 0.2 of a kid was pretty creative.

Gary found it useful to look at the policy as a computer program. No matter how well written, there had to be bugs. His scrutinizing finally paid off. In the case of the policy, the bug was a loophole--actually, several loopholes. Any by themselves were not a solution, but when he and Kate put them together, a plan began to formulate. They started work that night and soon had generated a couple of documents written on hospital stationery. When Kate was satisfied with their work, she headed home to type them up and make a quick stop at the bank before returning in the morning.

When she returned they had Dr. Wilson paged by a wary nurse. A few minutes later he was knocking at Gary's door.

"When can you do the surgery on my legs?" Gary asked.

"As I explained to you before, Mr. Carter, I can't get involved."

"Oh, but you can," explained Kate. They explained their findings in the policy and Dr. Wilson found himself nodding in agreement.

"Very clever," he concluded. "They have no choice when you put it like that. They worded their policy too well, it seems," said Dr. Wilson. "I should be able to book an OR for this afternoon." He picked up Gary's chart and made a few notations.

"Oh, and Dr. Wilson, be sure to use the very best stuff."

"Only the top-of-the-line for you, Mr. Carter," answered the doctor.

Later in the morning a nurse came in with some tablets for Gary to swallow. "They'll take the edge off for the anesthesia. They shouldn't knock you out, but you'll get a good buzz," she warned.

"The buzzier the better," said Gary.

A few minutes after that Crawford's confused face appeared at Gary's door. Gary was beginning to feel the effects of the medication. The pain in his legs was now just a constant ache.

"Mr. Carter, um, I'm afraid there's been some sort of misunderstanding," he voice quavered with bewilderment.

"Mr. Crawford, come on in," Gary invited. "I've actually been expecting you. I didn't think it would take long. You guys probably saw something pop up on my hospital bill and realized what was happening."

"Well, yes. The lorazepam tablets are typically given to preoperative patients, of whom you are not."

"Oh, but Mr. Crawford, I am a preoperative patient. In an hour I will be an operative patient, and later tonight I will be a post-operative patient. Chicago Casualty will be sparing no expense at fixing me up. Titanium alloy bone plates and screws, top-quality inpatient and outpatient physical therapy, the best pain medications, even a private room with cable and all the NFL games during my recovery. What's even better is that you'll owe me $12,900 at the end of the day. What a deal."

Crawford found a slight chuckle within himself. It came out like a stuttering turtle. "We don't even do that for patients who qualify for coverage, why would we do it for a 'total loss?'"

Just then, Dr. Wilson entered the room. "Ah, Mr. Carter, I see you're nice and relaxed for surgery." He flipped through Gary's chart, nodding with approval.

"There will be no surgery," interjected Crawford. "I represent his insurance company and we have denied his claim. This patient is a total loss."

"Indeed he is," noted Dr. Wilson. "Everything seems to be in order with regard to that," he said thumbing to the appropriate section of the record. "Here it is, approved by a Mr. Bernard Crawford. That's you, I believe."

"Of course it is. Now cancel this man's surgery or I will be forced to call the hospital administrator and possibly deny any payment on this patient's bill."

"Can't do that," said Dr. Wilson. "You can call the administrator, his extension is 1874. But I'm afraid he's signed off on this." Wilson and the Carters had their turn at a laugh.

Crawford couldn't understand what was going on. He grabbed the chart from Wilson's hand and read over the insurance form. Everything was as it was the day before. Carter was a total loss. He was entitled to four more days of palliative care, then harvesting. It might seem cruel or unusual, but it was perfectly legal. The insurance company was entitled to recover its losses where it could.

"Mr. Carter, you are entitled to four more days of care, then that's it. We are entitled to any and all salvageable body parts for distribution at our discretion. Now I don't know what you think you are pulling, but this must stop now. As it is I'm going to have a tough time with the lorazepam tablets going through. Since they weren't pre-authorized, the hospital may have to swallow those, so to speak."

"Mr. Crawford, you really must read the policy more carefully. I'm sure you have it memorized paragraph by paragraph, but perhaps you're too close to see certain ... subtleties. For once, the insurance company is going to get screwed and the best part is you did it to yourselves."

"What are you talking about?"

"It's your total loss provision, cleverly buried in a section on exclusions for special diets not related to metabolic or hormonal disorders prescribed by a clinical nutritionist under FDA livestock feeding guidelines. You guys must get a laugh when you write these things."

"The provision is clear," commented Crawford.

"Exactly," agreed Gary. "I'm not disputing the total loss. That's where your problem is."

"My problem?"

"Yes, the policy expects everyone to dispute the total loss. Who wouldn't? After all, we are talking about someone dying. Granted, most people covered under this provision are going to die anyway, but you never took into account specifically a patient who was still conscious."

"I still don't see what you are getting at."

"I waived my five days in the hospital," said Gary.

"Waived them? Why would you do that?"

"I bet you guys thought it was pretty compassionate to include the five-day waiting period. Pay out a little for a few days, then reap a windfall with body harvesting. In fact, your little subsidiary that harvests parts and distributes them, for what are undeniably reasonable fees, doesn't even get notified until the day before harvest. Why should they? They have other things to do."

"So they harvest you early. I don't care if you give up the four days."

"Oh, you should. You see, since I won't be using my body for those four days, I'm entitled to compensation equal to but no greater than the daily expenses for unused days. That is, over and above my deductible of three hundred dollars."

Crawford had his computer out and was scanning the screen nervously. "No one has ever waived their time. Even people with dying relatives never waive the five days. It's crazy."

"It's in the policy. And you yourself quoted me the cost of $3,300 a day. At four days left, minus $300..."

Crawford nodded. "Twelve thousand nine hundred dollars," his voice cracked. He rubbed his neck around his collar, then pulled out a handkerchief to dab at his sweating brow. "Claims is not going to like this."

"And I'm entitled to that check by the end of business today," Gary pointed out. "Give it to my wife. I'll be otherwise occupied."

"Yes, but even so, we don't have to pay for your injuries."

"Absolutely not," agreed Gary. "I never said you did."

"Then why are you having surgery to fix your broken legs?"

"And repair my lacerations. They say the plastic surgeon guy here is excellent."

"It's not authorized."

"Mr. Crawford, again you are too close to the policy. Step back a moment. I am not your patient now. I am your property. Well, was your property, until you sold the distribution rights to my parts."

"We did no such thing."

"I'm afraid you did. You had to. You only had six hours after I signed the waiver. Since your regular distributor didn't seem interested, another party bought them."

"Another party?"

"Yes."

"Who?"

"Me."

"You?"

"Me. I got them pretty cheap too." Gary waved Crawford closer and whispered. "Don't let it get around, but I paid a dollar for the whole lot."

"What?"

"It turned out to be the high bid. Imagine that."

"You can't bid on yourself."

"Nothing in the policy says I can't. In fact, the policy assumes that all tissues for distribution will go to your preferred distributor, but by law, you have to include language delineating an open bidding process. Of course, without having to actually notify anyone, it's up to the other parties to sniff out available bodies before the bidding closes."

Once again Crawford scanned his computer. Gary reached for an envelope by his bedside. He handed it to Crawford who took it absently. "What's this?"

"Your certified check for one dollar," answered Gary.

"I can't accept this," said Crawford. He placed the envelope back on the bedside table.

"You just did," pointed out Dr. Wilson. "I'm a witness."

Crawford glanced at the envelope, then returned his stare to the computer screen. He swallow hard. This couldn't be happening. Insured people didn't manipulate wording in the policy. It was the insurer's prerogative to do that. But they still hadn't explained everything.

"Assuming you did waive the five days, and properly bid on the distribution rights, I still don't see how we have to pay for your surgeries and recovery. It will cost us a fortune. It just isn't included in any coverage."

"Again, Mr. Crawford, you're thinking like a weasel trying to steal an egg from under a chicken. You're not paying under the policy. In fact, the policy specifically forbids any further treatment once the five days are waived."

"So you admit that you can't have the surgery."

"Absolutely," smiled Gary, "However..."

"There are no howevers, Mr. Carter." Crawford was sure the twisted road through the health insurance policy ended there.

"...However," continued Gary, "under the organ donation section, it specifically states that Chicago Casualty will do all that it can to insure the organs provided are suitable for use and free from defects or damage prior to distribution. Since my bones and skin are included in the list you provided for me the other day, you have to make sure they are in good condition before I can take possession. As I read the policy, that means the bones must be fixed and the skin repaired."

"That's not the intention of the policy," argued Crawford.

"It's not the intention of the policy to have otherwise healthy people harvested for organs when they can be fixed. You are the one who is trying to stretch the wording to save your company some money. Now you are stuck with the whole bill and you owe me almost $13,000."

"This is impossible," said Crawford, his face and mouth twitching with frustration, sweat starting to bead up on his forehead.

"I remember thinking that exact same thing yesterday," mused Gary. "The hospital billing department has copies of all the appropriate policy sections, my waiver, and my bid for distribution rights. Oh, and since this is not a patient coverage, they're going to want to be paid right away, instead of waiting four to six months like you usually make them do."

There was a knock at the door. "Carter. Three-Oh-Seven. Got a date in OR six," stated a tall orderly accompanied by a stocky nurse.

Gary raised his arm, IV tube and all. "That's me."

"We just wheel the whole bed," said the nurse. "Just relax, Mr. Carter."

"So long, Mr. Crawford, nice doing business with you," said Gary as he lay back smiling.

"Wait," interrupted Crawford, "I'll get the total loss waived. We'll pay for the standard coverage," he suggested. He was thinking of all the extra money that Chicago Casualty was going to have to pay. The Carters had outlined their case as well as any insurance adjustor.

"Hmm," thought Gary for a moment. "Naw, I'll go with what I've got now. Sorry, Mr. Crawford."

Crawford watched the bed as it was wheeled to the elevators. He returned to his tablet PC, tapping and scratching at the screen in a panic. It couldn't be right. This was preposterous. This wasn't supposed to happen.

Dr. Wilson started to leave as well, but noticed the envelope on the bedside table. He picked it up and handed it back to Bernard Crawford. The confused adjustor looked at the doctor with wide eyes, his mouth partway open. "You don't want to forget this," Wilson said, handing the one-dollar check into Crawford's trembling fingers. "We wouldn't want the whole thing to be a total loss now, would we?"

Copyright 2006 James Hosek

[Back to Table of Contents]

If something can't be what it seems to be, you're overlooking something.

Dressed in a rented monk's robe, Joshua Wang emerged from the forest trail. Ahead, beneath the revolving canopy of stars and a two-kilometer arch, torch lights flickered upon the stone walls of a castle. On the field beside the walls, a pair of armored knights faced on mounted chargers, raised lances, and clashed. The throng of tourists gasped as one of the knights tilted off his horse.

At the castle drawbridge, guards crossed their pikes.

"Joshua Wang of Raven Space Salvage and Recovery, to see Emil Hamilton."

"I'll see if his Lordship is available," said a guard.

After waiting within the castle courtyard, Joshua was greeted by a young woman bearing a quill, parchments, and a tightly strung bodice.

"Lord Hamilton will receive you," she said, her English accent as deep as the cut of her period dress. "Prithee come."

He was escorted to a high-raftered chamber adorned with tapestries of knights slaying dragons and one another with equal enthusiasm. It was the only room he'd seen since the docking port that had an undisguised computer.

"Joshua, so grand to meet you!" the lone occupant by the stuffed boar's head bellowed with a cavernous smile. He was costumed as a dead ringer for Henry VIII. "I'm Emil Hamilton." Shaking hands vigorously, he gestured toward the balcony. "What do you think of my little spinning world?"

Joshua took a moment to parse the words. Coming from the forest, he had lapsed into thinking he was on an actual planet. In reality, they were over a quarter-billion kilometers from Earth, and the forest, field, and castle were all inside an artificial space habitat--an "asterie," a rotating ring two kilometers in diameter floating in an independent orbit within the Asteroid Belt.

"Scarborough?" Joshua nodded. "Nice."

"A man of few words." Hamilton took a cigar from a jeweled humidor. "Your references mentioned that."

They sank into fur-lined chairs before the fireplace and exchanged the small talk typical for the high-context business culture of the Belt. It wasn't long, however, until Hamilton's features lost their joviality.

Hamilton tossed a file folder. "Tell me what you see."

Joshua opened the cover to a photograph of a snow-white horse in rampant pose. From the horse's head protruded a horn, about a meter long, slender and sharp as a rapier.

"A unicorn," Joshua said. If his crew had traveled a megaklick from New Seattle for a joke....

"Plantagenet Line." Hamilton held his cigar to the fireplace and puffed. "Finest breed of unicorn ever to be genetically engineered. It would be a tremendous draw for this resort. It was to be delivered weeks ago, and I want you to pick it up."

"Where is it?"

"Next item."

Joshua flipped to the next sheet in the folder, a photo of an undistinguished crescent among stars.

"An asterie?"

"Daedalus, the zoological development asterie of Daedalus Genetics Limited. It's currently passing within two million kilometers of Scarborough." Hamilton smacked an armrest. "May as well be beyond Jupiter, for all the cooperation I've received!"

"You want Raven to go there and bring you a unicorn."

"Thirty thousand Ceresian credits."

Joshua calmed his heartbeat. "That's a bit much for a short cargo run."

"There's somewhat of a complication. The asterie personnel evacuated and left no forwarding address. You'll board on your own initiative."

"You mean, board without permission. There's a seven-year waiting--"

"Look, I don't want you to salvage the asterie. I just want my unicorn!"

"Still, there are laws--"

"Joshua, you've been in the Belt long enough to know that every asterie is a sovereign entity. My legal point is that they're illegally holding property I've paid for."

"I see."

"I was told you have the requisite skills for cracking abandoned eggs such as this, which is why I'm engaging a salvager rather than a freighter skipper. So is there an insurmountable objection?"

Hamilton billowed smoke within inches of Joshua's face. Joshua buried his frown as he studied the photo of the unicorn.

"I can't see us lassoing this thing."

"Let me make it easy. Just go to the main lab and get me the genetic materials that I ordered, so that I can grow my own. A few embryo packs, and you're done."

"What about the keeper? Won't it repel unauthorized boarders?"

"The asterie's sole defense was a sentinel ship. The personnel departed aboard it. The asterie is now toothless. And the keeper is one of those doddering traditional types that can't hurt a fly. Plus, it's daft."

"Daft?"

Hamilton chuckled. "Issuing threats about a maze or some such nonsense."

"A maze?"

"I don't know anything beyond that. Contact it yourself."

Outside and below, metal crashed with metal. A thousand voices gasped. Joshua riffled the folder's pages. And he thought: thirty thousand credits.

"We'll need ten percent up front. For fuel and mission consumables."

"You're accepting?"

"I'll have to consult my crew."

At the mooring position fifty kilometers from Scarborough, the control room camera swiveled to greet Raven's returning captain and the voice of the ship's computer emanated from a speaker grid: "Welcome home, Joshua."

"Thank you, Hermes." Garbed once more in twenty-first-century tee shirt and slacks, Joshua slipped into the navigator-pilot's chair. "All's well, I trust."

"All ship's systems are well," Hermes replied. "However, Lucas has stated that he is not well."

Both Ann Striker and Lucas Chulaski, Joshua's fellow crewmates aboard Raven, were present in the control room. Ann was pressing a cold compress to Lucas' head. Lucas half-opened an eye and moaned.

"My anti-addiction implant," Lucas said. "It's too sensitive. We go to a tavern, I pour a flagon of mead and toast the green, green, lice-infested hills of Earth--and pow! A hangover with just one sip!"

"See what I got?" Ann said. "Reena will love this!"

She unribboned a box and unwrapped a crystalline figurine of a unicorn.

"Gift shop was bursting with unicorns," Lucas said. "Glass, gold, chocolate. It's unicorn mania over there."

"Yes," Joshua said. "There's a reason."

He briefed them.

Lucas massaged his temples. "Joshua, is there an honest asterie developer in the Belt? Especially this guy. The rumor over there is that he strong-armed the creator of Scarborough to sell."

"I know it's only a themeworld," Ann said. "But I wonder about a person who has flunkies calling him 'lord.'"

Lucas nodded. "Or baron or whatever. That whole serfdom scene."

"On the other hand," Ann continued, "I'd love to see a live unicorn!"

"What we need to see," Joshua said, "is the mythical, black-bottomed income statement. Which is why we're even considering a job like this."

While Joshua concocted their ritual bull-session espressos, a subdued Lucas linked to Asternet and contacted Ceres Legal, whose AI counsel sifted through the interlocking maze of treaties and concordats that served the Asteroid Belt in lieu of a central government.

"Ninety-five percent precedent that arbitrage courts will find in our favor should we board without permission," Lucas read from the screen.

"Forced entry still bothers me," Ann said.

"This operation will be nonviolent and nondestructive," Joshua replied. "If we have to do more than drill a lock, we'll withdraw."

"Aye, Captain," Lucas said. "About this maze business--"

"It's time we went to the source."

Joshua held the coordinates sheet to the control room camera. Hermes traded protocols over the standard one-hundred-gigahertz tightbeam communications link, establishing plain-text as the baseline message format.

CALLING ASTERIE DAEDALUS, Lucas typed. THIS IS SPACESHIP Raven. REQUEST CONTACT WITH YOUR MASTER.

Lucas's screen flashed the response, thirteen seconds of lightlag later: SPACESHIP Raven, THIS IS THE KEEPER OF DAEDALUS. ASTERIE PERSONEL ARE NOT AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME.

"Ask what happened to them," Joshua said.

Lucas typed. The keeper responded: PERSONEL ARE NOT AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME.

"Request permission to board and lend assistance."

PERMISSION TO BOARD IS DENIED.

"If we attempt to board, do you threaten harm?"

I HAVE NO WEAPONS. I AM PROGRAMMED NOT TO HARM. HOWEVER, THOSE WHO ENTER THE MAZE WILL NEVER ESCAPE.

"Tell us about the maze."

NO FURTHER INFORMATION WILL BE PROVIDED. THOSE WHO ENTER THE MAZE WILL NEVER ESCAPE.

"Lucas," Joshua said. "You think the keeper's on the level?"

"Keeper artificial intelligences are programmed to maintain the stability of asterie environments," Lucas replied. "Usually, they're specifically programmed not to practice deception. And if it could lie, why not threaten to shoot us?"

"So what is this maze?" Ann asked.

"Well," Lucas said, "the thought processes of keeper-type AIs are concrete, not metaphorical. So, presumably, it's a physical maze."

"It's actually rearranged its interior?"

"Unusual, but conceivable. The maintenance robots could do the remodeling."

"Lucas, it makes no sense! Aren't computers supposed to be logical?"

"Ann, being logical is different than making sense. Here's how I think it works. To start, it's an older, tradition-minded keeper, with inviolable ethical parameters--"

"Asimov's Three Laws," said Joshua, who liked to read historical science fiction.

"Uh, yes," Lucas said. "At any rate, its ethics are carved, so to speak, into the bedrock of its operating system. So it can't harm us, by action or inaction."

"And the maze?" Ann asked.

"Perhaps, while they were evacuating, the asterie personnel ordered the keeper to protect the asterie from intruders at all costs. So the keeper had to develop a non-lethal way to comply."

"A maze," Ann said. "I'll bet it's really a trap."

"Getting trapped aboard a deserted asterie could be lethal," Joshua said. "Which violates its ethical programming. Let's point that out."

The delay was longer than thirteen seconds.

TO ANSWER YOUR OBJECTION, THE MAZE IS NOT A TRAP. A WAY OF EXCAPE IS ALWAYS AVAILABLE. HOWEVER, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO ESCAPE FROM THE MAZE. Pause. NO FURTHER INFORMATION WILL BE PROVIDED.

"If it was human," Ann said, "it would know it's only making us curious."

"I realize this is the Belt and anything can happen," Lucas said. "But who's afraid of a maze?"

They discussed a few minutes more, then drained their espressos and voted.

Two weeks and two million kilometers later, the ship collapsed its plasma bubble and, with milligee deceleration, parked fifty kilometers from the asterie.

Daedalus was an unburnished ball with no major protrusions or cuts save a hangar at one end of the spin axis and a rocket exhaust nozzle at the other. The rim rotation calculated to half a gee simulated gravity on the five-hundred-meter equatorial radius.

They observed the telescopic view on the control room's main screen.

"We call asteries 'eggs,'" Ann said. "But this actually looks like one."

"A common design for a space habitat," Joshua said. "Use a solar mirror to heat a ball of metal to molten, inflate like a balloon, cool to solid. Very simple, very cheap."

"Very claustrophobic," Ann said.

"Raven's hull sensors are tasting radioactive isotopes," Lucas said, reading a chart-laden side display. "Traces of krypton-85 and iodine-131."

"Typical of a fission reactor," Joshua said.

"How do you know that?"

"I was an engineering mate, long ago. Some days I wish I hadn't made the career change." Joshua stared at a bar graph on Lucas's screen. "The reactor must have been operating recently if the iodine-131 is still significant. The half-life is only eight days."

"The reactor isn't being used for propulsion," Ann said. "The asterie hasn't moved in two weeks."

"It's being used for internal power requirements," Joshua said. He nodded to the image on the screen. "You'll notice, no solar mirrors or panels."

"A reactor presents a smaller radar cross-section," Lucas said.

"A nuke is a lot more expensive than solar arrays," Ann said. "They're going out of their way to keep a low profile."

"Gazing as I am upon this orb of mystery," Lucas said, "I once more ponder our client's true motives."

"The answers are inside," Joshua said. "If there are any."

They dispatched Hermes Junior and watched its telemetry on the control room main screen. The robot surveyed the asterie's shell at one hundred meters. The camera relayed images of dull, smooth metal, and of tiny, highly radioactive vent ports. It soon became apparent that the only humanly or robotly possible entry was through the hangar.

Synchronizing with the hangar rotation, the barrel-like scout robot alighted on the deck, and rolled past the vacant docking berths to the main personnel airlock. The opening mechanism was a single button.

Junior erected a transmission repeater. Elevating an appendage, it pressed the airlock button. The door slid open. The robot cycled inside.

"Too easy," Joshua said quietly. "For thirty thousand credits, that is."

"Normal pressure and oxygen ratio," Ann said, scanning her data-feed screen. "Radiation in the safe zone, biofilters clean. Temperature sixteen centigrade--sweater-wearing weather."

Lucas cocked an eyebrow. "How does the unicorn get the sweater over its head?"

Ann grinned and swatted his shoulder.

"Carry on, Junior," Joshua said.

"Right-oh, Joshua," Hermes Junior said.

Unspooling a fiber optics cable after itself, the robot rolled deeper within the asterie. Its camera eyes relayed empty passages and barren compartments. Socks and shirts lay scattered haphazardly on the cabin floors.

"They were in a hurry to leave," Lucas said.

"What are those?" Ann demanded.

Lucas flipped on Junior's head lamp. Inside a dark room, a dozen pairs of yellow dots gleamed from floor level. Brown furry shapes the size of shoes scurried into the shadows. Over the speakers came squeaks and squeals.

"Rats!" Ann said.

"We've seen rats in abandoned asteries before," Lucas replied.

"These look different. Can you get closer?"

Lucas drove Junior over the threshold, but just then a lamp crashed from a desktop, missing the robot by centimeters.

"We're not here for rats," Joshua said.

Junior exited the cabin and continued down the passage. A rat waddled across an intersection, and more eyes blinked from darkened rooms.

"A regular infestation," Ann said.

"In a way it's comforting," Lucas said.

They stared at him.

"Regarding the maze," he said. "If the rats solved the maze, how hard can it be?"

Junior passed an elevator and, mindful of its trailing cable, trundled down a ramp instead. Then the walls changed, becoming uniform and smooth. The robot entered room after room filled with containers. Most of the containers were refrigerator and freezer units, plugged into wall outlets.

"They carry a lot of cargo," Lucas said.

"A zoological asterie would," Ann said. "As it orbits through the Belt, it passes asteries in neighboring orbits, and merchandise is transferred back and forth."

"Like a mobile distribution center," Joshua said. "Or flying warehouse."

With Joshua wearing the teleoperations glove, Junior undid latches, twisted handles, and pushed open sliding doors. Each doorway led to another compartment, without intervening passages. Despite the sameness of the walls, the compartments followed a seemingly random geometry and were seldom the same size and shape.

"Maybe this is the maze," Ann said. "I'm confused already!"

"Hermes will remember the way out," Lucas said. "But how are we going to find the lab? The compartments aren't labeled. How did the people who worked here find their way around?"

Joshua said: "The keeper must have directed--"

"Whoa!" Lucas said.

The wall in front of Junior bore coin-sized punctures, set in a curving line.

"Automatic rifle fire," Joshua said.

Lucas panned the camera. The other walls were similarly strafed.

"An all-out battle," Lucas said. "But why? Pirates? Mutiny?"

"Hey, guys," Ann said. "Does it seem like there's more rats?"

Lucas panned again. From each corner, behind every container, a pair of beady yellow eyes blinked. Joshua had seen plenty of rats aboard derelicts. Yet these were different. They were larger, bulkier, and their fixed stares prickled his neck hairs.

Just then, the screen went blank. Lucas barked at the control room camera: "Hermes, report!"

"Scout telemetry lost," Hermes replied. "Comm cable break indicated."

Joshua stroked his chin. "Let's contact the keeper."

"I'll get voice this time," Lucas said.

A moment of frenetic typing later, and a male-sounding voice said over the control room speakers, "This is the keeper of Daedalus."

The voice was calm, almost deferential. Joshua realized he had assumed from the capital letters of the plain-text transmission that the keeper had been shouting.

"Keeper," Joshua said. "I am Joshua. I am captain of the spaceship Raven."

"Hello, Joshua."

"Keeper, what have you done to our scout robot?"

"I have not harmed your property, Joshua."

"Then what happened to it?"

"Nothing has happened to it, Joshua. It is unharmed."

"Then what caused its communications cable to break?"

"The cable was broken by the maze."

"The maze? How?"

"No further information will be provided. However, there is no escape from--"

Joshua disconnected. He zoomed the telescopic view on the main screen. For a long moment, he gazed at the asterie's revolving, uninformative shell.

"Our turn now," he said.

"Nonviolent and nondestructive," Ann said, watching Joshua load a snub-nosed automatic rifle into each of their personal carrybags.

"We won't start trouble," Joshua replied.

"Those bullet holes." Ann shuddered. "I'm a single mom! If I didn't need the money so badly--"

"Are you staying here?"

A long pause. "No. Of course not."

Lucas opened the explosives locker and loaded his carrybag with his hand-made charge packs.

"Plan on blasting your way through the maze?" Ann asked.

"It's one solution," Lucas replied. From a strongbox within the locker, he removed several candy bars in red-and-white foil wrappers. Meeting their gazes, he said, "Hey, supposing we do get trapped!"

Once fully suited, they boarded the skiff, broke from the de-spun ship, and flitted toward the asterie.

"Joshua," Hermes said over the radio. "The keeper of Daedalus is calling for you."

"Something about no escape from the maze?"

"Yes, Joshua."

"Let me know if it has something else to say."

Minutes of crossing open space, and the skiff alighted in the hangar. They dismounted and, with Joshua leading in a show of decisiveness that he didn't quite feel, they cycled through the airlock.

The inner door slid open. Their helmet lamp beams revealed an unlit compartment whose rows of lockers and shelves burgeoned with space suits and helmets and other outside-the-hull equipment.

"Pretty pricey stuff to abandon," Lucas said. "And in good condition. Too bad we're not here to salvage. Our financial problems would be solved with this one room."

"Keep your suits on," Joshua said. "They may have evacuated because of a plague."

"I doubt it," Ann said. "If they were doing macroscopic genetic engineering here, they wouldn't mess with viruses. It would endanger breeding stocks."

"I hope you're right, Ann."

Lucas scrunched his mouth at his computer tablet, which was connected to a Geiger-Müller-style radiation detector on his belt. "Radiation is registering safe levels. No alpha or beta, very low gamma."

"Keep monitoring," Joshua said. "A reactor problem is another possible reason for evacuation."

Lucas attached his spool of fiber optics cable to the same repeater that Junior had erected on the interior side of the airlock. He unspooled his cable behind them as they progressed down the passage, their helmet lamp beams bobbing spots upon the walls.

They managed only a few steps when the overhead lights gleamed on.

"It's making us welcome," Ann said. "Even though it wants us to leave."

"Don't human hosts show courtesy toward their unwanted guests?" Lucas asked.

Ahead lay a brightly illuminated, spotlessly clean ship's corridor. Joshua listened with his suit's external microphones at maximum. The lights hummed and the ventilators purred. Far off came a creak.

"Let's go," he said.

Switching off their helmet lamps, they followed Junior's cable. In every compartment, eyes blinked from behind the storage containers.

"Joshua," Hermes announced. "The keeper is saying something else."

"Pipe it in."

The keeper's words bounced from the asterie to Raven, to the antennas and repeaters at the hangar airlock, down the fiber optics cable in the passages to the transmitter that Lucas carried, and into Joshua's space suit earphones.

"Joshua," the keeper said in its always-calm voice. "I request that you not deface the property of Daedalus Genetics, LTD."

"We're not defacing anything," Joshua said.

"There is a person in your party who is defacing the walls."

Joshua looked around. Ann stood by the portal, lipstick dispenser in hand. A red wedge was scrawled on the adjacent wall.

"I got the idea from a movie," Ann said. "You want me to stop?"

Lucas wiggled his tablet. "I'm video-logging our journey. And anyway, all we have to do is follow the cable out."

"Keeper," Joshua said. "The marks will wipe off." To Ann: "Keep doing it. I like having back-up procedures."

They continued down ramps and through passages, tracking Junior's cable. Joshua raised his eyes to the ceiling. In every compartment, he saw the same arrangement of light fixtures, ventilator grids--and little black hemispheres.

Cameras, he thought. It's watching.

Lucas viewed his tablet. "This next room is where Junior's cable broke."

Joshua halted at the portal. Unzipping his carrybag, he removed his rifle and slung it over his shoulder. Ann and Lucas imitated. Squeezing the rifle grip, breath heavy and heart pounding, Joshua crept to the frame and peered through.

On the floor, between container pallets and rat eyes, Junior's cable extended to the opposite wall--and terminated.

Lucas examined the cable end. "Look how frayed this is."

"Rat chews?" Ann asked.

"Looks like it was severed by something blunt. And powerful."

Ann did a full turn. "Where does the cable continue?"

A freezer unit occupied the center of the compartment. An electrical cord trailed from the side. Its plug lay on the floor. Joshua looked for an outlet. There wasn't any nearby. He pointed his laser-beam temperature sensor at the freezer unit's door seal.

"This freezer was running until recently," he said. "Then it was unplugged."

"By who?" Lucas asked.

"That is the question. Keeper, are you still on the line?"

"On what line, Joshua?"

"Never mind. Got a question for you. Besides us in this room, are there any other humans aboard this asterie?"

"No, Joshua. They have all been evacuated."

"What about robots?"

"My robots have been evacuated. There is also your robot. There are also five unidentified robots which entered the maze unauthorized thirty-seven days ago."

"Those sound like Hamilton's doing," Joshua said to Lewis and Ann. To the keeper: "The unidentified robots. What is their status?"

"They have not moved in thirty days. Analysis indicates loss of battery power."

"So, Keeper," Lucas said. "Who unplugged this freezer?"

"No further information will be provided," the keeper replied.

"You know, Keeper," Lucas said, "that refrain is starting to annoy."

The keeper remained silent.

"Maybe the rats unplugged the freezer," Ann said. "I realize that sounds like I'm obsessing over them--but they do have the ability."

"I can't see their motive," Joshua replied.

Ann crossed her arms. "Well, do we have a search plan? I mean, this place is creeping me out--the evacuation, the rats, the bullets. I'd like to get done as soon as possible."

"Hermes calculated there's over half a billion cubic meters here," Lucas said. "If we just bumble around, it'll take forever."

Joshua thought for a moment. The direct approach, he decided, was often best.

"Keeper."

"Yes, Joshua."

"You're watching us, aren't you?"

"Yes, Joshua. I have been ordered to monitor intruders. I regret the compromise of your privacy."

"That's all right. So you know where we are. Keeper, I have a request."

"Yes, Joshua."

"Can you guide us to the main lab?"

"No, Joshua. I have been ordered not to direct intruders there."

Lucas smiled. "Guess that was worth a try."

Joshua thought again. People rushing to evacuate, forgetting that computers are often literal-minded when it comes to interpreting commands--

"Keeper. Can you guide us to the room in front of the main lab?"

"Yes, Joshua."

"Keeper, guide us to the room in front of the main lab."

"Yes, Joshua. Please go through the door on your right."

Lucas dropped his jaw. "Joshua, next election for captain--you've got my vote!"

Joshua released the rifle grip. Mindful of the overhead camera and the possibility that the telemetry might someday be viewed by a court-of-arbitrage jury, he stuffed his weapon back into his carrybag.

"Okay. Let's head--"

He saw Lucas frowning at the wall where the cable had broken. Lucas ran his gloves along the surface, and pounded.

"What's up?" Joshua asked.

"According to Junior's telemetry," Lucas said, "there should be a doorway here."

"Portal," Joshua said, reflexively giving the standard space-freighter terminology. "I don't see one."

"Well, I thought I reviewed the video correctly." Lucas shrugged. "Maybe I made a mistake. Been known to happen."

Joshua found he couldn't let it go that easily.

To Joshua, the main lab was merely boxes of lights and switches juxtaposed with liquid-filled tanks and interconnecting tubes. Ann's eyes were aglow.

"I wish we could salvage this just to play with it!" she said. "This is the best gene-editing equipment I've seen in the Belt."

Batting Lucas's hands away from a workstation keyboard, Joshua inspected a wall with shelves of transparent jars like inverted space suit helmets. The bowl interiors seemed coated with sea salt and slime.

"Artificial wombs," Ann said. "A little small for unicorns, though."

"Guys!" Lucas called.

They joined him at the other end of the lab. From a second-story perch, a picture window overlooked a chamber larger than a terrestrial city's sports stadium.

Beneath the light fixtures that dangled scores of meters overhead stretched a vista of hundreds of meters. The chamber contained a forest of gnarled, barren trees, prickling a landscape of hillocks and gullies. Clearings of yellowing grass broke the treelines.

The largest clearing, on the right, had a dried lake bed, orange with rust. The lake bed abutted the only wall visible from the laboratory window. The curvature of the asterie hid the other ends of the forest from their sight.

"An ecosystem module," Ann said. "This must be where they tended the grown specimens."

"It hasn't been watered for a while," Lucas said.

"Gloomy, too," Ann said. "Half the lights are burnt out."

"Let's find the storage unit," Joshua said.

The main room of the lab diverged into short hallways lined with doors. Joshua read the door plaques.

"Fifty-four alpha. This is it."

The door was locked, the first time they'd encountered a locked door since coming aboard. A brief whir of Joshua's drill annihilated the lock mechanism. Joshua entered the storage unit and, cutting the refrigerator padlocks, compared the serial number on Hamilton's purchase order with the labels on the embryo packs. He immediately frowned.

"There are two different serial numbers here," he said.

They withdrew a finger-sized bottle from each pack. Ann inserted the needle of her DNA comparator into both.

"This first one registers as genus Equus--which is right for horses," she said. "I wish I could be more specific, but unicorn DNA is proprietary, so it's not in my comparator's genome library."

"How about the other pack?" Joshua asked.

"Definitely not Equus ... wow, whatever it is, it's been heavily modified. But my educated guess would be ... order Rodentia."

"Rodentia," Lucas said. "Rodents?"

"Uh-huh. Maybe they were experimenting with pest control. Goodness knows they need it."

"So we take the horsies, leave the mousies?" Lucas asked.

"Not so simple," Joshua said. He stabbed at the hard copy of the purchase order, which he had carried from Scarborough. "The Equus number isn't listed. The Rodentia number is."

"Their inventory data base is probably confused," Lucas said. "If you'll let me hack their system--"

"No. The easiest solution is to take both. We'll return parcel-post whichever Hamilton doesn't want."

They wrapped the embryo packs in insulation and stuffed their carrybags to overflowing.

"Lot of baby unicorns here," Lucas said. "Is our friendly and trustworthy client planning to raise a cavalry regiment?"

"All Belters are crazy," Ann said. "Look at us."

Joshua frowned at the serial numbers on the packs, then slung his carrybag's strap over his shoulder, staggered to the door, and motioned outward.

"We've got what we came for. Let's go see stars again."

"About time," Ann said. "All this talk about mazes has me scared we'll run into a minotaur."

"That could happen in a genetic engineering facility," Lucas said.

"Lucas, honey--please shut up!"

Joshua crowded out fears of minotaurs with a daydream of their traditional post-mission espressos-and-cookies in the coziness of Raven's control room. He was halfway to the lab exit when Ann cried out. She was staring through the window toward the clearing.

Not more than a few meters distant inside the ecosystem module, a snow-white horse munched on the sparse grass.

The horse had a mane tangled with elflocks. Its eyes were wide and liquid. Upon its head projected a golden-hued horn like a jousting lance in quarter-scale.

It happened too fast for Joshua to stop her.

Shedding her carrybag, Ann descended the stairwell, flung open the door, and entered the ecosystem module. With more caution, the men followed.

The unicorn perked, neighed, and trotted to the clearing edge, as far as it could go without entering the woods. It surveyed the three of them, swishing its tail and grunting. Its head bobbed and the horn flicked like a swordsman's parry.

"She's so pretty!" Ann said, after briefly stooping to determine sex.

"A little on the thin side," Lucas said. "Little ragged, too."

"Dehydration." Ann sighed. "This whole place is run down. There's hardly any grazing. Poor thing!"

"Ann," Joshua said. "It's an untamed creature, we have no ability to capture it. Didn't you say you wanted to leave?"

The unicorn made a noise like, "Ruh-uhhhhh!"

Ann grabbed Lucas's carrybag. She extracted a fistful of red-and-white wrappers.

"Hey!" Lucas cried. "My stash!"

Peeling off a wrapper, Ann held out a chocolate bar and approached the unicorn, step and halt, step and halt. The creature grunted and stamped, like a bull preparing to charge. Watching the horn tip's circles, Joshua slowly reached into his carrybag.

"Don't you dare, Joshua!" Ann said. "My suit will protect me from the horn."

Joshua curled his finger around the trigger just the same.

Midway across the clearing, Ann stopped. The unicorn examined the candy with both eyes and flaring nostrils. It trotted forward and its teeth pried the bar from Ann's fingers. With a gulp, the bar vanished. Ann unwrapped a second bar.

As the unicorn munched, Ann delicately slipped alongside, whispering gently. The creature grunted and bobbed its head, as if in comprehension. The horn stayed pointed away from Ann.

"'Constance,'" Ann said lightly. "My daughter Reena has a stuffed unicorn named Constance. That's a good name for you." She stroked the mane. "Your hair is so soft, Constance! And you're so well-behaved!"

"She's a moocher, that's what she is," Lucas said, as Constance the unicorn nibbled on the chunks of a third bar. Lucas turned to Joshua. "Perhaps we should discuss who'll clean up after this charming beast, assuming we take her aboard Raven."

"I'll do it," Ann said. "Horse lovers run in my family. Besides, handling a horse will be no trouble after cleaning up after you two!"

Lucas placed his hands on his hips. "Ann, you are being unfair. Accurate, irrefutable--but also unfair."

Suddenly, the unicorn's ears twitched. Her eyes widened still more. She bolted into the woods, a streak of white swallowed into the gloom.

"Something spooked her," Lucas said. "But I don't see or hear any--"

Ann stared at the swaying branches--then plunged after.

"Ann!" Lucas shouted.

Joshua raced after Lucas, who chased after Ann. Overhead, the branches blocked the faltering illumination. Around Joshua, shadows merged into thickets of black. Animated stickers whipped his space suit and snapped at his helmet.

In the murk of the forest he thought he glimpsed a spider web large as a man, a spider big as a bowling ball. He saw the bones of a half-eaten pterodactyl carcass. He saw hulking silhouettes that had to be his imagination.

He came to a fork in the trail. On the left, a branch swayed. He went left. Then he broke into a clearing. Ann and Lucas were frozen, gaping at the gully below. Since it took him a moment to accept what he was seeing, he froze too.

Row upon row of huts ran parallel to the dried stream bed at the bottom. The huts had walls of sticks and stones, roofs of straw, and bare apertures for windows and doors.

The tallest roof towered no higher than Joshua's knee cap.

"Does this mean what I think it does?" Lucas asked.

"Back to the lab," Joshua said. "Now."

Through the windows, furry heads peeped beady eyes.

Joshua swung open the lab door and ushered the others in. He sprang after them and slammed the door. Breathless, he clambered up the steps.

Beyond the window, on the far side of the clearing, the tall grass shook. Joshua expected a wave of brown fur to wash out. Instead, he saw a flood of leaves.

The rats wore caps of leaves, and around their waists, cinched by strands of grass, were jackets of leaves. Their mock uniforms blended with the dead leaves matting the ground.

Maneuvering into the clearing, the rats formed into squares of hundreds. At the forefront of each square pranced a larger-than-average rat attempting to lumber upright while waving a sharp stick. Joshua saw petals of marigold gracing the shoulders of the uniforms of the leader rats. Next to each leader, a pair of smaller rats held ceilingward a long branch with three leaves skewered. Joshua thought of epaulettes and regimental colors.

"It's like a miniature army," Lucas said. "How do they know to do that?"

"It's taken decades to program their instincts into imitating human military tactics," Ann said. "But that's all it is. Instinct and imitation."

"Like bees and their hive behavior coupled with monkey-see-monkey-do?"

"Yes. Instinct and imitation. That's all it is. Despite the name, intellirats are more clever than intelligent."

"You can only genetically engineer so much strategy into brains the size of walnuts," Joshua said. He wondered how much military strategy that was. Likely, he thought, he had only a peanut's worth himself.

The squealing rattled the lab window. The multitude of cries were regular and synchronized, chants led by the officer rats and directed toward the humans.

"Why are they so furious?" Lucas asked.

"We violated their territory," Ann said.

"Let's stay out of sight," Joshua said. He headed for the exit. "We have what we need, let's--"

Ann stood by the window, glaring. "We're abandoning Constance? In there, with them?"

"We--we can't--we have to--" Joshua couldn't form a complete sentence under her scrutiny. Then he noticed Lucas.

Lucas stared at the flashing screen of his computer tablet, clutched in both hands with far more of a grip than required in a point five geefield.

"Something wrong, Lucas?" Joshua asked.

"Radiation detector," Lucas said. "A significant increase in iodine-131."

Joshua and Ann traded glances.

"How much is the gamma?" Ann asked.

"Point three millirem per hour. Is that harmful?"

"Not if we're leaving right away."

"It shouldn't be anything at all," Joshua said.

He examined the history graphs for counter-and-average-MeV.

After a period of time, Ann said: "The reactor is running high, isn't it?"

"At fever--since about forty-five minutes ago," Joshua said. "Maybe Hermes can tell us what's happening." Hefting the fiber optics cable spool, Joshua flipped the transmitter switch. "Hermes, you there?"

Hermes wasn't. After a few calls of wasted breath, Joshua glanced at the ceiling grids.

"Keeper," he shouted through his helmet glass. "Can you hear me?"

"Yes, Joshua," said the voice from a circular grid.

Joshua adjusted his helmet external-microphone volume.

"What's the status of your reactor plant?"

"I have placed my primary reactor at maximum power and am disengaging all safety features," the keeper said, in a voice whose dispassion matched that of a human describing how to bleach stains from laundry. "I am preparing to pump ice-cold water into the core. This will result in a rapid and extreme temperature transient that will stimulate a high flux of thermal neutrons, leading to explosive meltdown. The meltdown event will fulfill my directive to self-destruct upon intruder penetration of the main laboratory."

There was a long silence.

"It's the intellirats, isn't it?" Ann said. "We found out about the intellirats."

"Yeah, Daedalus Genetics has to destroy the evidence now." Lucas shook his head. "If there's anything that'll summon the navies of a dozen asterie alliances to your doorstep, it's breeding intellirats."

"Keeper!" Joshua shouted. "Return your reactor to normal operation!"

"I am sorry, Joshua," the keeper replied. "You do not have countermand authorization."

Joshua opened his mouth to shout again, but Lucas interrupted: "Keeper, when will meltdown occur?"

"There is a point nine nine confidence interval between seventy-five and eighty-one minutes," the keeper replied. "I regret that unknown reactor tolerances prevent a more specific answer."

Joshua adjusted his watch. "Lucas, does that give us enough time to leave?"

Lucas skimmed the video log of their inward journey. "If we don't delay." He looked at Ann.

Ann turned from the woods. Her face had no tears, just a hollow glaze.

"Let's go," she snapped.

Exiting the lab, they followed the cable through portals, past pallets. Joshua's legs increased speed unconsciously. And so, head bowed, he almost slammed into a wall.

He picked up the frayed cable end. "Blunt cut. Like the other one!"

Lucas compared his computer tablet screen to the wall. "According to the video, there should be a door--a portal--here!"

They slapped the bare surface. It didn't make a portal appear, not even a crack.

With his boot, Lucas nudged another disconnected electrical plug. "Who's doing this? An energy-conscious minotaur?"

"The keeper may have lied about not having robots," Joshua said.

"Joshua, I told you, the keeper can't lie!"

"Lucas, there's the cable and there's the wall. Either we walked through the wall or this cable has been rerouted."

"Well, is the keeper editing my video log, too?"

"It's got to be the right place, Joshua," Ann said. She pointed to the lipstick mark on the portal frame.

Joshua sighed. "We don't have time for this." Conscious of his flushed cheeks, he tucked his irritation away. He keyed in his laser gyro, determining the direction of the hangar. "We need to go through this wall."

Lucas blinked. "You mean, blast through it?"

"I, for one, am not worried about lawsuits anymore," Ann said.

Lucas taped the explosive charge in place. They hid in the adjoining room. Lucas tapped his computer tablet screen. The portal flashed and the boom shook the walls. Debris flew past. They poured back into the other room. A hole smoldered in the center of the wall.

Joshua strode toward it, but not fast enough.

The wall moved back. The ceiling parted. Down came a new wall, joining with the floor and adjacent walls. The ceiling closed up.

They faced a bare, smooth wall. If they had delayed reentry into the room, it would have seemed as if the detonation had been without effect.

Gingerly approaching, Lucas examined the new wall, rapping his knuckles on the edges and corners.

"Electromagnetic induction coils," he murmured. "That's how it moves so fast."

"But why?" Ann demanded. "I mean, why would an asterie have walls that move?"

Being mesmerized, Joshua took a moment before he could speak.

"Ann, you agreed Daedalus was like a flying warehouse, drifting from one customer--and supplier-asterie to another as it orbits through the Belt. Well, to maximize storage efficiency, it has to reconfigure itself to cargo allocation requirements, which are constantly changing."

Lucas nodded. "You're saying the keeper automatically remodels its interior to adapt to its cargo?"

Ann sighed heavily. "Only in the Belt!"

"Not just here," Joshua said. "I've heard about this on Earth, too. Commercial airlines have been doing it for over a century. In the daytime, a jet will fly with passenger seats. At night, the seats are removed and pallet tracks are installed, to haul freight. It's so routine, they don't even use robots anymore. The jet reconfigures itself."

"A dynamic maze!" Lucas said, his eyes lighting. "That must be the key, how the keeper rationalizes its actions! It always provides a way of escape, so it can justify to itself that it's not actually trapping us. But the escape route constantly shifts in response to our movements, so that--"

"So that we're always going the wrong way." Joshua raised his eyes to the ceiling bubble. "Keeper! Can you take us to the room that is next to the hangar?"

The keeper's voice was prompt and smooth: "I'm sorry, Joshua. That would facilitate your escape."

"It's learned that trick," Lucas said.

"Keeper," Joshua said. "Do you realize that the meltdown will kill us if we cannot escape in time?"

"In regard to the meltdown event," the keeper replied, "while normally my ethical parameters would require me to release you in the face of imminent danger, my self-destruct directives are an exception and must exclude any consideration on my part with regard to your personal safety."

"Keeper, that's not logical!"

"I believe you are incorrect, Joshua. My programming instructions are explicit. Human Life Protection overrides all priorities except Self-Destruct. Self-Destruct is independent of Human Life Protection."

Joshua felt his face grow red, his stomach churn. He also felt a need to punch something.

"Keeper--"

"Joshua," Lucas said quietly. "Don't argue with the computer."

Joshua unballed his fists and slowed his breathing. "All right. Lucas, can we blast our way back to the hangar?"

"Not if the keeper throws a hundred walls in our way. Even just ten. I only have nine more charges."

For an instant, it got to be too much. Swirling into a maelstrom of worries, Joshua bowed his head and closed his eyes.

"I'm sorry," he said, covering his temples with his hand. "I worked on freighters, I should have thought of reconfigurable compartmenting before this."

Feeling a palm on each shoulder, he opened his eyes. Lucas and Ann smiled at him. Small smiles ... but enough.

And by then, he remembered ... the rust.

"Let's go back to the ecosystem module," he said.

"The rat's nest?" Lucas asked.

"I hope you can think of a better idea on the way. Mine isn't that good."

Inside the lab, Joshua pointed through the window at the orange bottom of the dried lake bed near the right-side wall, about a hundred and fifty meters distant. There were no rats in the foreground, no unicorn anywhere.

"Because of the heaviness of its biomass," Joshua said, "the ecosystem module is built right on top of the inner surface of the asterie's outer shell, with no levels underneath. Right?"

"Gotcha," Lucas said. "You want to blast a hole through the shell."

"The lake bed's rust must be from the steel shell. That's where we'll do it."

"Then we jump through the hole?" Ann said. "That's your plan?"

"The rim rotation is fifty meters per second," Joshua said. "That'll throw us clear of the meltdown. Hermes will have the skiff pick us up."

"Joshua," Lucas said. "I once saw this documentary on World War II battleships. Their plating was two feet thick. The average asterie's shell is three times that."

"I'm not optimistic, either."

Joshua descended the steps and opened the door. His earphones filled with the shush of a breeze from distant, hidden ventilator fans. With suit external microphones at maximum sensitivity, he listened toward the woods. He heard something like the caw of a crow on steroids. There were no squeaks or squeals.

They gripped their rifles and flicked the safeties. Joshua crossed the clearing. Lucas and Ann tagged closely.

From ground level, Joshua could not see the lake, but above the trees he could see the wall that he knew was adjacent to the lake. He entered the woods and at the fork took the trail on the right this time, heading toward that wall.

A herd of scarab beetles with luminescent racing stripes scattered from the path. Stickers blocked, waving like octopus tentacles. Joshua thrashed with his rifle barrel. The stickers fought back. He slashed with his knife. Hissing, the stickers parted, revealing the lakeside clearing.

Bounding with half-gee leaps, Joshua reached the dry lake's shore.

Pack by pack, Lucas tossed a pile of explosive charges onto the corroded bottom. Then he backed from the shoreline and crouched. Joshua and Ann got behind him.

The lake bed boomed and a pillar of orange dust billowed roofward. Joshua ran to the edge. The cloud cleared, revealing ... a shallow crater.

"It hardly made a dent!" Ann cried.

"Joshua, that was it," Lucas said. "I have one charge left."

"Maybe," Joshua thought aloud, "the charge will have more effect if we cover it with rocks and--"

"One charge won't punch through two meters of steel!"

"Joshua," Ann said.

The tall grass by the woods was shivering. Out marched a carpet of leaves, marigold-epaulettes dancing and banner-sticks waving. Chanted squeals echoed against the module wall.

From Joshua's right to his left, the rats advanced in a semicircle that constricted around the humans standing at the centerpoint of its radius.

Joshua raised his rifle, took aim, and fired. A rat leaped into the air and flopped. The humans spread rifle fire in a trisected pattern. Stampeding over the bloodied corpses of their stricken comrades, the rats retreated to the tall grass. But the grass continued to shiver.

"They're not going away," Joshua said.

"I told you, they're territorial!" Ann said.

"I think they've got us surrounded," Lucas said.

Suddenly the grass stilled. Then Joshua heard a loud squeal, followed by simultaneous clicks from everywhere in the grass before them.

Black rain-in-reverse erupted from the grass.

The dark speckles arched skyward and careened toward the humans. Joshua shielded with the carrybag and cringed. A hail of pebbles rapped against his helmet and arms and stung the ground.

"Catapults!" Lucas cried. "How can they have catapults?"

In a fleeting instant, Joshua pictured miniature medieval-style catapults mounted on tiny wheeled carts with windlasses no larger than sewing-machine spools, ropes as thin as thread. Rationality told him the "ratapults" could be no more than flexible sticks gouged into the ground and bent under the weight of a gangpile of rats. But all he saw, in a one-eighty panorama with his back to the lake bed and module wall, was furiously agitating tall grass.

He heard a rat shriek. The grass clicked. Another storm of projectiles streaked toward the humans. Rocks and beetles and clumps of muck pelted their suits. Under cover of catapult fire, the rats charged. The humans retreated into the lake bed.

They crowded side-to-side, scanning the lake's perimeter, which was then above eye level, and they waited for the rats to rush the edge. Conducting a mental inventory of their remaining ammo, Joshua wished he could trade his rifle for a chain saw.

"More clever than intelligent!" Lucas mumbled. "So they can't compose a symphony at us!"

Abruptly, a riot of squeals came from above.

Joshua heard whinnying, then hoofbeats. A rat carcass tumbled onto the lake bed, flinging droplets of blood from its wounds. The humans climbed to the shoreline.

The unicorn galloped across the clearing, stamping the tall grass, dipping its head and swinging its horn like a metronome set to allegro. Skewered rats flew outward in waves as the rest scrambled.

In seconds, the rats vanished. Their squeals faded into the woods. The unicorn made prancing circles and snorted. Joshua and Ann helped Lucas onto the grass.

Ann ran to Constance. "You saved us, sweetie! You're wonderful, you are!"

Its neck enveloped in Ann's embrace, the creature grunted and bobbed its head, seemingly in agreement, giving Joshua the impression that modesty was a quality yet to be engineered into the Plantagenet Line. But there was no question, he admitted as he surveyed the piles of impaled and blood-soaked carcasses littering the field, that the battle had been well-fought.

Lucas peeled a wrapper and held out a bar. "Babe, you deserve a hundred more for that!"

While the unicorn nibbled, Joshua gently brushed his fingertips against its hide. It was trembling, and beneath the hairs he traced tiny scars.

"She's fought quite a few battles," he said.

"We can't leave her here," Ann said.

"I know."

Joshua gazed at the shallow crater in the lakebed. Lucas and Ann turned their attention from Constance and gave him what-do-we-do-now-captain looks.

"Well," he said. "We have to figure another way out."

"Will the reactor melt a hole in the shell?" Lucas asked. "We could jump through that."

"The heat and radiation would fry us before then. This whole asterie will be super-heated into vapor."

Lucas scowled. "Didn't our client tell you this place was harmless?"

"Toothless. Lucas, you want to try hacking into the system and overriding the self-destruct?"

"Even if I had all my gear--well, I'll try."

They started toward the lab. Ann's hand suddenly clutched Joshua's arm. She pointed to the trees. The bare branches drooped with squirming rats.

The humans froze and watched.

"Can they unlatch our helmets?" Lucas asked.

Ann's reply was barely a whisper. "Wouldn't put it past them."

Joshua heard a crack from the trees. Another crack, and dirt exploded by his boots. Something metallic and rodlike glinted in the branches. An end of the rod sparked, and something whizzed by his helmet--far faster than a catapulted pebble.

"Get down!" he shouted.

They dropped to the grass as gunfire erupted from several trees at once. Bullets whizzed overhead and ricocheted against the module wall. Hugging the ground, the humans crawled to the shoreline and rolled onto the lake bed, into concealment from the arboreal snipers.

Ann whistled. "C'mon, Constance!"

With a leaping glide, the unicorn landed onto the rusted bottom. A rain of pebbles clattered after. Red streaks on Constance's haunches revealed where the missiles had grazed. Ann stopped hyperventilating only after she assured herself there were no bullet wounds.

"They must have broken into the armory," Joshua said, catching his breath. "Now we know what caused the evacuation."

"How can they know how to shoot?" Lucas asked.

"They must have seen humans doing it," Ann said. "They're very imit--"

Another volley of bullets ricocheted against the module wall. Joshua examined the wall, surveying its entire length. It was a sheer plane of metal.

"I don't see any exits," he said.

"The module walls have to be sealed for waterproofing," Ann said. "They're different from the cargo walls."

Lucas hefted his last charge. "You mean, they don't move around?"

Lucas climbed to the wall with a haste that belied his body-to-fat ratio. He set the charge, retreated to the basin, blasted a hole. It remained unplugged. Through the jagged gap, they slipped out of the ecosystem module, into a cargo compartment. With some coaxing, Ann got the unicorn to follow.

Joshua looked back. The clearing showed a carpet of leaves rolling toward the hole, guns and rifles riding atop the swellings.

He checked his gyro compass and pointed right. "The hangar's this way."

Ann petted and prodded the unicorn after them into the next room. Lucas ran to the next portal and yanked the handle. It refused to budge. He bored the lock mechanism with a number-three bit. He flung back the door and motioned.

Joshua looked at his suit clock. They had nearly an hour left, but what of it? They would be chased by rats through the maze, never coming even close to the exit, even if the keeper were to leave all the portals unlocked. For it would rearrange the walls, and escape would always be impossible.

If only, Joshua thought, he could make the keeper realize their lives were in imminent danger from--

Joshua halted.

Another idea had come. He didn't think it was a good idea. The risk, for one thing, was far worse than blasting through the lake bed. If he was wrong, the rats would not forgive....

"Joshua--let's move!" Lucas shouted, waving toward the next portal. "Come on!"

"No," Joshua said. "Not that way." He referenced the compass arrow and nodded toward the hangar. "This way."

"We can't go that way!" Lucas shouted. "There's no portal! Now come on--they're right behind us!"

"Exactly," Joshua said. He drew himself up. "And we need to get them around us, also."

Lucas's mouth went slack. "Are you crazy?"

I wonder too, Joshua thought. "Lucas, we have to force the keeper to choose!"

Pouring through the hole blasted from the module, the rats overflowed the previous room, abandoning their leaves as the camouflage was no longer of use. The humans took cover behind palleted cargo. The unicorn trembled and bucked, making threatening circles with her horn tip. Ann took a syringe from her med pack and jabbed the creature's flank. Constance calmed.

The rats charged. Joshua squeezed his trigger. They returned fire.

From overhead came skittering noises. A ceiling grid popped open, a rat head poked out. Joshua blasted it off its shoulders.

"The ventilator shafts!" Lucas cried. "They can go anywhere in the maze!"

"That's good," Joshua said. But he had his doubts. If the keeper didn't split the fine hairs of philosophical reasoning the same way that he did--

"Joshua," the keeper's voice boomed from the ceiling grid. "You are being surrounded by creatures which I have determined are hostile to human life. You must move away. Please go through the portal on your right."

"No, Keeper," Joshua said.

"Joshua, this is a matter of your personal safety. Please go through the portal on your right."

Lucas stepped toward the portal. Joshua grabbed him.

"No. Wait!"

Through the portal on his right, he watched the floor vanish beneath the mass of rats dropping from the ventilator shaft. Ann raised her rifle barrel. Joshua pulled it down.

"Let them come," he said. "Please trust me on this!"

Anxiety kept him from articulating, but in his mind, he visualized the situation. He thought of the hangar as being at the asterie's North Pole. To reach the hangar and safety, they needed to go north.

Rats were coming from the portal in the south. Through ventilator shafts, the rats had filled the rooms above and west. East was the module. Below was two meters of steel.

That left the humans only one way of escape from the rats. To the north--to the hangar.

"Keeper," Joshua said. "We're surrounded now, except for one room. You must open the wall to that room, or we will die. And you are responsible."

"No, Joshua. You are responsible for placing yourself in jeopardy."

"That was true, Keeper. However, now the situation is out of my control. Now you are responsible for whether we live or die."

The keeper was silent. The machine that could perform complex arithmetic calculations in picoseconds took humanly measurable time to contemplate ethical equations.

"Keeper," Joshua said, above the rising clamor of the rats. "This has nothing to do with your self-destruct sequence. You cannot claim an exception to your ethical programming. Open the wall, or the rats will kill us--and you are responsible!"

The keeper's programming instructed it to insert emotional intensity into its voice: "You must move, Joshua! You must move to another room!"

The rooms on the other sides of the portals seethed shin-deep in rats. Surely the keeper saw! Joshua feared: could a machine experience denial?

"It's too late for us to move anywhere without your help," Joshua said. Then, for the sake of his listeners--including himself--he forced his voice calm: "You must help us, Keeper ... or cause us to die by your inaction."

They waited. The rats howled. The room shook with the thrashing of the horde.

Joshua heard a hum behind his back.

The wall to asterie-north rose into the ceiling, revealing the one still-ratless adjoining room.

"Joshua," the keeper said. "Move into the room I have opened--now!"

The humans backstepped northward. The rats surged after. Lucas raced for the next portal. But it faced westward and he caught himself and nodded at Joshua. They waited for the rats to catch up.

"We have to do this one room at a time?" Ann asked. "All the way out?"

The next northward wall opened. The humans stepped through.

The rats quickened the pace, emboldened by each retreat and enraged by each wall-raising escape. The keeper waited too long, sometimes. Joshua poured his bullet clip into the horde, attempting to keep the fangs beyond glove-nipping distance.

With somersaults and hops, the rats proved as adept as cinematic ninjas at evading Joshua's aim. They dodged the rifle snout and leaped onto his body. Their paws sought his external suit controls. They shut down his airflow fans. They ran his heater coils at full blast. They popped his ears with pressure charges. Worst of all, they scratched at the helmet locks.

His ammunition clip emptied. Lucas's gun clicked. Then Ann's. Then the humans used their firearms as clubs.

The keeper, finally recognizing their predicament, opened the remaining walls.

With half an hour remaining until the point nine nine interval, they reached the end of the cargo spaces and entered the permanent decks of personnel quarters, and in the straight passages they shook the rats off their suits and outran the tiny legs of their pursuers. At last they reached the hangar.

Joshua and Lucas cycled through the personnel airlock, unrolled and inflated the skiff's transport bubble. They pressed the seal against the transport docking mechanism. Ann swathed the horn tip inside bandages. With urging and shoving, a double-dosed Constance bemusedly trotted into the bubble.

Then Ann stared toward the mouth of the hanger.

"Joshua, why are there two skiffs?"

When Joshua turned, there were not only two skiffs, but five men emerging from behind a fuel tank. One of the space suits was jet black with gold trim. Smiling through the face plate was the Lord of Scarborough.

"Greetings, Captain Wang," Emil Hamilton said. "All of you, drop your weapons. Bags too, please. Or would you rather we blow off your legs?"

Under the aim of five automatic rifles, Joshua, Lucas, and Ann released their bags and empty weapons.

"Prior to engaging your services," Hamilton said, "I contracted a team of Nemesis Commando Robots. Top-of-the-line strategic-reasoning AIs--augmented with state-of-the-art armor and weaponry. They entered that airlock behind you weeks ago, and have failed to return or signal. Their loss cost me far more than thirty thousand credits. So, Captain, I'm interested in learning how you solved the keeper's maze."

Joshua kept his eyes still, but took in the situation. In front of him, armed men blocked escape to Raven's skiff. Behind him, on the other side of the airlock ... yes. But he had to play for time ... to let one threat catch up to another.

"Before I tell you anything," Joshua said, "I'd like to know about your plans."

Hamilton laughed. "I suppose I won't mind boasting."

"The unicorn was just a cover to do business with Daedalus Genetics, right? You really wanted intellirats."

"Very good."

"But what do you want intellirats for?"

"Surely that's obvious. I want them for what everyone else wants them for. As a weapon, to infest other people's asteries."

"But why would an asterie developer want to damage asteries?"

"Let me explain the process. It all has to do with Scarborough. Scarborough is a tourist attraction. When the tourists go home, they take the rats with them aboard their return shuttles. Unknowingly, of course. Then the rats infest the tourists' home asteries. My consortium buys the infested asteries at depressed prices. Then we exterminate the rats, and sell the rat-free asteries at market prices. We make a considerable profit, and will be regarded as saviors of otherwise uninhabitable asteries."

"So long as no one tells the secret."

Hamilton smiled thinly.

Joshua glanced at his crew. Their eyes were wide, fixated on the gun barrels aimed at their chests.

Joshua continued: "I don't see how you expect to get rid of the intellirats, when even Daedalus Genetics couldn't."

"This asterie was overrun by an earlier, less controllable version of intellirats," Hamilton replied. He gestured toward their carrybags. "Those particular embryos have been engineered to grow an organic antenna inside the skulls. The proper coded radio signal, at the correct frequency, and the rats die instantly, en masse."

"But isn't there a problem getting them into other people's asteries in the first place? All the inspections, the detectors, the scanners--"

"The rats are designed to survive briefly in vacuum--expanded lung capacity, pressure-barrier skin layers, even hibernation ability. Thus, they can ride on the outside of shuttles, and hop into asterie hangars after docking. And they can operate airlocks."

"I'm sure. But then--"

"Excuse me, Captain. You're not thinking of prolonging this until the reactor melts, are you?" A smirk blossomed on Hamilton's face. "And yes, the keeper was thoughtful enough to warn us about that."

Joshua said nothing. Lucas growled at the ceiling camera: "Traitor!"

Hamilton checked his watch. "We'll need to leave soon. So are you going to explain how you escaped the maze?"

"Certainly," Joshua said. "It was very simple. The crew helped us."

Hamilton's smirk faded.

"The--personnel? They've evacuated!"

"Not all." Joshua tilted his head toward the hangar ceiling camera, as if acknowledging an audience.

As his men shifted footings, Hamilton glared at Joshua. "You're lying."

"Look at the three of us. Not exactly paramilitary material, wouldn't you say? But your commando robots never came out, and we did. It's because we had help."

Hamilton shouted at the camera: "My yacht has missiles! I'm warning you!"

"You're not really sure this place is toothless, are you?" Joshua asked. "And your relationship with Daedalus Genetics hasn't been friendly, either. Not lately. Not since you've been boarding without permission."

Hamilton locked his eyes on Joshua. "You're lying! There's no one here!"

"See for yourself."

"You!" Hamilton pointed to one of his men, then at the airlock. "Go inside, check! No more than one minute, then come out!"

With a nervous glance at his companions, the man approached the airlock.

He pressed the button. The door slid open. He stepped inside. The door slid closed.

Hustling Joshua and Lucas to one side, Hamilton motioned his other men into firing positions directly in front of the airlock.

Joshua waited, tensing his muscles. Lucas studied the bare deck. Ann gazed blankly and stroked Constance's mane. The airlock door slid open.

Out lunged a screaming man--and a thousand angry rats.

Whirling and staggering, Hamilton and his henchmen frantically grabbed and flung furry bodies from their space suit controls. During the wild dance, one man's rifle fell to the deck.

Mindful of the clinging vermin, Joshua slowly edged toward the abandoned weapon.

Approximately half an hour later, having doffed his space suit, Joshua sat in the control room of Raven and watched the pilot's main screen as the skiff bearing Hamilton's henchmen returned to its yacht.

Then Daedalus spewed incandescent and radioactive vapor into surrounding space. The gasses first emanated from the hangar, then from the vents, and then from holes melted along the rim as chunks of the reactor fell through. Finally, the microworld vanished within clouds of superheated mist.

"All the stuff we could have salvaged," Lucas said. "It's not doing anyone any good now."

"Be thankful we got out alive," Ann said.

"Maybe we can get a reward, too," Joshua said. "It depends whether our guest has a price on his head."

He turned to their prisoner. Hamilton struggled with his bonds, but Ann had secured the knots. While continuing to watch the screen, Lucas casually kept a pistol aimed at the small of Hamilton's back.

Hamilton formed his face into a snarl. "Wang, listen! My ship has you outgunned. They're under orders not to accept hostage threats. You may as well surrender right now, because you're not going anywhere!"

"Let me show you why we are," Joshua said.

Joshua clicked screen icons, opening an application window that displayed a graphic of the ships and asterie. Daedalus was interposed between the salvage ship and the space yacht. From the holes in its equator, the spinning worldlet gushed expanding spirals of vapor.

"See this disk-shaped cloud?" Joshua asked. "It's what remains of the interior of Daedalus. Hundreds of thousands of tons of material, converted to plasma-hot gasses. And I've maneuvered so that the disk serves as an impenetrable barrier between our ships. By the time it disperses, we'll be long gone."

Hamilton glared at the screen, then at Joshua. "You won't get far! My ship is faster than yours!"

"You've never navigated through the Asteroid Belt, have you?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Speed isn't everything. Besides, Raven is faster than you think." Joshua smiled at Ann. "You have a place to put him?"

"In the main hold with Constance," Ann replied. "If she can take the smell."

Lucas helped Ann escort Hamilton away. Joshua returned his eyes to his console and tapped keys.

The screen displayed a real-time map of the Asteroid Belt, with their current position superimposed upon a shifting field of asteroids, asteries, and spaceships. Sipping his espresso, Joshua touched the stylus to the screen--marking possible courses, identifying potential intercepts.

He was still working when Lucas returned.

"So who gets him?" Lucas asked.

Joshua sighed, resting a hand on the screen. "I'm still analyzing and tagging the scanner contacts--friends, foes, neutrals, pirates, and sovereignties that might take him. Then I have to figure how to weave around intercept ranges and spheres of influence."

Lucas twitched a smile. "Looks like a dynamic maze."

"It's a mess. Everything in different orbits, changing vectors on whim. Long-range transits in the Belt are always miserable for navigators, thanks to the political chaos."

"You'd like the Belt united under one government."

Joshua shook his head.

"That would be like having a keeper run everything. And there'd be no escape."

He set a course. The ship got under way, and they entered the maze.

Copyright 2006 Joe Schembrie

"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
--Louis D. Brandeis

[Back to Table of Contents]

When a project is bigger than any ever undertaken, even the first step isn't easy.

Chapter 1

But what if you're wrong?" the reporter asked.

Hilda Kremer tried to compose herself. The Black Hole Project auditorium became so silent that the gentle whoosh of maglev traffic on the grassway down the hill could be heard. Even the small gaggle of protesters outside the auditorium were quiet, leaving the air to the calls of birds about their business in the two-century-old redwoods that had grown up around the mountainside building. The four story Mediterranean style mansion had once served as a satellite campus for the University of California at Santa Cruz and before that, a Buddhist retreat. The speaker's platform faced the rose window that once stood over the Buddhist altar, and Hilda often drew a sense of inner peace looking in that direction.

She needed it. They had spent twenty minutes explaining why trying to make a black hole would not destroy the known universe, and here was yet another hostile question.

Project director Dr. Zhau Tse Wen, who had the floor, turned to her. Did he want her to reply to the question? On one hand, his turning to her was a form of recognition; on the other, she didn't want to venture into the minefield of loaded questions. She shook her head. She created intricate, massive computer simulations of subnuclear processes; others strove to make them happen. Desire to make things happen was the enemy of equanimity and clear-headedness.

Tse Wen's mouth turned up just slightly at the corners and he winked. When Tse Wen smiled he reminded her of a contented, if undernourished, Buddhist monk He'd lost his hair before taking his initial telomerase treatments and preferred that look, as it simplified his life. His thinness was not from any asceticism; he simply forgot to eat for days on end. Not infrequently, Hilda and Sarah Levine kidnapped him from his office and drag him over to Sarah's room for a feast of chicken soup and bagel sandwiches filled with kosher sausage slices.

He turned back to the reporter who'd asked the question. "Theory tells us the forces between the electron shells of atoms keep us from collapsing into a tiny ball of neutronium in the center of the Earth. What if we were wrong about that?"

"We don't collapse..." the reporter said.

Tse Wen smiled and bowed slightly. "And neither has any naturally formed black hole ever created a new universe on top of us. Please remember, we live here, too."

A titter ran through the room. Hilda smiled. Tse Wen was a student of martial arts among many other things, but had the kind of mind that could apply those lessons to conflict with words and ideas. Here he had gotten the opponent going in one direction and effortlessly pulled him past his objective and onto the floor. But another reporter rose to take a shot.

"Dr. Zhau, is or is not the Ten-Ten experiment an attempt to create a black hole right in our own asteroid belt before final review of the project?"

"It is not. It is far too small, only ten milligrams, and not the right geometry, to create a black hole. Many years ago, it was thought that quantum black holes might form in such experiments, only to evaporate instantly. But according to the 2135 Wilson-Lu synthetic model of quantum gravity, the minimum area of an event horizon is approximately 1/720th that of a proton--far too big to be made with the amount of energy the Ten-Ten experiment provides. It should, however, help us calibrate Kremer's limit and understand what kind of phenomena to watch for in the main event. I should let Dr. Kremer describe the model."

Tse Wen gave her a cautionary glance. "Less technical," she thought he meant. No escape this time. Hilda took a deep breath, stared up at great dark wooden beams, and imagined herself up there, calm and removed.

"Think of neutrons as tiny balloons filled with quarks," she began. "Squeeze them and heat them enough, they dissolve into a 'quagma,' a kind of bubble of free quarks buzzing around like angry bees. Push more, and the quarks buzz around faster and push back, but they get heavier and change in the process. At a high enough pressure, there's a transition to an ultra dense state of what we call 'strange matter' that is normally unstable, but can exist under extreme pressure.

"Increase the pressure and we think one gets a condensed Planck-scale Lu superposition of all the original mass. I say 'think' because by this time a stellar mass is so dense that it warps spacetime around it to the point where light cannot escape, becoming the unobservable inside of a black hole. The central pressure of a quark star of 3.18 solar masses is enough to cause that collapse.

"To make a black hole without a star, we need to force enough mass-energy into a small enough volume to exceed the critical pressure for long enough for the mass to implode within an event horizon. The Ten-Ten experiment will confirm the model where we can see it and help us with the precise design of the final experiment."

Hilda touched the net for Sarah. I'm getting into your territory now, and you like attention. "Dr. Levine?"

Sarah beamed and brushed a wave of thick brunette hair aside. "When we try to make the black hole some thirty years from now, we'll be using most of the interstellar propulsion capacity of four stars for several months. To use more would needlessly take resources from other interstellar commerce and exploration. Also, the resulting black hole would be heavier and harder to handle than needed. But if we use too little, we'd have to try again and decades of work would be lost. So to get it just right we're going to calibrate the model first."

The reporter frowned and looked as if he were searching for a follow-up that would make sense. Finally he just sighed, shook his head and sat down. Hilda almost sympathized with him; the poor man had been looking for something sensational or at least controversial and what he'd ended up with was "calibrate the model." Granted, it sounded sexy when Sarah said it.

"I think we should take one more question," Tse Wen said.

A well-groomed reporter stood up and stared almost accusingly at Hilda.

Torsten Ried, from Popular Issues, Sarah sent. He's the brother of our nemesis, Senator Lars Ried. Watch out.

Hilda bit her lip. Sen. Ried was the leader of the consolidationist coalition in the Interplanetary Association Senate and a frequent project critic. If his coalition got a majority, he could be the new IPA president. Hilda shivered. Consolidationists wanted to limit cultural change and typically opposed research that might cause it. If the demographic analysis of consolidationist gains was right, humanity might be in for as profound an inward turn as that of China a millennium ago. She might get only one chance to make a black hole.

Tse Wen acknowledged the reporter. "Mr. Ried?"

"Yes. Setting aside the uncertainties and the possibility of wiping this universe out with a new big bang, have any of you considered what you might unleash if you succeed? Are the leaders of humanity ready for the kind of power that having its own black hole would mean?"

Hostile as it was, Hilda realized it was a fair question. To her relief, Tse Wen nodded to Bradford Adams. Brad was a gifted engineer and practical problem solver. He'd thought and written more about what to do with a black hole, if they made one, than any of them.

"No problems, I think. Now our society lets people be people, so we still have gangs, power trips, and police actions here and there. But there has not been a war, or anything resembling one, among the advanced nations of the world, for over a century. Our cybernetic tools for monitoring and preventing misuse of resources are increasingly effective.

"Anyway, the black hole will be created six light-years from any concentration of human population. No bloody politicians there, just scientists." The audience chuckled. Brad's normally standard English lapsed into his native Australian dialect, or 'strine as he called it, when he got excited or wanted to sound folksy. "And many people are excited about this," Brad continued. "Even Bruce Macready, my old science history professor, wants in on it."

"The author of Unification Quest?" the reporter asked.

"Right you are. He's even offered to leave Broadfield College on the Isle of Skye to go along on the Epsilon Eridani mission as an historian. That's probably the most challenging star in the project, technically, because it's so young..."

Dr. Zhau held up a hand. "I must thank you all for this fascinating discussion. So fascinating that indeed we have gone a bit overtime and our food is waiting. Please, everyone, join us for the reception in the atrium and perhaps these conversations can continue in a more relaxed setting."

He bowed and motioned for the team to rise, signaling the end of the press conference.

Hilda and Sarah were first on their feet and quickly off the podium and out the door at the rear of the stage before the applause faded. They'd programmed the food and wanted to check on it. Sarah handed her jacket to a robot, revealing a dark, low-cut, strapless dress.

Hilda sighed. She hadn't considered looking any different at the reception than at the press conference, and her loose black tunic and pants, while simple and elegant, were about as unsexy as a nun's habit. Well, she thought, there was something to be said for truth in packaging.

They sampled some sausage and cheese; Sarah grinned and nodded.

Hilda touched the net to let Brad and Tse-Wen know they were ready.

The team lined up and the guests entered. After all the handshaking was done, knots of people formed. Sarah was surrounded by four major infonet editors, all male. Dr. Zhau had quietly slipped into a corner with the editors of Scientific American and Nature while Brad was sitting at a table in deep political discussion with some of the Coriolis media corps.

"Dr. Kremer?"

She turned. It was the reporter with the political point of view. She would have watch what she said. Misquotes by a journalist with a political point of view could be a real problem. "Yes?"

"Torsten Ried. Popular Issues."

"Oh, yes." They shook hands. Hilda forced a smile and focused in on him. He seemed normal enough, about 180 cm and trim. His slightly sun-bleached brown hair was short with a part on the left. He wore cologne, maybe a little too liberally for her taste.

"It's a nice spread," he said. "I detect a woman's touch in the programming."

She laughed. "Found us out, I'm afraid. Sarah Levine and I spent all afternoon yesterday on it."

"Dr. Levine, yes." Ried followed Hilda's eyes and did a double take.

"Well, I'd like to talk to her, but she seems occupied just now." He turned back toward Hilda.

"Off the record, there's some real risk, isn't there or you wouldn't be doing this experiment?"

Hilda thought about Sarah tasting her sausage and laughed. "It's just a calibration, a little like what Sarah and I did before this reception. The food was programmed down to the atom, but we still had to slip in and taste it first, to see what it was like."

He smiled disarmingly. "Isn't there any result that would cause you to give up the project?"

Hilda shook her head. "Black holes exist. The only question is how much trouble one needs to take to make one."

A deep, resonant thud broke the quiet. She wasn't conscious of falling, rather, the floor seemed to rise to strike her, fall away, and then clobber her again. Antique glass exploded into the room from the high windows. Wine glasses toppled to the floor and food dishes followed.

Smoke and dust filled the atrium instantly. People started to get up off the floor and head for the exits. Hilda sat where she was a moment, not realizing her mouth was open in shock until the dust began to tickle her throat. She tried to touch the net. What happened?

No answer. The building's comm must be down, she thought. She shivered. One got used to the near-instant access bioradio provided, and being cut off felt, momentarily, like suddenly being deaf, or in a lightless room.

"Dr. Kremer, are you okay?"

Hilda looked up at Ried's dust-covered face and clothes. "Ried? Yes, I'm okay. The local net's down."

He nodded and offered his hand, which she took and flowed up to her feet.

"Do you see Dr. Zhau and Dr. Levine?"

"He's okay--over by the buffet, I think. I'll see if I can find Dr. Levine."

Hilda found Brad and Dr. Zhau under the same table where she'd left them. Brad looked angry, Tse Wen looked calm but very, very serious. She felt another slight jolt then, and some dust came down on her. One look at the cracked wall towering over them and she slipped under the table between them.

"Aftershocks?" she asked.

"That was no bloody earthquake," Brad said. "I'd say it was a subterranean bomb and the cavity it created is collapsing--hard to believe that level of animosity. Fortunately, it was matched by their level of incompetence; the damage seems pretty superficial."

Tse Wen shook his head. "We should not assume incompetence, but rather that it achieved exactly the physical result they wanted. Now, what purpose would that result serve? It would frighten people. It could also serve to make the political opposition seem more moderate by comparison."

Brad nodded. "A good cop, bad cop ploy. Just another argument for them--see, we still have these fanatics and therefore we shouldn't have black holes. Machiavellian, it is."

Hilda shuddered, looked up at the table top, then over at Tse Wen sitting cross-legged under it. She did a quick calculation and smiled. "Well, I think we should have black holes. If we had a 16-billion-ton black hole on top of this table, Tse Wen, you could levitate!"

Tse Wen smiled. "Truly a demonstration to impress the greatest critic."

Brad laughed and put an arm around her shoulder; his body felt good next to hers, reminding her of the one night they'd spent together some twenty years earlier, when they'd gotten the go-ahead for the initial phase of the Black Hole Project.

They'd been at a conference in Lillehamar, Norway, talked impactor design and done simulations until the Sun rose at nine the next morning. Then, when the maid knocked and they realized it was getting near checkout time, Brad had held her hands and suggested that, as they were going to have the name for it anyway, they might as well play the game.

It had made her happy to make him happy. When she'd confessed to his girlfriend a year later, she'd gotten a laugh and a hug and the statement that boys will be boys. But there'd somehow never been another such occasion with Brad. Now, feeling him next to her brought back that the pleasant memory. She shut her eyes and tried to exist in the immediate moment, banishing explosions from her mind.

When she opened her eyes, there was Ried, staring at her as if registering something that hadn't occurred to him before.

"I couldn't find Dr. Levine, but I think we're in the clear," he said, relieved. "The net's back up."

With a nonchalant smile that she didn't feel at all, she extricated herself from Brad and under the table. The two of them helped Dr. Zhau to his feet. Maintenance robots were already whirring around, picking up the debris.

She touched the net, comforted by its familiar presence. No one had been seriously hurt, the damage was superficial, and the building would be usable again tomorrow.

"Well, Mr. Ried," Dr. Zhau said while brushing the dust from his shirt and pants, "do you know anything about who might be behind this?"

Ried shook his hear. "The Public Safety Administration puts the explosion almost half a kilometer under the institute building--it's as if someone loaded a mining mole with a half ton of chemical explosives. It was more likely intended to scare than injure."

"Really, mate?" Brad asked, his voice laced with irony. Did your brother tell you..."

Ried cut him off. "My brother's politics are his business. We're just half brothers anyway, and raised fifty years apart. I'm doing my best to be a reporter, that's all. But I think I can assure you that being connected with any kind of terrorism is the last thing he'd want politically.

Brad snorted. "Is that so? He wouldn't make danger from antiproject terrorists just another argument for shutting us down?"

There was an embarrassed silence. Hilda had never seen Brad so angry about something that didn't involve a steering magnet or a photon field lens. She reached for his hand and gave a light squeeze. Let's not be too antagonistic, she sent

Brad squeezed her hand back and took a deep breath. Then he offered a hand to Ried. "Sorry, mate ... a bit shaken, it seems."

"Me too," Ried replied with a softer face and shook hands. "No offense taken."

Dr. Zhau smiled. "Well, Brad, Hilda, if things are back in harmony, perhaps we should check to see if our things are still on our shelves. The upper floors are cleared for reentry, it seems."

Hilda shut her eyes. Not surprisingly, her office cam was still offline.

Then it hit. "Cleared for reentry?"

Dr. Zhau shrugged and smiled. "I thought there would be less chance of injury in a fairly mild shake if we took cover here. Everyone else went out the exits. Afterwards, we were not missed, except by you. It appears we were not as important as the other events today might have led us to believe."

Sarah appeared. "Was I the only one here with the presence of mind to get out of the building?"

Brad started laughing uncontrollably. Soon they had all joined in, and the tension drained away.

Ried put a hand on Hilda's shoulder. "They've ID'd the group responsible for this mess. Another small fringe group I've never heard of that wants recognition. Dr. Kremer, I'd be happy to help you put things back in order. Of course I might have a few more questions over dinner afterwards."

Hilda saw the reporter's face lighten up. It seemed an earnest offer. Brad gave her an "it's okay" look.

"Okay, Ried," she said. "But only if you agree to call me Hilda. I've had about as much of 'Dr. Kremer' as I can take today."

"That," Brad added, "is another kind of Kremer's limit."

Ried smiled and stuck out his hand towards Hilda. "Torsten, then."

Zhau Tse Wen gestured to the stairwell.

Hilda sighed. The elevators would be down for a few more hours.

Dinner was at the Ridge House in North Boulder Creek. The meat was replicated, but the crepes and the soup were house-made and smelled delicious. The view sitting just above the pine tops was dramatic. At dessert, the fog rolled in below them like some kind of alien flood.

Knowing Torsten would eventually break the quiet mood with questions, Hilda ventured one of her own first. "Tell me what it's like to be in a political family. I can't imagine the pressures it must place on everyone around your brother."

Torsten chuckled. "No probably not. In my family, everything revolves around my brother's political career. He's the Vaterführer. Anyone can do anything they want as long as it doesn't get in the way of his vision for the family."

"It sounds a little autocratic."

Torsten shrugged. "It takes a lot of effort to put someone in office. You need a support team, and what better a team than a family. I'm kind of the black sheep in the family because of my independence.

"Quite a sacrifice, I would think," Hilda said, not entirely convinced of the independence or the sacrifice.

He shrugged. "Not for me. I always wanted to be a journalist. So I told them to leave me out of their political games. I just want to do my work the best way I know and leave the family politics out of it. You're Kate Avonford's daughter, aren't you, as well as Wotan Kremer's? That must have made for an eventful home life."

Hilda smiled wryly; she knew about living with famous parents. Her starship-captain mother and planet-molding father couldn't live with each other and couldn't stay away from each other, living a soap opera story that had spread to every human habitation in known space.

"Until I was sixteen; then Mom left and Dad sent me back to Earth to go to school. I had other ideas; I wanted to come right back, so I asked the crew to let me stay awake on the voyage and I studied on my own. I pretty much grew up on that starship; I learned to pilot on the ship's runabout, learned zero-g sports from the crew."

"Relationships?"

"No. The only ones up were three women and a couple of very married men who weren't interested." She shrugged. "I wasn't that interested either."

Torsten looked vaguely disappointed, and switched topics. "I see you don't have a school certificate or bachelor's degree?"

"No, just the Ph.D. I'd passed all the tests for entrance to grad school by the time I arrived and went right into research." She smiled, somewhat embarrassed." I've gone to some lectures, but never actually attended a regular class since leaving New Antarctica. So much for Dad sending me away to school!" She laughed. "At least your family's politics are external," she said. "You act like an objective journalist, but your questions seem, well, biased towards your brother's political bent."

"Popular Issues considers the consolidationist viewpoint a legitimate one. I try to ask the kind of questions my reading public would ask if they were here. Having a point of view doesn't make me unobjective or untruthful. Our readership has serious questions about what you folks are doing. My job is to address their concerns."

Hilda nodded, trying to understand his point of view. "I suppose every new thing ever done has been terrifying to someone. Automobiles--people thought human beings wouldn't survive 50 kilometers an hour. Now we approach the speed of light. Some thought these genetically engineered radios we grow in our heads were going to turn us into computer-controlled zombies; now they're so natural to us, we forget about them. Change happens. We adjust."

"Hilda," he said earnestly. "This black hole project is terrifying to ordinary people who don't understand it. It's just way out of anyone's intuitive range. I don't know if I can really explain it, but at least help me understand it."

She made herself smile and replayed the simulation she'd shown at the press conference on the restaurant table screen.

Finally he asked, "But a new universe is possible, isn't it? I mean, anything can come out of the quantum foam, can't it?"

"Look, according to statistical mechanics, every air molecule in this room might suddenly find itself on a trajectory toward the upper left corner of the room, leaving us in vacuum. Well, don't hold your breath."

Ried sighed. "Okay, I guess it's something I don't have to worry about right now. You don't mind if I use this interview on the net, do you?"

"Huh? How?"

"Watch the table screen. I'll play back the view from the restaurant's surveillance camera."

Hilda saw herself and Torsten from above, with the simulation on the tiny image of the table screen, looking for all the world like some weird place mat art.

"But what about privacy?" she asked. "How can you do that?"

"I'm licensed media, remember; I have access. We can use security video because otherwise everyone would be running around with cameras making a nuisance of themselves."

"I didn't know." She mulled over his revelation.

"Most people don't. As for privacy, we have to ask before using it, or lose our license."

She smiled as she saw herself talk and gesture.

"No problem?" he asked.

Maybe it was the wine, but she looked all right to herself. "No problem." Hilda laughed. "But, for the project information. Sarah's the key person right now."

"Does she understand it as well as you do? How do you work as a team?"

Hilda thought about that one. "We all work well together; Dr. Zhau asks the right questions, Sarah generates all the possible answers, I winnow the answers down to those that make sense and can predict something. Brad figures out how to test the predictions. Then Dr. Zhau and I go over everything that Brad does with anal-retentive thoroughness, and Sarah generates worst case scenarios--she has the most imagination. Occasionally, I decide whether a worry is real or not."

"But if some new theoretical concern came up at the last minute, you'd be the one they'd turn to, wouldn't you?" Torsten pressed. "They'd be reluctant to go on without you."

Hilda laughed and waved a hand expansively, "Okay, I'll admit it. I'm probably essential." Four glasses of wine, she thought, was what it took to let her say something like that. "It's getting late."

Torsten nodded. "Yes. But I'd like to continue this some day."

The conversation had been pleasant, Hilda thought, and the offer sounded innocent enough. "Okay, when and where."

"Well, I'm supposed to cover one of my quote brother's unquote speeches next week. Any chance you'd like to come hear it? Nobody needs to know who you are, of course. Then we can discuss it over dinner, on or off the record, as you like."

She did need to understand these people better. "Okay, it's a date."

They arrived at her car, the car door opened for her, and she flowed languidly into it. Torsten, grinned foolishly as he touched her shoulder, then let the door shut after her. She fell asleep on the seat as the car steered itself down the grassway and rocked gently as it caught the buried maglev track. Her last waking thoughts were that she was going to feel a bit silly the next morning, assuming some idiot with a bomb didn't blow her up for real because if she was really as important as all that, maybe the opposition would ... do ... something.

Chapter 2

"Ever the daydreamer, eh?"

Torsten looked up, mildly irritated. He'd been working on the net--not daydreaming.

"Hi, Anna."

Anna Messenger, cousin Rolf's wife and a distant Ried cousin herself, was his hostess when he was in the San Francisco Bay area. She was tall, with straight auburn hair parted in the middle, and casually dressed in a plain gray long shift. When she moved, it was pretty clear that was all she was wearing. Such casualness, he knew, was sheer art--as an actress, she had learned how to gain advantage with men. An advantage Torsten had long since conceded to her.

He waved a hand in the air. "On the net, studying BHP simulations."

"Full access? How did you get by their blocks?"

"As far as I can tell, there are no blocks. No need. The explanatory text is in a foreign language--physics."

She rolled her eyes. "Come on inside, the fog's rolling in and I'm chilly. Any penetration?"

"I didn't get anywhere with Levine," Torsten said. "She's suspicious of me. But Kremer seemed less on guard. So I got her woozy enough over dinner, but she backed away. We may have the beginnings of a relationship, though. She's curious about us; she accepted an invitation to come to the forum next week."

Anna shot a glance at him. "Kremer? The black hole science geek? A wonder she'd let you get close. Levine looked more amenable to drugs and seduction. Kremer doesn't look the type. You think she'll really come to the forum?"

Torsten shrugged. "She says she needs to understand why we're doing it."

Anna spat. "Now you're swallowing her BS She more than anyone knows damn well that they're rolling the dice with everyone's lives--and I mean everyone in creation--all for their own damn hubris. Torsten, politically, we need to get someone with inside credentials to say something embarrassing about the project. We don't have enough people scared yet. Did you get DNA samples?"

"We had dinner. I got her fork. What do you need that for?"

That got a wicked grin. "Opposition research. The less you know about it the better. Anyway, Lars wants to see you about your reportage. He's downstairs."

"Here?"

Anna shrugged. "I didn't think that was a good idea either. He insisted on coming with me."

As they came down the stairs, Torsten saw Lars and Mono Tukapo, his bodyguard and political secretary. Lars was actually shorter than Torsten, but so toned and barrel-chested that he looked bigger. His professionally styled hair was so neatly cropped that he looked more artificial than a humanoid robot. He reeked of the presence and self-confidence of a successful politician, and had for as long as Torsten had known him.

Torsten reached out a hand. "Hello, Lars. Something wrong with one of my stories?"

Lars flashed his best campaign commercial smile. "Hey, what kind of brother would I be if I didn't pester you once in a while? I'm worried that you might be doing the disinterested reporter bit a little too much, and thought we should have a chat. The polls being where they are, we could use a little more of a boost, and everyone knows Popular Issues' lean, anyway."

Anna chuckled and ordered some drinks.

Torsten shook his head. Only a tiny handful of physicists really challenged the physics, and they did so in a language he couldn't understand any better than Hilda's. "Lars, I've got a reputation to maintain--my stuff is much more effective if I appear objective; a point for their side for every two of ours." To do even that much he had to be careful.

A robot floated in with the drinks. Lars latched onto one and sipped it as he stared off into space. Anna played with her ice cubes. It was clearly up to Torsten to fill the silence.

"Maybe I could go to three points for our side for every one of theirs?"

Lars shook his head. "No, if anything, get the ratio more even. AI's look at ratios like that and report bias. No, the points for our side need to be more telling, the ones for the other side more trivial. Present the issue in our language instead of theirs. Weight it that way. The public's not scared enough yet."

Torsten stifled a moment of irritation with Lars for telling him his own business--and worse, being right about it. He just nodded.

"Torsten, my committee is hearing rumors that the BHP is carrying on some secret experiments, even more dangerous than the Ten-Ten. We're not ready to go public with that, so it's off the record."

"Funny thing," Anna said. "The same things have been going around my production set. The studio is owned by Wu-Lake Ltd.; one of their divisions is the prime contractor on the experiment instrumentation--the stuff that's supposed to take quarter-nanosecond pictures of the Ten-Ten experiment until it gets vaporized."

Torsten laughed. "I've looked, and there's nothing there. I couldn't..."

"Sounds like you have two independent sources, Torsten," Lars said.

Was Lars crazy? The sources were hardly independent. "You want me to go with that?"

Lars settled back against his chair and made himself comfortable. "Torsten, there's a time for objectivity, but this election is about pulling in all the resources of our family to help win. It's not about individual pride, status, and reputation. No, this is about our people and what we can give back to them, what we can give back to our world. This election is about much greater issues than making governmental policies and keeping the constituency happy. It could be about saving humanity itself. We need to sell people on the idea that the public experiment is only the tip of the iceberg, that things are happening in the Black Hole Project that could destroy everyone if we don't expose this Ten-Ten experiment."

Torsten was silent for a while, contemplating his place in the family and the overall scheme of things. He had no choice. "Okay, you want a make-or-break issue to pull out of the hat just before the election? For that, timing is as important as content. You don't want to give them time to refute. Mark Twain said that a lie can get halfway around the world before truth has even put its boots on. We have to time it so the boots come on after the election."

Anna smiled at Torsten as if to say, "You're starting to enjoy this, aren't you?" "Well, we're stuck five percent behind. We need to switch two percent to you and another two percent of the expansionist leaners to undecided. Simulations show that a scandal on the Black Hole Project could do that, if it stinks enough."

Lars nodded. "Even the appearance of scandal, of stonewalling, or of something not entirely right could do it. Our side is the safe side."

Torsten sighed. "Okay. It's dueling experts and people-like-us can't decide. So, where there's smoke, there's fire. That will certainly bring in magazine hits; but..."

Lars cut him off with a wave of the hand. "This is the kind of gut-worry issue that binds voters together. Make them fear."

"As I said, it will be more effective closer to the election."

"Perhaps." Lars sighed. "We'll go with your judgment on that, for now. But make no mistake: this is a good cause to fight for. I believe in it. I'm told by some of the most brilliant scientists we have that existence itself is at stake here." Lars stopped for another dramatic pause, convincing enough that Torsten wondered if he might be sincere.

Lars continued quietly, "This is big stuff. So big I'm pulling in the whole family on this one. I need you. Everything might depend on a few good breaks."

"I understand fully, Lars, and I'm on it. I just have to be a little subtle, or it could backfire before the election." He didn't add that it was certain to backfire sometime after the election; that was irrelevant. If Lars won, he'd be in power and he knew how to use it.

Anna touched him on the shoulder. "We may need to do something to this Kremer woman before she does something to us."

"Journalistically, of course," Lars added.

"Of course," Torsten answered. "But, if I'm going to gain Kremer's confidence, I can't irritate her too much now."

Lars raised an eyebrow, then nodded slowly.

The day of the speech, Torsten watched Kremer walk into the Mark Hopkins Hotel. Her costume was pedestrian, a black tunic and slacks--indistinguishable from what she'd been wearing at the news conference. A typical geek, he thought. She walked closer to the inner walls, looking up, and she wasn't the only one. The bomb at the institute had left its mark on everyone's thoughts--even at a Lars Ried rally. Anna's friends had meant to scare people about the BHP but the immediate result was a kind of generalized fear that affected any potentially controversial gathering.

It was as if they'd let a genie out of the bottle, one that had supposedly been capped centuries ago. People were screaming for a review of antisurveillance laws and robotic restrictions. If Lars won, he'd probably get enough government policing power to prevent anyone from doing to him what his people had done to create the current mood. The irony of it made Torsten smile, however uncomfortably.

Kremer stopped and looked across the outer hallway through the transparent walls, a distinctive feature added in reconstruction after the 2221 quake. The view of the bay was one of Torsten's favorite sights, too. The only visible security was signs at the entrances that said "By invitation only," but the party's AI's would discreetly check everyone entering with multispectral cameras and microwave scans from overhead. Plainclothes operatives near the doors would be cued to offer gentle reminders to anyone who wandered in without reading the sign. Anna's work; she'd artfully arranged the appearance of openness and Kremer walked into the room unaware of the checks. Torsten went down to meet her.

She sat in the back of the room, running her hands through her short blond hair, clearly feeling uncomfortable. What would she know about Lars going in? He asked the net for a quick-look data scan to see what an outsider like Kremer might get. Noted consolidationist within the Conservative Union Party--Geology degree--apolitical through grad school--gregarious--desire for order--politician since age of 42--drive for power came early--What did he want to be when he grew up? '"n charge," quoted from an undergraduate friend. Family home lies outside Leipzig..." Nothing particularly scary there. He went up to introduce himself.

"Hello, Torsten. I've been reading reviews of your brother's political life. Some aren't very flattering--'unsophisticated,' 'a will to impose order,' and so on."

Torsten shrugged. "He's got a consolidationist constituency to play to. But beyond that, I think he's a pretty good leader."

"Is that your job, to balance the news?"

Torsten smiled and shook his head. For all her naïveté, this lady was quick--a lot quicker than he was, and he'd have to keep that in mind. He would have to work at his own pace and avoid getting into a contest of wits with her.

"I like to think I'm fair-minded about him, though. You know I don't know him as well as I should. He's more like a grandparent than a brother. Now keep in mind that he's preaching to the choir here. His job is to pump these people up and motivate them to go out and work for the election."

Lars Ried strode into the room and waved to the crowd amid applause and cheers. Dressed in a high-fashion single-piece navy-blue suit in the loose-cut Scandinavian fashion over a powder blue turtleneck set off by a red-jeweled medallion on a gold chain, he exuded urbane executive authority. Political posters rose up as if on queue as he took the podium. Lars nodded in appreciation and finally held his hand up to quiet the room.

"Tonight I would like to talk to you frankly about an issue that confronts each of us in this room and those I seek to represent. It is the undeniable and palpable suspicion, even fear, which divides the people of our planet today.

"Issues of pure scientific research that don't even have an economic value are dividing our world.

"Too often, those of us who believe in letting humanity adjust to the changes that technology has already made before embarking on new and questionable endeavors may, find ourselves caricatured and stereotyped as a danger to tolerance. Some have suggested that the Conservative Union Party is motivated by political opportunism with the ultimate goal of denying freedom to researchers, many of whom are doing the enriching and rewarding work of consolidating, understanding, and applying the huge mass of data accumulated over the last two centuries.

"My friends, the Conservative Union seeks merely to point out that the social and cultural implications of research can no longer be ignored. We say, let the people decide if they are ready for yet another new technology to complicate their lives. We say, let the people decide if they want to take the risk of playing around with the basic fabric of the universe when there is no pressing need for it."

Kremer squirmed in her seat at the applause. Torsten patted her hand. Lars was in good form, Torsten thought, as the elder Ried's rhetoric flowed over its spellbound audience.

Kremer leaned over to Torsten and whispered. "I fear the beginnings of an inquisition."

Torsten put a hand on hers. "Not an inquisition; a regaining of control. This isn't the Middle Ages. The AI infrastructure can't be the instrument of an inquisition and it will defend individuals who resist it. An inquisition is impossible. Lars just wants efforts refocused. Politics is perception, Hilda. Yours are different from most of these people's. Hear him out for me. Then we can talk, okay?"

Hilda rolled her eyes and returned her attention to the platform.

Lars Ried continued. "I come before this audience tonight with the explicit purpose of reconciliation with the scientific community.

"Let us bridge together the gap of misunderstanding. Let us help the scientific community understand that humanity is in danger of losing itself and cannot afford the disruption that the Black Hole Project might bring. Enough is enough."

"You call that reconciliation?" Kremer whispered to Torsten who winked back at her.

"History has much to teach us about scientific research run amok," Lars continued.

"Friends, just as we have citizen oversight committees guiding our legislation, we need citizen oversight committees watching over scientific research projects. Even if they may be right, we have to hold back until at least a majority understands what they are doing! It's our necks on the line.

"My first priority if elected will be to put at least a temporary hold on any other experiments that may have societal implications, including, on the face of it, the Black Hole Project. My second priority will be to put in place a citizen watchdog committee to curtail aberrant research earlier. The expansionist coalition is on record opposing both initiatives. The choice of responsible people should be clear.

"Thank you for your support!"

The resulting ovation rang in Torsten's his ears. Kremer sat shaking her head and looking distinctly unhappy.

"It's all about power, isn't it?" she said. "Who is the alpha male? Who gets to beat on whom? Your brother reduces the work of the entire scientific community, never mind the Black Hole Project, to a political beauty contest, with him and a bunch of politically correct toadies as the judges."

He winced at "toadies" and the hostility it implied. "I'll ignore the moral issue for the moment, but at least consider that it is simply impossible for a democratic politician to pander only to elitists and stay in office."

"Elitist? Look, I don't know the first thing about, say, hypnoactive kinetic art. Does that make the artists 'elitist?' It's just different areas of interest. Leave cobblers to their lasts."

Damn, she was bullheaded! "When the last is creation itself? I think not."

"But..." She seemed confused, and a bit angry. "You journalists can affect so many things yourselves. Are you really objective, or is that just a power trip, too? Excuse me a moment."

She whirled and walked off toward the toilets.

Torsten waited by the hotel foyer. He wondered once more if she was angry enough to duck out of their dinner date. But Kremer returned, noticeably more composed than when she left.

"I hope this doesn't mean we have to postpone dinner..." he began.

She shook her head and smiled fleetingly. "I'm fine."

They wandered downhill in silence and ended up, not so accidentally, at a small Thai restaurant Torsten knew. An elegant little hideaway on the third floor, it had leanings towards the exotic spices of Pattaya--served, of course, by elegantly painted young men dressed in stunning silk dresses. He'd taken dates there before, often with good effect.

Kun Srichard, who knew the Ried men well, provided Torsten with a table in a quiet corner of the petite room with a secluded view of the ancient Golden Gate Bridge sinking into the fog, now rolling in from the ocean.

A message from Anna announced itself as they finished a dessert of candied rice and fruit. He touched the net for the playback.

Good news--they've got problems with the experiment. Your sweetie doesn't know it yet, but she's going on a space voyage. So are we.

We? Space? he replied.

I'll tell you all about it when you get here.

His heart beat a little faster than could be explained by the curry.

Chapter 3

Brad's image on Hilda's wall screen pointed to a section of the array imaged on the wall screen of his office. Hilda thought briefly of the nesting of images of ever-decreasing size and resolution collapsing to a precisely located point with no information content.

"If those radiation levels are isotropic," he said, "the experiment is putting out more energy in gamma radiation alone than we are putting in with kinetic energy." He turned to her. "I don't buy that, but I don't see how the results could be strongly directional. We've only collided milligrams; not nearly enough for any shielding effect."

Hilda shook her head, feeling frustrated; the results made no sense and screamed of bad data or bad instrumentation. But, she reminded herself, much great physics had come from results that were contrary to all expectations, at first. "Brad, even in these precursor collisions, we're into new territory; quagmas a million times denser than have ever been produced before. We ought to expect something new."

"I know," Brad said. "If we only didn't have the whole bloody world breathing down our necks expecting everything to be perfect and just like predicted or else. I look at the political sims and wonder if there will ever be another chance." He scratched his right temple.

"I know how you feel," Hilda said. "Bombs, grandstanding politicians, idiot journalists ... I didn't think it would be such a fight," she said. A pang of guilt joined her frustration. Dating Torsten Ried and getting a worms-eye view of ultra-suspicious populism and its panderers had given Hilda lots of insight into the political problems they faced. In the last two weeks she'd seen political networking that put even academic kingdom-builders to shame. On her own part, she'd offered her services to the project's outreach group, talking to high schools, futurist groups, and even a journalist's convention.

Torsten, to his credit, had introduced her to several journalists who at least had an inkling of how the scientific community worked and encouraged her to reach out to them, while cautioning her not to voice too many technical words. But, outreach sucked away her time and energy. She hadn't touched her toroidal spin web transformations in two weeks and felt a growing void within her.

Brad snorted. "It's a bloody law of nature; the bigger the advance, the more you have to fight for it. But we have to stay with it. You'll be able to concentrate a lot better when you get out to the test site, away from these distractions."

"Is that why Tse Wen is sending Sarah and me out?"

Brad shook his head in frustration. "I'm not sure what you two can do to the experiment on-site that you both can't do here. But she'll be a right place to think."

"Well, we're sure not getting anywhere here," Hilda said. "So maybe being there will work--just seeing the stuff with our own eyes and touching the equipment with our own fingers."

She recognized Tse Wen's wisdom in sending them to the experiment site. They needed focus, focus away from this political mess. But frustration crowded into her thoughts. She turned to her long-time friend. "Thirty years of work and things feel like they're coming completely unglued--bombs, Lars Ried's political pandering, crazy experiment results..." She sighed. "It's getting late. Talk to you later. I'm going to sleep." Hilda often stayed overnight and slept on a fold-out cot. She pulled it vigorously from her closet.

Brad smiled. "Oh, she'll be right in the end, you'll see. G'night."

The screen went blank.

Chaos, I just hope I can sleep, she thought as she threw her clothes into the closet.

Morning was bright in her window when she realized she hadn't thought about black holes, quantum gravity, or protesters for at least eight hours.

She took that thought back--she hadn't thought of it consciously. But from somewhere in her deep sleep at least three plausible explanations for what had happened had formed in her head. Smiling, she sat down at her terminal, grabbed her sketch pad, and started setting up the simulations.

Her stomach growled. She was, she noted, still stark naked, and ravenously hungry. Time for a break. But plausibility started to change to possibility before her eyes, and she kept on. One of the possible explanations might mean that the darker side of Lars Ried's political constituency had penetrated into the project far deeper and with much more sophistication than any of them realized.

She sent a note to Tse Wen and grabbed her long shirt in case he called back.

He did.

"I was wondering if we might have lunch. There are things I'd like to talk to you about--in person."

"I am available," he said with a smile.

Tse Wen stroked the slight goatee he affected which, along with his bald head and thinness, gave him the aura of an ageless oriental sage. He'd been about forty when the antiaging retrovirus was spread--it was all for effect, which he'd cheerfully admit if called on it.

"Now what is all this being mysterious about?" he asked.

Hilda's hamburger was too good to believe. Grill smoke leaking into the dining room of the cafe added to the taste of the food without being overly noticeable. She swallowed her last bite and had a sip of lemonade to clear her throat.

"I see three possibilities for what's happening at the experiment site. One, of course, is that it's new physics--perhaps a virtual quantum black hole did form and there was a kind of leak-through of energy from another universe, or another part of our universe."

Tse Wen nodded politely. He didn't think so either, she could tell, but completeness required mentioning the possibility.

"The second is that the anisotropy is caused by advanced wave Mota crystallization."

He frowned. "General relativity permits such a solution, but I think that is only because it is incomplete. Even at the Planck level, the causality implications are disturbing."

"Aren't they? I can't say that there aren't any other possibilities for anisotropism, but that was the only one I could find that made even that much sense. Which brings me to my third idea." Her face sobered. "Maybe we aren't getting the real data."

Now Tse Wen really frowned. "The last thing a theorist should do is to claim that data is bad which does not fit previous theory."

Hilda nodded. "That's why I mentioned it last. But the falsification of data does fit within the existing theoretical structure, perhaps better and more simply than time travel or multidimensional teleportation."

Tse Wen shook his head, then grinned. "I would not put out press releases. But you have convinced me some caution is warranted. I shall have conversations. Do you still see the reporter, Torsten Ried?"

"Occasionally."

"Do you think that wise?"

Hilda ran a hand through her hair. "Torsten's a nice guy. Lovely smile, and he thinks and listens. I'm making progress; he's not certain that the Black Hole Project is such an evil thing, he just doesn't know and he's got a lot of family pressure. And you know, I'm not sure Lars sees it as anything more than a political issue that he can use to play his political game. If it became a non-issue, or even worked for him in some way, I don't think he'd bother to oppose it. I think we just have to do a better job of educating people."

"Ah, very brilliant! After a few years of such an education program, the proportion of people who tunnel bombs under our building may decrease by a statistically significant amount!"

Hilda felt deflated. "I'm sorry."

"And I, too, am sorry for using humor to disguise my frustration, which is as great as yours. I shall trust you and Sarah to deal with any possible physical causes of the anomaly, in the distraction-free field location. Brad will continue to supervise the work here. It will be left to me to talk to people to try to bring things back into harmony again. I think next year, you should chair the project."

Nobody had ever said or done anything to scare Hilda as much as that pronouncement. It left her open-mouthed and staring at Tse Wen in abject horror. She could not think of anything to say.

Tse Wen laughed and reached out to touch her. "No, no, I was only kidding."

Hilda began to giggle a bit in a reaction that soon dissolved into the kind of uncontrollable laughter that was for her but a micrometer from uncontrollable tears.

"You'll need to go soon. Your certification is current?"

Hilda nodded.. One of the results of being awake for eight years on a starship was being a qualified spacecraft commander.

"You can work out the details of the investigation on the Psi Naught en route.

It took a week to get clean up loose ends and get underway, but once the Psi Naught finished acceleration and settled into the routine of interplanetary travel, Hilda buried herself in simulations, changing parameters and discarding approximations in an effort to make theory fit the data. She came up only to eat and sleep. For her, this was what physics was all about--the driving compulsion to work through a compelling problem.

Three days after they departed, Sarah came to Hilda's cabin.

"Any luck with the theory?"

Hilda shook her head. "If those results are real, they don't fit theory. But the main data-handling software seems very clean"

Sara frowned "I think we can verify the anisotropy question by placing new Ragi probes away from the collision plane and firing another round of tests."

Hilda nodded. "That leaves bugs in the data stream itself." A century or two ago, spy services developed a very thin technology that could be inserted in a fiber optic cable joint. The bug could read data and pass it on with or without modifications.

"The controller would have to be very sophisticated, possibly even a non-Asimovian AI," Sarah said.

The idea of an AI not limited by the laws of robotics disquieted Hilda. "Chaos, these people have blinders on if they'd do that!"

"You've seen them in action. Using an illegal AI would be exactly what Consolidationists should be against. But power is what they're about, not principle."

Hilda shook her head. "They'd undercut themselves if it ever got out. Too big a risk, I think."

"So maybe they think that we wouldn't be looking for it," Sarah said. "Anyway, the Rieds aren't the whole story. The project is a big target. There are other more fanatic Consolidationists and people who need to make their own mark on the cosmos. They could do anything."

"Our AI's should help us against that kind of threat."

Sarah shrugged. "They'd try to protect us, but remember that our opponents are people, too. Typically Asimovian AI's stay out of people conflicts until physical harm to someone becomes a real possibility, whatever their evaluation of the potential perpetrators."

"I'm not sure I'd want to change that," Hilda said after some thought.

"Me neither--which is why we have some work to do ourselves, and quietly." Sarah stood up. "I've got the equipment ready to go. My thinking is that we should get it in place first thing before the opposition figures out that anything is happening, let alone what."

"Okay." Hilda nodded and smiled. "It's been a while since I did anything experimental. I may be all thumbs."

Sarah smiled. "We have time and a fully equipped nanoscale fabrication facility on board."

Six weeks later, Hilda watched the fountain of glowing plasma corkscrew ahead of the Psi Naught as the ship decelerated toward the main habitat for the Ten-Ten experiment personnel. Her weight fell as magnetic fields transferred the spacecraft's spin angular momentum to its exhaust.

As the rotation slowed, she could watch long enough to follow the long white tubes of the Ten-Ten experiment's pellet accelerators all the way in either direction from the Macrocollider Experiment Station. The faded to the thinness of spider silk but never quite vanished, even ten thousand kilometers distant. The beauty of it never ceased to thrill her.

The project's cylindrical habitat and control center swung tethered to an asteroid about ten kilometers from the planned collision vertex. The complex seemed to grow as they got closer and she watched the cylinder of the habitat module swing around its asteroid anchor once a minute like the second hand of a giant clock. A tiny elevator climbed inward from the habitat to meet them at the central rock.

The plasma fountain ceased as the Psi Naught's relative velocity decayed to a few meters per second. Hilda and Sarah felt a momentary queasiness as they returned to zero gravity. Hilda took personal control of the spacecraft docking for practice, goosing this thruster and that to bring them to the counter-rotating dock assembly at the north pole of the little asteroid. There were three other spacecraft present, including the Interplanet News ship, Gulliver.

"I thought we were going to get away from that," Hilda said.

Sarah shrugged.

As she settled in among three other spacecraft, Hilda watched insect-like limbs deploy from a half dozen places around the Psi Naught's toroidal hull and grasp the open latticework of the docking platform. A flexible tube rose like a cobra from the platform and mated itself to the main door of the cabin. Sarah supervised the shutdown.

"Your helmet." Sarah handed Hilda her helmet with a slightly defiant look. The chances of her needing it were about as close to infinitesimal as any AI could calculate, but Sarah liked all her stones turned over.

Hilda laughed and took it. "I feel like I'm headed for another giant leap for woman-kind instead of a docking tube."

The entrance into the air-filled docking tube was as normal as ever, though, as was the trip down the elevator to the habitat cylinder. There was a surprise when they got there, however: Torsten Ried

"Uh!" was all Hilda could manage.

"Mr. Ried," Sarah said, drawing out the "Ried."

"Torsten, we're going to be kind of busy," Hilda said, apologetically.

He nodded, but looked at her more like a puppy than a predator. "Don't worry, the media room's on the Gulliver. We'll all be there, anchoring, when the thing actually happens. Besides, you don't have to work all the time, do you? Dinner's being served in the level six atrium now. That's where everyone is."

His questions over their last meetings had been getting less and less hostile, and their conversations had ranged over the known universe, from Hilda's memories of New Antarctica to the debate about the genetically unmodified New Reformationist colony at Proxima II. Hilda felt repelled at the loss of life and Torsten listened; he'd been a good listener.

Hilda nodded. "Good. We'll be up after we get settled in. I didn't mean to be cold, Torsten. It was just, well, a surprise."

He laughed. "That was the general idea. May I offer you a tour?"

Sarah waved him off. "We spent a year out here helping set this place up."

"Oh. Well, okay, I'll see you ladies later."

The walk was a pleasant stretch. Hilda reviewed the layout on her net to locate their assigned quarters. The can was about thirty meters in diameter with staterooms arranged in rings around the outside of each of the first nine levels. The center sections were given over to equipment, labs, and common functions. There were three elevators spaced equilaterally. The tenth level was a domed combination of park and vegetable garden, with a swimming pool that Hilda had been dreaming about since the Psi Naught shipped out. The corridors were lined with hydroponic flower boxes as well; a thornless yellow rose with just enough scent adorned either side of her room, Number 502. Sarah was in 503 next door, with petunias.

Later, they went through an uncomfortable dinner in which almost everyone was either a media jackal looking for meat or a potential saboteur.

Hilda took Sarah's arm. "I'm not sure I can take another one of these."

"I know how you feel. Ready?"

"You mean, just go and do it? Now?"

Sarah grinned. "Now."

They wandered out of the cafeteria separately, then checked out a shuttle and arrived at the MES at 2300 universal. The ten-meter-radius sphere of the Macrocollider Experiment Station was so covered with various protuberances, antennae, and boxes that it looked to Hilda as if someone had dipped a geckro-covered volleyball into a bin of miscellaneous electronic parts. Formally, it was called the MES, informally, the "mess." Their shuttle headed for a tubular protuberance that turned out to be an airlock. They docked.

Pressures equalized, the doors opened.

The spherical room was brightly lit. Narrow boxes, tubes, and lattice frames radiated from the very center of the complex like an outsized metallic forest growing from the tiniest asteroid imaginable--a one-meter radius ball. It looked like random junk. But a second look showed Hilda that the long axes of most of the equipment lay in a circular plane centered on the vertex, as they should be to investigate a sheet of debris normal to the collision axis. Black patches of photovoltaic cells and infrared data bus windows glinted on most of the equipment.

Hilda examined one of several huge boxes around the outer wall of the sphere and found what she was looking for. "Sarah, here's the neutrino detector. Neutrino radiation from the experiment should be approximately isotropic and proportional to the total energy. Let's see if this one is telling us the truth."

"Got it," Sara said, and shoved herself over to the device.

Meanwhile, Hilda placed a number of simple, disk-shaped neutron detectors, each about two centimeters across and a couple of millimeters thick, at various places around the collision site.

"Good evening, ladies," a voice announced.

Hilda felt a chill down her back.

She turned and saw a large ruddy man wearing a BHP staff sweatshirt glide out from behind the central globe. He was calm, inexpressive, neither smiling nor frowning, but his eyes darted restlessly.

"Good evening," she said. "You are?"

"Dr. Vitaly Rossov, Dr. Kremer; I am new site engineer. Anything I can do to help?"

Sarah stopped her with a hand on her arm and smiled at Rossov. Hilda noted that the front of Sarah's skin-tight pressure suit had opened almost down to her navel.

"Nothing we needed to bother you with, Dr. Rossov," Sarah said. "We're putting some equipment in place for tomorrow's test shots and adjusting camera fields. Trying to get a handle on the anomaly."

"I'll be about my calibrations then," he said. "We have a test shot at 0900 and everything should be ready. Not expecting visitors. Will be done in hour or so."

"We'll manage," Sarah said. "Thanks, Dr. Rossov."

Rossov nodded and floated back to where he'd come from.

Sarah made a hush gesture to cut Hilda off, then pointed to the terminal end of the neutrino detector cable on the outer wall of the facility. "Hold that," she whispered, positioning Hilda so her body hid the work site.

Sarah, Hilda decided, really didn't trust Rossov.

Silently, Hilda held the cable, floating so her body hid what they were doing while Sarah slipped the tiny, transparent disk over the optical cable end and reconnected. Then she followed Sarah to the airlock and the shuttle.

"Is Rossov a spy?" Hilda asked, in the privacy of the shuttle.

"Someone is," Sarah said. "He gives me the creeps, so that makes him a suspect. He's also in the right place. "If Rossov were working for them, he'd know how to fake it. I'm going to set an agent watching with an radio link back to the Psi Naught. If there's any tampering, we should see it."

Everyone gathered in the habitat auditorium to watch the data come in from the shot--staff, investigators, and press. Sarah wore a thin T-shirt and loose, clingy shorts--artlessly practical in the warm controlled temperature of the habitat, but Hilda thought it made her look like a teen age pin-up instead of one of the top physicists in the solar system.

Hilda wore a much more dignified plain black jumpsuit and had her vacuum tights underneath, in case they needed to go to the experiment site on short notice. What an odd couple we make, she thought. Hilda found a spot next to Sarah, then Torsten Ried planted himself next to them.

"Morning, Hilda! Hi, Sarah."

"Good morning, Torsten," they said, almost simultaneously, and with about the same weary inflection, then laughed.

He smiled. "Yes, uh, what are we going to find out new today?"

If we knew that, thought Hilda, we wouldn't be doing the experiment. But be nice, she told herself. "For one thing, we'll be able to put some limits on anisotropy and get a better idea of radiation losses."

"Anything that would detect the beginnings of a new universe?"

Some people, Hilda thought, had one-track minds. She shook her head.

"T minus three minutes and counting," the experiment control software reported.

She scanned the situation display. A green color raced down the two beamline representations, indicating that the accumulators for each set of coils along the line were fully charged, each coil ready to come on at the appropriate time to push the pellets ever faster.

The count reached ten. Torsten, she saw, looked confused. Too bad, she thought, I'm not going to launch into a lecture now.

"...3, 2, 1, fire."

The green lights went off down the line at an accelerating rate until they were all off.

"Good shot," the controller reported.

I don't believe this, Sarah sent. It's completely nominal. Hilda?

Hilda was already comparing the readings from these instruments with those reported on the previous shots that had brought them out here. The anomaly had vanished entirely.

Nothing, she reported

"It looks completely nominal so far," Hilda said aloud.

"So far?" Torsten asked. "What does that mean? Why wasn't it like the first shot?"

Hilda stared at him, searching for words. She was not, she realized, ready to accuse nameless parties of falsifying the experimental results, even though that was what had clearly happened.

"Something in the instrumentation setup itself may have caused the first set of anomalous readings. That's the only thing that's changed."

"An observer effect? Like Schrödinger's cat--half dead and half alive until someone looks?"

Hilda groaned. "No, we physically moved the detectors. Besides, it's not 'half,' it's a superposition..."

"Excuse me, Mr. Ried," Sarah said. "Hilda and I need to have a chat. In private."

"You're in over your heads, then, aren't you?"

Sarah smiled. "Not exactly, Mr. Ried."

Hilda followed Sarah, but instead of heading for their rooms, she headed for the airlock. Hilda smiled to herself--when Sarah said private, she meant private. Fifteen minutes later, they were outside gliding over the small asteroid's surface near its center of rotation, with Sarah trailing an emergency survival pod along. Sarah said nothing for a while, but appeared to be looking for something. Finally she motioned for Hilda to follow her. Then, amazingly, Sarah seemed to vanish straight into the ground.

It was a cave entrance, Hilda discovered, as she got to where Sarah vanished. "Sarah?"

No response. The asteroid had a high nickel-iron content, though, and might be screening Sarah from her radio. There was no other cave entrance around, so Hilda gulped and pulled herself in afterward. It was pitch black.

"Sarah?"

An intermittent signal light started blinking on the display reflected in Hilda's helmet faceplate. As her eyes adapted to the dark, she began to detect a very dim glow and smiled. She activated her own suit lights so she could follow the passage, and in a minute was floating next to Sarah in a small, roughly spherical room.

Sarah put her helmet next to Hilda's.

"I think I know who," she said.

"Isn't this getting a bit melodramatic? I almost didn't follow you in here!"

Sara laughed. "We might be bugged. The station net might be bugged. If your radio signal couldn't reach me in here, then the signal from any bug can't get out. Now, help me with the vacuum tent."

The two-person emergency tent was a tight fit, but they managed to wiggle inside and inflate it. As soon as the pressure was up, Sarah made a hush sign and started to take off everything, motioning for Hilda to do the same.

Their clothing might even be bugged, Hilda realized.

They pushed their clothes into a pallet, and sealed it. Donning the emergency gear, they deflated the tent, and pushed the pallet out. Then they reinflated the tent.

"There's no reasonable theoretical explanation for this, is there?" Sarah asked.

Hilda thought hard, giving that question a lot more effort coming from Sarah than from Torsten. Maybe she owed him an apology. "The results are inconsistent and the second set are the right ones. It's Rossov."

Sarah nodded. "Besides, he may have intimate connections to the Ried family; he had an affair with one of the cousins, someone named Anna, years ago."

"Sarah, that's personal data. How did you...?"

"Pillow talk."

"Sarah!"

She laughed again. "I got it from Irene Simmons, who has odd tastes in men. Anyway, Rossov tends to brag after too much vodka. Years ago, he studied voice in Nürnberg then and appeared in a low-budget opera. Our Anna was the only Ried of the right age in the area at the time. Rossov was not a very good basso, but a really clever set designer. Later he got a Ph.D. in physics, but had problems with getting published and ended up in instrumentation. So we have professional jealousy and a sexual connection."

Hilda pondered this. "We can't let everyone know about the telltales or the bad guys will know, too."

Sarah nodded. "So we've got to play it like we don't know. With a couple more tests, we'll have enough information to argue convincingly that the anomalous results aren't real. Or, we might catch him tampering again."

What a tangled web we weave, Hilda thought. But Sarah was right. "Okay. We can go ahead with the Ten-Ten without Rossov being aware that we're onto him, but we need him out of the picture before he can think of anything else to screw it up. Doesn't anyone have the authority to simply remove Rossov, without making explanations?"

"Tse Wen could, which I think he will, if we have data to convince the personnel review board," Sarah explained. "With Rossov out of the way, all we have to worry about is physics."

Hilda bit her lip. The election was less than a week away, and the Senate's control of the vast resources for the project was at stake. "What if Lars Ried becomes president?"

Sarah shook her head. "That's another worry. One more thing--we can't talk about this to anyone where they can plant microbugs. Rossov is good at this kind of thing. The net here is his, so he can defeat that encryption, too. If we use another encryption, he'll think we're onto him. Nix on the net chat, too. Just in case. But we can bring dates here."

Hilda groaned. "Sarah, I just want to do physics."

Sarah grinned. "I'll take care of the dating part. Let's get back."

Chapter 4

Hilda, in the holographic simulation room, found herself biting her nails for the first time since she was a teenager. The experiment itself was not the source of her nervousness. Three more runs at the milligram level showed no anomalies, and they got the go-ahead to do the Ten-Ten experiment--only two days before voting began in the senate election. The opposition was certain to do something, and there was no time to recover. She filed a final prediction run, leaned back to stretch, and saw Torsten Ried enter.

She fought irritation; there were no rules barring media from the work areas, but by a kind of implicit mutual consent, the physicists were allowed to work undisturbed in those areas. "We've got company."

Sarah sighed softly. "I noticed."

"Hilda, Sarah," Torsten said, "sorry for the intrusion, but we've got nineteen-plus hours of virtual dead time to fill until you fire the Ten-Ten experiment, and I wondered if you'd help with a piece out at old Duluth Station--what things were like before the new facility--Captain Sally Duluth slept here and so on."

"Can we wiggle out of it?" Hilda asked Torsten. "There's still stuff to do."

"You're not completely ready?" Torsten suddenly seemed very serious.

Sarah shook her head. "We're more than ready enough, but we can always squeeze a little more out of the shot. Hilda, I have things in hand if you want to go."

Hilda nodded. Sarah was essential to their plans and having Torsten elsewhere would be a good thing.

"It won't be long," Torsten said. "I think we'll need three hours on site at the outside. We'll have her back here watching the MES eight hours before T = 0."

Hilda noted with a smile that, after a week out here, Torsten was calling the Macrocollider Experiment Station "the mess" and talking about "T = 0" like everyone else. "Tse Wen thinks it's a good idea to be as open with the media as we can and cooperate in every way possible. 'The silence of many hands not clapping is louder than the sound of few cheers,' he says."

Sarah sighed. "They won't applaud what they don't get. You've had practice with Torsten, of course."

Torsten smiled wryly and spread his hands as if to say that was simply the reality of his business.

Hilda shook her head. There were, she thought, people all alone in kuiperoid stations a thousand astronomical units from nowhere perfectly happy with research problems that could be done with one mind, a good cybersystem, and no interference. Why, she asked herself, had she chosen something so public? Or had it chosen her?