For a long moment Adams just stared at me, an alien yet unmistakably surprised look on his face. Apparently that implication of their Seeker contacts hadn't yet occurred to the thunderheads, either. "I don't know if it will... be possible to—"

"So try it," Kutzko broke in brusquely, nodding toward the displays. "We've got company coming."

Adams's face twisted, his hands reaching tentatively for the black Deadman Switch. I held my breath... and abruptly fell a few centimeters to the deck below me as the Mjollnir drive came on and the pseudograv began to function.

I exhaled raggedly, swaying a bit as my circulatory system adjusted to weight again. A moment, and my vision cleared... and I turned to find Kutzko looking at me. "Well," I said to him. "It worked."

He nodded, a quiet grimness to his sense. "So far, anyway," he agreed. "Now what?"

"We see how long he can handle it," I said evenly. "If he can get us all the way to the alien fleet in one jump, fine. If not... we see how long he needs to rest between contacts."

"And once we're there?" Kutzko persisted. "You can't have him fading in and out on you while you're trying to hold a conversation with the Invaders."

"Let's just see what happens, all right?" I snapped, my mouth dry. Beneath his casual words I knew what it was he was offering.

For a moment Kutzko studied me. Then he nodded, once, and turned back to the satchel in the corner. "Sure," he said over his shoulder. "There's no rush. Come on—give me a hand and we'll get this comm gear of yours set up."

I stared at his back, my muscles trembling with anger and dread. No, there was no rush; and if we were lucky, there might be no need to go through with it at all.

But I could tell Kutzko didn't believe that. And down deep, neither did I.

We were forty-five minutes out from Solitaire, three-quarters of the way to the alien fleet, when our luck ran out.

There was no warning at all that I could see—nothing in Adams's face or body language that preceded it. One minute he was sitting at the Deadman Switch, glazed eyes staring tautly into space; the next minute, there was the crack of circuit breakers, gravity abruptly vanished, and Adams was gasping frantically for breath.

We reached him at the same time, Kutzko jamming the oxygen inhaler we'd brought over his nose and mouth as I searched his face for other symptoms.

It didn't look good.

"I'm all... all right," Adams managed after a couple of tense minutes under pure oxygen. "Just let... me catch my... breath, okay?"

Kutzko turned to me. "How is he?"

I took a careful breath of my own. "Not in any immediate danger, I don't think," I said. Before Aaron Balaam darMaupine and the paranoia that had followed in his wake, Watchers had sometimes been employed by hospitals as complements to the standard medical sensors. Fleetingly, I wished some of that specialized training had been available to me. "Heartbeat's stabilizing, and blood pressure seems all right. Brain functions..." I peered into Adams's eyes. "Pupils are responding normally, and... I don't see any evidence of pain."

"Nothing hurts," Adams confirmed, still somewhat short of breath. "Just give me a few... more minutes to rest."

I looked up to find Kutzko's eyes on me... and I knew what he was thinking. "We can do the rest of the trip in shorter stages," I told him firmly. "We're only fifteen minutes or so from the alien fleet—we can let him rest up and then go on."

"What about your talk with the Invaders?" he countered. "You going to confine that to fifteen-minute chunks, too?"

"If need be, yes," I said, keeping my voice steady. The lie was an unnecessary caution, perhaps, with the thunderheads presumably no longer listening in... but with so much hanging in the balance, I preferred unnecessary caution to unnecessary chances.

How easily I'd learned, and learned to rationalize, the art of lying. There are ways that some think straight, but they lead in the end to death... "Besides," I added to Kutzko, hurrying to get my mind off that thought, "any talking I do with the aliens will necessarily be chopped into short segments. They'll be shooting past us at twelve percent lightspeed, remember?"

He grimaced, but for the moment at least he seemed willing to trust me. "All right," he said at last. "We'll give him some time—maybe give him another shot of Dr. Eisenstadt's fancy mixture. See how quickly he recovers."

I glanced at Adams; but if he'd heard the unspoken and if not in Kutzko's tone, he gave no indication of it. "Agreed," I nodded, my stomach tightening. And if not... then either Kutzko or I wouldn't be returning to Solitaire.

—

We waited a little more than an hour... an hour that will forever remain etched on my memory.

Not for anything in particular that happened. On the contrary, the most dominant feature of that time was its extreme boredom. Wrapped in our own individual thoughts and fears about what lay ahead, none of us really felt like talking; and with our equipment already set up there was absolutely nothing for any of us to do. I don't know how many times I floated past the board, studying the never-changing indicators, or how many minutes I spent at the viewport, looking out at the stars and straining my eyes to try and follow the contours of our tethered rocheoid in their dim light.

But what I did mainly was fight against terror.

Not fear. Fear I'd expected, and had been more or less prepared for. But as the minutes ticked by, and I ran out of other things with which to occupy my mind, I began to focus more and more on the image of the alien ships rushing inexorably down on us. It did no good to remind myself that they were two years away at their normal-space speed—my gut instincts had already latched firmly onto the fact that, as far as we were concerned, they were a bare fifteen minutes away. It was a totally irrational terror, but reminding myself of that did nothing except make me too ashamed of myself to try and talk it out with the others. More than once I told myself that the thunderheads might be behind at least some of the emotion, amplifying my feelings as they had back in the Pravilo cell on Solitaire. But this time, even that knowledge didn't help.

And so, for an hour, I suffered; alone, bored, terrified, and ashamed. It was like a foretaste of hell... and as close as I ever again want to be.

Which probably also explains why, when Adams finally decided he was ready, I immediately agreed to let him do so. I've often wondered whether things would have worked out differently if I'd been more cautious.

—

"You will reach the Inva... ders in three minutes," the thunderhead whispered through Adams's lips. "What are your instructions?"

My throat was dry enough to hurt. Against all odds—against all opposition—we'd made it. Now it was in my hands alone. "Stop us here," I ordered, "as close to being in the path of the lead ship as possible. If you can control our position that accurately, that is."

"I can," the thunderhead hissed, and I got the distinct impression I'd just stepped on his pride. I'd rather thought he would take it that way; hopefully, that would translate into the pinpoint accuracy I needed. Holding my breath, I watched as Adams's hands moved to make a slight correction in the course; then, with a crack of circuit breakers, gravity vanished and the stars once again appeared in the viewport.

We were there.

"All right," I said, fighting to keep my voice from trembling. "Now. Pay attention to this, thunderhead, because this part is crucial." I pulled myself over to Adams and indicated an instrument Kutzko and I had wired into the main board. "This device is measuring the magnetic field strength outside the tug," I explained. "Magnetic fields are what the Invaders are using to scoop hydrogen into their ships' engines, and fields of that strength can be dangerous to our species. You understand?"