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I want to help, and I have something in mind. It is a long shot, but it is different in kind from everything else that you are doing. It can certainly do no harm to anyone except possibly me. Do not come looking for me; that would be a waste of time that you should devote to your own plans as stated. Although I do not expect to return, you will know if I succeed. Good luck to all of us, whatever happens. Ben Blesh.

He climbed into his suit and went through to the next room. He opened the hatch and looked down. It was a long drop, but into deep snow. He would suffer no injury. A bigger worry was the hatch. If he left it open when he jumped, freezing air would invade the inside of the ship, which needed all the warmth it could get.

The hatch could be raised upward. If he stood on the edge, grasped the top in both hands, and stepped out backwards, then he could snap the hatch closed as he dropped.

Ben stood for a long time before he moved. If he was wrong he would die a drawn-out and lonely death as his suit ran out of air, water, and warmth. If he was right he might die even less pleasantly. Not the greatest of options.

But waiting would not improve them. Ben opened the hatch, grasped the top, and stepped out backwards for the blind drop to the surface.

* * *

The snow had stopped falling, and for the first time the sky was cloudless. It was full daylight. All around Ben stood a frozen wonderland of pure and dazzling white. He stared up. Light reflected from the surface and scattered so intensely in the atmosphere that M-2 was invisible in the bright sky.

The drifted snow changed the appearance of everything. There was a real danger that he might lose his way. That would be the ultimate failure, a journey that ended not in tragedy but in farce.

Ben studied the faint line that marked earlier movements between the cone-house and the ship. It should be easy to go that far. Beyond the cone-house he saw a lumpy hummock that must be the walking car. It had not moved since its arrival with Ben and Darya aboard, and it ought to provide the bearing that he needed.

He followed the half-covered track to the cone-house. With no wind and with his improved condition, it was hard to believe that he had been unable to cover this short distance just an hour or two ago. He continued into the unmarked wilderness beyond. With snow so deep and a hardened crust of ice, this was much harder going. He told himself that he would only need to do it once.

Snow had drifted against the car. He stepped close and brushed one side clear to provide a line of sight up the hill. He fixed that vector in his suit’s locator and began to plow his way up the shallow incline.

The other side of the hill led down to the valley with the stream, now frozen and snow-covered. The road had vanished. Ben could see no landmarks at all. He was forced to operate from memory—unreliable memory, from a time when he had been strongly and continuously medicated. He walked, stopped, hesitated, started again, and finally halted. This was as good as he would get. He cleared a place big enough to sit, then used packed snow to make a steep little bank against which he could lean. He sat down. The scene had an eerie tranquillity and beauty. As far as the eye could see, the valley was an undisturbed white. Above it the cloudless sky shone greenish-blue.

Now there was nothing more that Ben could do. And precisely because he could do nothing, he relaxed for the first time since his injury on the surface of Iceworld. He had been unconscious for much of that time, but those medicated periods had not rested him. He leaned back against the little wall of snow. He adjusted his suit’s thermal setting to its most comfortable level. As the long day drifted on, he drowsed.

What woke him was no more than a shadow, a patch of darkness sensed through closed eyelids in a place where no shadows should exist. He came fully awake, opened his eyes, and scrambled to his feet in a panic. Thirty meters away from him a black sphere hovered above the snow. He had no idea how long it had been there, but already it was beginning to sink down into the surface.

Would he be too late?

Ben made the effort of his life, scrambling and sliding toward the sphere. When he came to it he did not hesitate or slow. He hurled himself forward. The dark heart of the sphere swallowed him up, and one minute later it too was gone.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Stripping the ship

Sometime, someplace, humans and aliens might discover practical telepathy. Until they did, there was always a chance that whatever you said might be misunderstood.

If Louis had not been convinced of this before, the point was emphasized as he was walking along the Have-It-All’s lower corridor and happened to glance into the conference room. He had just come from the lowest level, where Torran Veck, Teri Dahl, Atvar H’sial, and J’merlia were beginning to clear packed snow from the drive unit. Now Louis was looking for Kallik and Archimedes to set them to work.

He certainly found them, though what they were up to was another matter. Kallik stood by the conference room table, her round head level with the polished white top. Archimedes was sprawled along the length of it, his blue tentacles wrapped around each end. They flexed as Nenda watched, and the table top warped upward under a mighty force.

“I don’t suppose you two would like to tell me what the hell you’re doin’?”

“It is the table, Master Nenda.” Kallik touched it with a forelimb. “Although we can pass it through the biggest of the cargo hatches, it will first be necessary to remove it from this room. That requires that it be broken into pieces. Indeed, although I had never thought about it before, it is a mystery how it was ever brought in.”

“It wasn’t. It was secreted on the spot by a bunch of Doradan Colubrids, an’ for the moment it stays here. Archie, get down off that table or you’ll be lookin’ for a new set of guts.”

“Master Nenda, you specifically declared the table to be expendable.”

If, Kallik. Didn’t I say if? If things get desperate, an’ we’re not there yet. What I want is an inventory. We need to know the mass of everything that’s not nailed down, plus a bunch of things that are. But until that’s done, we throw nothin’ overboard. Clear enough?”

“Master Nenda, it will be done exactly as you command.”

“An’ you, Archie, shape up an’ get useful. If that table has to go outside in bits, maybe you go with it.”

Nenda hurried away double-time through the ship’s interior. Kallik was smart, and if she could get it wrong, so could anybody.

Claudius would not be a problem. Louis found the Polypheme coiled down tight in one of the cabins in a trance of terror. Neither useful nor ornamental—now there was a candidate to throw overboard when you needed to reduce mass. Louis hurried on. He was approaching the hatch through which they had all entered, and this part of the ship was colder than everywhere else. That was surprising. The air circulation system should have taken care of that long ago. Even more surprising was the sight of a group of figures in one of the nearby cabins.

Hans Rebka, Darya Lang, Sinara Bellstock, E.C. Tally, and Julian Graves. Almost half the available work force. And doing what? Not one damn thing, so far as Louis could see. They were clustered around a display terminal.

Louis was about to say, “It must be nice to be a guest on board, an’ not have to work,” when he saw the message on the display.