“Are you certain they’re coming?” Frank asked. “I’m further north than I’ve been before, and I’ve found some interesting strata here, things that don’t poke through down by Athena. I don’t want to leave if I don’t have to.”

“I’m not sure,” Bragg said, looking as though the admission pained him. He always looked that way when certainty eluded him, Irv thought.

“Then I’m not leaving,” Frank said.

Bragg made a fist, pounded it against his knee. He glanced over toward Irv. Order him back, the anthropologist thought. But before he could speak, Bragg turned back to the microphone. “You be alert out there, you hear me!” he said.

“Sure I will,” Frank said. “We need more lerts.”

“Not a good time for jokes,” Bragg said with a snort. “I mean it. Athena out.” He was shaking his head as he put down the mike. “Lerts.”

“If it’s not fight there in front of him, Frank doesn’t worry about it,” Irv said. He thought of Pat’s bitter words the night after Sarah had flown across Jotun Canyon. He had done his best to avoid thinking of that night ever since or thinking of Pat in anything but a purely professional way. Most of the time, that worked pretty well. For a moment, though, even his skin remembered how she had felt in his arms.

“Yeah, I know,” Emmett said, bringing Irv back to the here-and-now. “But I can’t make him come in just on account of my vapors. He’s got his job to do, down there in the canyon.”

“I suppose so,” Irv said. He sounded halfhearted, even to himself.

Bragg looked at him. “You, too, huh?”

“Yeah. Logically, though, you’re fight. Don’t misunderstand me, Emmett.” Walking in front of a train was surer trouble than getting on Emmett Bragg’s bad side. Offhand, Irv could not think of much else.

“Yeah, logically.” Bragg grunted. “Then why don’t I like it?”

The KGB studied Disneyland because visiting Soviet dignitaries liked to go there. One of the attractions, Lopatin had learned from a friend, was something called “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.” Never having read The Wind in the Willows, Lopatin did not know much about this Mr. Toad, but he was sure the fide he was taking was wild enough to horrify any amphibian ever hatched.

The coracle tossed in the surge like a toy boat in a bathtub with a rambunctious three-year-old. All the Minervans in it were blue with fright. Could Lopatin have changed color, he would have been blue, too. He wondered if Tolmasov had let him go along in the hope he would drown, and thought of ways he could get revenge even on a Hero of the Soviet Union when he got back to Earth.

If he got back to Earth. At the moment, he would not have given a counterfeit kopeck for his chances of making it to the far side of Jotun Canyon, let alone home again. Two boulders of ice had already missed the boat by a lot less than he cared to think about; he had fended off another one, fortunately smaller, with a pole.

And his coracle was luckier than many. One of the chunks of iceberg that just missed it smashed a boat a little further downstream. Minervans splashed into the water as the coracle instantly turned to kindling. A couple of warriors managed to hang on to floating debris; the rest simply disappeared.

Even if he managed to grab something, Lopatin knew, he would quickly perish; this temporary river was frigid as the waters around Vladivostok in December. There, at least, the Minervans had the advantage on him. To them, any liquid water was warm. They might drown, but they would not freeze. A dubious distinction, he thought.

The spray blowing in his face had already left his nose numb. And when he bent down to scoop water from the bottom of the coracle, the cold bit into his fingers through the heavy gloves he was wearing. His feet had also started to freeze.

Lopatin was bending to bail again when Fralk screamed, “Paddle! Paddle hard for your lives!” The KGB man jerked erect. A veritable ice mountain was bearing down on the boat.

“Mother of God!” Lopatin shouted. He had called on the devil’s relatives often enough in his career, but could not remember the last time he had named any of the Deity’s. Luckily the Minervans, unlike his comrades, would not notice.

He grabbed a paddle from one of the males, jammed it into the water again and again. He did not know whether he was a better paddler than the warrior but could not bear to depend only on the efforts of others for his survival. Slowly, so slowly, the coracle moved ahead. The blue-white slab of ice, sailing along as majestically as a dowager queen, took no notice of the artificial insect in its path.

The Minervan whose paddle Lopatin had taken let out a shrill scream of terror and leapt overboard. The rest of the locals, along with the KGB man, dug in even harder. Lopatin refused to look up; he would risk nothing that might distract him from his desperate rhythm.

Were they gaining? He almost tried not to believe it, for fear of slacking. But surely that mass of ice was not headed straight at the coracle anymore. Surely… The wave the ice mountain pushed ahead of itself lifted up the boat’s stern; Lopatin tried to tell himself he was imagining the wind of its passage.

Then it was past and some other boat’s problem. Heart pounding, Lopatin rested for a moment. A few more like that, he thought shakily, and the whole fleet would be someone else’s problem-probably the Virgin’s, in whose existence he did not believe. After angrily telling himself that, he wondered whether Minervans had souls.

“Is water like this all the time?” Fralk asked. If he did have a soul, he had been nearly frightened out of it; the blue of his skin was the next thing to purple.

“I hope not,” Lopatin answered, no sailor himself. In the aftermath of shared fright, he felt closer to the Minervan than he ever had, even during weapons training. Which reminded him: the only way Fralk would ever get his hands on the Kalashnikov was from Lopatin’s dead body.

That didn’t necessarily mean he would not get off a few shots of his own, though, when the time came.

The eastern wall of Jotun Canyon filled more and more of the sky ahead. Fralk saw it, too, and began to drift back toward his usual green. “We are doing it, Oleg Borisovich,” he said. Lopatin did not think he was reading surprise into the Minervan’s voice.

Nevertheless, he answered, “Da, Fralk, we are doing it.” That was no small feat, either, not when the Skarmer were inventing watergoing technology from scratch. He peered upstream, downstream. The water was still full of boats, in spite of the dreadful swath that enormous hunk of ice had cut through them. “So are most of the rest.”

Able to look in both directions at the same time, Fralk had already decided the same thing. “Enough of us will get across to fight well,” he said, “if we can assemble quickly once we’re there.”

Lopatin nodded. After a while, the coracle was close enough to the eastern shore for him to look for landing sites. “There!” he said, pointing. “Steer that way. Looks like good, sheltered anchorage.” He spoke the Skarmer tongue so the paddlers could understand him, but the key word, as happened so often, came out in Russian.

“Like a good what, Oleg Borisovich?” Fralk asked. “Tell me what that means.”

“A good place to put up a boat,” Lopatin answered. He pointed again. “That piece of rock that juts out into the water shields the part behind it from the worst flow of the stream.”

“Oh.” Fralk did a token job of widening himself. “A good thought. It never would have occurred to me that something like that could make a difference. I’m glad you’ve come along.”

That, Lopatin decided, made one of them. A problem with new technology, human or Minervan, was that it didn’t have all the answers, not least because the people putting it together hadn’t asked all the fight questions. Fralk would have been perfectly happy to land any old place on the eastern shore; he hadn’t refined his goals enough to see one place as better than another. That would be fine-until he needed his boat to get back to the other side and discovered it wasn’t where he’d left it anymore.