The large hydrogen and oxygen tanks left little room for a suited driver, but with an effort she squeezed in behind the wheel. The seat wasn't padded; she anticipated an uncomfortable ride.

Reaching down to the valves beneath her seat, Susan turned on the hydrogen, then the oxygen. She looked at the gauges on the dash. Both tanks registered nearly full pressure. She pressed the starter button and instantly felt the engine's vibration through the seat and heard it as it was conducted through her suit.

Putting the crawler into reverse with her left foot, she backed away from the wall, then maneuvered to face the hangar door. The lieutenant did the same ten yards ahead.

The overhead lights went out, leaving only the dim glow of the crawler's dash to break the darkness. Susan searched for the switch that controlled the overhead lights and found it beside the one marked door.

When she looked up, she saw a patch of black, star-speckled sky where the door had been only a few seconds before. It grew as she watched, and she could just make out the other crawler going through the opening, silhouetted against the unexpectedly bright field of stars. Shifting into forward gear, she followed the other crawler from the chamber.

She clutched the wheel with both hands and concentrated on driving, and on keeping the other crawler in sight. Without headlights, it would be a rough trip. Although the starlight was sufficient to make out the other crawler ahead if she really worked at it, it wasn't nearly bright enough to reveal every crater and bump. Her crawler lurched and jerked over the rough terrain, throwing her about between the tanks at her back and the steering wheel in front of her. She only hoped her guide knew the way well enough to keep them out of the deeper craters.

They were nearly to the mining camp before Susan saw it.

Something wasn't right. The entire area around the camp should have been bathed in bright light, but it wasn't. There should have been the bustle of work, yet the only indications that the facility was even there were the shadow shapes of buildings blocking out sections of the sky's star field.

She stopped her crawler beside her guide's. She could just make out another vehicle parked ten yards beyond.

Unfastening her seat belt, she struggled from the crawler and started for the dirt-covered Quonset hut living quarters almost invisible fifty yards ahead. Then she stopped. Her escort sat in her crawler, unmoving. Susan shuffled back, bent, touched her helmet to her guide's.

"I have orders to leave you here, Captain," came the other'smuffled voice. "You'll return with director Hyatt."

Susan nodded in her helmet, although she was sure the other could not see it. She no longer felt anger toward her guide. The lieutenant's methods were unconventional, yet she had accomplished the task assigned her. She had delivered Susan safely, with minimum delay.

"Thanks," Susan said. She straightened, then turned and shuffled toward the mining camp's living quarters.

The airlock's outer hatch stood open. Susan stepped in, then keyed the helmet chronometer with her tongue. The digits projected on her visor: 0812.

She waited for the outer hatch to close, but nothing happened. Then she realized that only manual airlocks existed when the mining camp was built. This was the oldest still-operating facility on Luna.

Yet the mining camp had been in nearly continuous use since its construction, almost a hundred years ago. It had brought more than its share of wealth to the lunar colony. Wouldn't the facility have been updated in all those years?

And again she wondered at the camp's lack of light and life.

She pulled the outer hatch closed and turned its locking ring. The red airlock light should have come on, casting its customary sight-adjusting glow, but it did not. She tongued her helmet lamp on and blinked in the sudden glare.

Within a few seconds her vision adjusted, and she turned in the small airlock to face the inner hatch. The light that should have glowed green when the airlock attained full pressure was broken-slivers of glass littered the floor, covered with a thin layer of dust. Obviously, the airlock had not been used in some time.

Again she felt the unnaturalness of the place. It seemed as if the camp had been deserted for years.

But that couldn't be. She remembered…

She pushed the thought away and reached to the manual air valve on the wall beside the door. Turning the handle, she waited for the hiss of air rushing into the airlock. For nearly half a minute she stood listening to the rasp of her breath and the pounding of her heart in her ears before she realized the airlock was not working. She turned the inner hatch's locking ring and pushed the heavy door open, then stepped through.

Danger clanged in her thoughts as her ability warned her. Someone waited here.

Slowly, she turned her head, directing the helmet lamp in a wide arc, sweeping the single large room with its beam. The metal frames of more than two dozen triple-tiered bunks were bolted to the floor, many twisted or broken. At the far end, in the corner to her right, stood the galley. The microwave oven's door laid on the floor. In the left-hand corner stood the toilet. It, too, was in ruin.

Empty metal brackets that had once supported communications equipment were bolted to the wall on either side of her. A tangle of wires and electrical couplings dangled from the overhead beside her right ear.

The light's beam fell on a patch of blue beneath a bunk frame in the center of the room. She shuffled to it, keeping the helmet light trained on it. It was a human figure, laying face down, wearing a Survey Service life-support suit. A blaster burn blemished the suit at mid-back, a dusting of crimson ice crystals feathered out around an opening as small as a thumb nail.

Susan squatted and took the suited figure by the shoulder, then rolled it over. A face stared up at her through the fog of ice crystals on the inside surface of the helmet's visor, eyes frozen wide in shock and pain.

It was Hyatt.

She stood and staggered back a step, coming up hard against the bunk frame behind her. Catching a stanchion with a wildly thrown arm, she leaned against it for a few seconds, trying to clear her thoughts.

Hyatt had told her to meet him here. He had arranged for her to be brought out to the mining camp.

And now he was dead.

Sudden movement to her left brought her around in a defensive crouch. The beam from her helmet light caught a red-suited form as it stepped from behind the ruined galley. The other held a blaster pistol trained on her.

She could not tell who it was. The light from her helmet caught the other's visor just right and was reflected back.

Susan felt suddenly dizzy, and her would-be attacker disappeared, just like that other had done in the corridor outside the curio shop on Fleet Base. The headache came and the pendant burned beneath her suit. Both lasted only a few seconds, then were replaced by the snowflake pattern. Without thought, she began mumbling the healing mantra.

She panned her helmet lamp back and forth over the smooth, undisturbed layer of dust. Hyatt's body was gone, too.

On impulse, she again keyed the chronometer in her helmet with her tongue. It read 0814-exactly what it should have read, and not at all what she had expected.

If only I had my LIN/C, she thought. With it, she could at least verify the sequence of events. Perhaps she hadn't jumped back in time outside the curio shop on Fleet Base, as she had started to suspect. Maybe she was going insane.

She forced those thoughts down. They were dangerous; they could actually cause insanity.