“Get Galena in here,” Charles said. “Please hurry. Don’t let her look outside.”

Hergesheimer started down the tunnel.

“Can I do something, Charles?” I asked, still holding his hand.

“The QL has found a bad path,” Charles said. “Don’t look outside.”

I felt a directionless jerk. With my other hand, I grabbed the back of Charles’s couch. Leander became indistinct, wrapped in shadow; he seemed to turn a corner. His mouth moved but he did not speak, or I could not hear him. A whining sound came from behind me, then enveloped me like a cloud of gnats in a nursery full of hungry babies. Bump, bump, bump, I seemed to keep running into myself, yet I did not move, there was only one of me. Collapsing forms around Leander gave me a clue to what I felt: he appeared to be wrapped in deflating balloon images, each slapping itself down around him, making him jerk and shiver: the momentum of colliding world-lines. The cabin filled with collapsing images of the past, but of course that made no sense at all.

I turned my eyes to the displays and saw ghosts of images unsuited to electronics and optics, images that could not be reassembled correctly from their initial encoding. The math was failing. The physics of our instrumentality had become inadequate. We could not see, could not process the information, could not re-imagine reality.

The feeble whining increased in pitch. Still slapped by my colliding past selves, I sensed a direction for the sound and turned to face it, the star-shaped chamber all corners and wrong sight-lines, angles senseless. I recognized a shape, saw Hergesheimer’s face gone cubist and fly’s eye multiple, and the face became Galena Cameron’s, and I was able to put together an hypothesis that Hergesheimer was holding Galena and she was making the whining sound, eyes closed, hands floating around her face like pets demanding attention.

Hergesheimer’s lips formed shapes: I did not look.

And then, Outside.

And, She did.

Leander had moved and I could not locate him in the diverging angles. I still held Charles’s hand. The fingers wrapped in mine became external. Charles held an inverse of my hand. It didn’t matter.

The whole popped. The final slap was horrendous, soul-jarring. My bones and muscles felt as if they had been powdered and reconstituted.

Drops of blood floated in the air. I took a deep breath and choked on them. Something had scored my skin in long, thin, shallow razor passes. My clothing had been sliced as well, and the interior surfaces of the chamber seemed to have been lightly grooved, as if a sharp-tipped flail had thrashed through the cabin. Leander moaned and held his hands to his face. They came away bloody. Hergesheimer hugged Cameron to his breast. She lay in his arms unresisting and unmoving. All slashed, all bloody.

Charles let go of my hand. Where we had held hands, there were no cuts. The back of my hand might have been a picture of cat practice, except where his fingers had covered.

The interior of the chamber felt deadly cold. The displays and electronics still did not function. Then, they returned, and outside, we saw stars, and the brightness of a much closer sun.

For a moment, nobody said anything.

“We need medical attention,” Leander said, holding out his hands and inspecting his bloody clothing. We had brought a fresh medical kit in the shuttle. I went to fetch it. It seemed imperative that I take charge and become nursemaid.

Otherwise, I thought, I might end up just like Galena , limp as a doll, eyes shut tight, lips drawn in endless riddle.

Leander had plunged deep in conversation with Charles when I returned. I applied medicinal nano directly from a vial with a sterile sponge. Everyone stripped down to receive my ministrations. Hergesheimer undressed Galena , who did not resist. We wiped each other, the touch itself reassuring, healing, an orgy of medicinal tenderness.

I applied swift strokes of sponge to Charles’s arms and face. He closed his eyes, enjoying my attentions.

Hergesheimer suspended Galena in a sling net. She drifted lowly down and settled. “Where are we?” he asked.

“Where we want to be,” Charles said.

“What the hell went wrong?” Hergesheimer asked.

“The QL took us through a bad path,” Charles said. “It couldn’t disengage from some compelling truths. I’m sorry. That must not be any explanation at all.”

“We passed through a different universe?” Leander asked.

“I don’t think so,” Charles said. “Something to do with changing our geometry, altering boson world-lines. Photons acquired slight mass.”

Leander said, “Is this something we can understand?”

“Maybe not,” Charles said.

“Are we damaged? I mean, permanently,” Leander said. He knew the questions to ask Charles, our oracular connection to the QL. I kept my mouth shut and listened. Galena seemed to be asleep. Hergesheimer hung in one apex of the star-shaped chamber, half-visible from where I stood, feet pressing with a pebble’s lightness against the floor. The astronomer’s eyes seemed listless, half-dead.

“Photons cut through matter, but not deeply. Only some photons acquired mass. Not complete.” Charles looked at me directly, then at Leander. “QL doesn’t understand. I don’t understand. I don’t think we should waste time trying now. It won’t happen again.”

“How do you know?” Leander asked, bringing himself closer to Charles, staring at him intently.

“Because the QL got scared,” Charles said. “It won’t examine those truths again.”

We mopped up the droplets of blood as best we could and made new clothes while Hergesheimer worked alone with his instruments. In the tunnel to the shuttle pad, I stopped Leander to ask, “Do you know what might be wrong with Galena ? She’s still asleep.”

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“Will she recover?”

“I hope so.”

“Can we do what we need to do?”

“Ask Hergesheimer,” Leander said testily. “I’m worried about getting us back. Charles is exhausted. We’re all strung out. It’s been four hours already.” He tried to break loose from my hand, but my fingers clamped down like talons. He grimaced.

“It’s all over, isn’t it?” I said. “We can’t move Mars.”

He swallowed and shook his head, unwilling to face the obvious. “Charles says it won’t happen again.”

“The risk, Stephen.”

“It’s horrendous,” he admitted, looking away. “Horrendous.”

“Did you expect anything like this?”

“Of course not.”

Hergesheimer dragged himself through the tunnel hand over hand. “Not that it matters much,” he said, “but this goddamned system is ideal. It’s everything we thought it might be. The planets are rich with minerals, one is Earth-sized and has a reducing atmosphere but no detectable life… Ripe for terraforming. Two prime gas giants. Lovely young asteroids. The star is a long-term variable like the sun. No sign of intelligent life — no radio chatter. It’s beautiful.”

He showed me pictures and graphs and strings of numbers on his slate. Sludge-brown Earth-sized planet, very unappetizing; huge blue-green gas giants banded with orange and yellow, rich with hydrogen and deuterium; he had made estimates for the total mass of free minerals and carbonifers and volatiles available in the belt. Rich indeed. He switched the slate off abruptly. “To hell with it.”

“You’ve finished?” I asked.

“No, but the essential work is automatic and should be done in a few minutes.”

“Margin for error?” I asked.

“Certainty on broad descriptive grounds. All we could expect,” Hergesheimer said. “Does it matter, Casseia? Are we ever going to return?”

I shook my head. “Do it right anyway.”

“ Galena ’s awake,” Hergesheimer said. “She doesn’t behave.”

“Beg pardon?”

He waggled his fingers in front of his face, stared at me with eyes bulging, accusing, and said, “There is no behavior. She’s blank.”