How did Judy know that the Golden Circle had crashed? You couldn't know the answer, so you hung a tag on it. Telepathy.

"And even then," said Luke, not knowing that he spoke. "she managed to fool herself. Marvelous!"

"Did she?"

Luke's head jerked up and around. Lloyd was scared and not trying to hide it. He said, "The Golden Circle was a tough ship. Her drive was in her belly, remember? Her belly was built to stand fusion heat. And the explosion was below her."

Luke felt his own nerves thrill in sympathetic fear.

"We'll find out right now," he said, and touched the control panel. "All ships, listen in. Anderson, what do you know about the Golden Circle?"

"Yeah, I heard it too. It could be; it just could be. The people who built the honeymooners knew damn well that one accident or one breakdown could ruin a billion-mark business. They built the ships to stand up to anything. The Golden Circle's life system is smaller in proportion than the life system of any ship here, just because they put so much extra weight in the walls and in the failsafe systems."

In a dull voice, Smoky said, "And we're out of it."

"Hell we are. That message was in code. Lloyd, get the maser pointed at Pluto. We've got to warn the Belters. Smoky, is there a Mayday signal we can use?"

"No need. They'll hear you. It's too late anyway."

"What do you mean?"

"They're going down."

Kzanol walked slowly through a tunnel which gleamed dull white where the light fell. With practice he had learned to stay the right distance behind the disappearing far wall, following his disintegrator beam, so that he walked in a sloppy cylinder six feet in diameter. The wind-roared past him and ceased to be wind; it was flying dust and ice particles, flying in vacuum and low gravity, and it packed the tunnel solidly behind him.

The other suit was two hundred feet beyond the end of the sloping tube.

Kzanol looked up. He turned off the disintegrator and stood, stiffly furious, waiting. They had dared! They were just beyond control range, too far away and moving in fast, but they were decelerating as they closed in. He waited, ready to kill.

Mature consideration stopped him. He needed a ship in which to leave Pluto; his own was shot to heat death. Those above him were single seaters, useless to him, but he knew that other ships were coming. He must not frighten them away.

He would let these ships land.

Lew's singleship hung nose down over the surface of Pluto. He'd set the gyros that way. The ship would be nose down for a long time, perhaps until the gyros wore out. Yet he could see nothing. The planetary surface was hidden beneath a curtain of boiling storm clouds.

He knew that he had passed Cott's Crescent some minutes ago. He had heard the hum of an open intership circuit. Now, coming toward him over the curved horizon, was a storm within a storm: the titanic whirling hurricane he had passed over twice already. Pluto takes months to rotate. Only a monumental flow of air, air newly created, rushing around from the other side of the planet, could have carried enough lateral velocity to build such a sky whirlpool from mere Coriolis effects. Flames flickered in its roiling rim; but the center was a wide circle of calm, clear near-vacuum all the way down to the icy plateau.

Over the radio came the sound of Garner's voice.

"… Please answer at once so we'll know you're all right. There is a real chance that the ET survived the crash, in which case-"

"Now you're telling me, you know-it-all son of a bitch!" Lew couldn't talk. His tongue and his lips were as frozen as the rest of his voluntary muscles. He heard the message all the way through, and he heard it repeated, and repeated. Garner sounded more urgent than he had ten minutes ago.

The hurricane was almost below him now. He looked straight down into the eye.

From one of the murky fires in the rim of the eye, a tongue reached inward.

It was like the first explosion, the one he'd watched through the telescope. But this wasn't the telescope!

The whole plateau was lost in multicolored flame in the first twenty seconds. With the leisurely torpor of a sleepy ground sloth on a cold morning, the fire stood up and reached for him. It was fire and ice, chunks of ice big enough to see, ice burning as it rose in the clutch of the height and might, a blazing carnivore reaching to swallow him.

Viprin race. Bowed skeletal shapes like great albino whippets seemed to skim the dirt surface of the track, their jet nacelle nostrils flaring, their skins shining like oil, racing round and round the audience standing breathless in the center of the circle. The air was thick with Power: thousands of Thrintun desperately hurling orders at their favorites, knowing perfectly well that the mutant viprin didn't have the brains to hear. Kzanol on one of the too-expensive seats, clutching a lavender plastic cord, knowing that this race, this race meant the difference between life as a prospector and life as a superintendent of cleaning machinery. He would leave here with commercials to buy a ship, or with none.

Larry dropped it. It was too late in Kzanol's life. He wanted to remember much earlier. But his brain seemed filled with fog, and the Thrintun memories were fuzzy and hard to grasp. As Kzanol/Greenberg he had had no trouble with his memory, but as Larry he found it infuriatingly vague.

The earliest thing he could remember was that scene of the sunflowers.

He was out of cigarettes. The pilot might have some in his pocket, but Larry couldn't quite reach it. And he was hungry; he hadn't eaten in some ten hours. A gnal might help. Definitely one would help, for it would probably kill him in seconds. Larry tore a button from his shirt and put it in his mouth. It was round and smooth, very like a gnal.

He sucked it and let his mind dissolve.

Three ships rested on the other side of what remained of Cott's Crescent. In the control bubbles the pilots sat motionless, waiting for instructions and thinking furious, futile thoughts. In the fourth… Kzanol's eating tendrils stood away from his mouth as he probed.

It was rather like probing his own memory of the crash. A brightly burning wind, a universe of roaring, tearing flame and crushing shocks.

Well, it wasn't as if he needed Lew. Kzanol turned his disintegrator on and began walking. Something bright glimmered through the dark ice wall.

"They don't answer," said Lloyd.

Luke let himself sag against the constant one-gee acceleration. Too little, too late… the Belt was beaten. And then his eyes narrowed and he said, "They're bluffing."

Masney turned inquiringly.

"Sure. They're bluffing, Lloyd. They'd be fools not to. We handed them such a perfect chance! Like four spades up in a five stud hand. The perfect opportunity to get us fighting the wrong enemy."

"But we'd be getting this same scary silence if they were really caught."

Luke spoke jerky phrases as the answers came. "Right. We get quiet radios either way. But we get the same answer either way, too. Shoot to kill. Either the fleet is on its way back with amplifier, or the ET has it and is on its way to conquer the Earth. Either way, we have to attack."

"You know what that means, don't you?"

"Tell me."

"We'll have to kill Atwood and Smoky first. And Anderson."

"O-o-oh. Right, about Atwood. He'd never let us shoot at his friends, whether they're slaves or not. But we can hope Anderson can control Smoky."

"How's your coordination?"

"My-?" Luke pondered his uncertain, shaky hands and newly clumsy fingers, his lack of control over his sphincter muscles. Paralysis hangover. "Right again. Smoky'd make mincemeat of Anderson." A gusty sigh. "We'll have to blow both ships."