“Shit!” the Georgian said. He slammed a fist against the back of a chair. The thing was padded and did not hurt. “Shit!” he said again.

Chip, chip, chip. Frank Marquard went down on his knees so he could use his geologist’s hammer with greater precision. He had not seen a conglomerate quite this fine-grained before.

Anything new and interesting deserved to be a specimen.

Even through padding, his knees began to freeze. He sighed. He was so sick of being cold. As a lifelong inhabitant of Los Angeles, he had had no practice living in a refrigerator. He remembered somebody on the selection panel asking about that and remembered answering that it would not bother him. He had known he was lying even then. Luckily, the people on the panel had not.

Pat was as Californian as he, but the cold didn’t bother her as much. Or if it did, Frank thought, frowning, she didn’t let on. Not so long ago, that would not have occurred to him. Now he wasn’t so sure what Pat could hold back. He hoped-he thought-he was warming her up again, in a very different sense of the word, but he wasn’t sure.

As he usually did, he tried to make the best of that. He supposed it was all to the good that he wasn’t taking her for granted anymore. Boredom lay down that road.

Out of the comer of his eye, he saw something move. He looked up. Where had the Minervan come from? “What do you here, male of Reatur’s clan?” he asked in the Omalo tongue.

The male did not answer. It came closer. How, Frank wondered, had it got below him without his noticing? Then he saw the spears in the Minervan’s hands.

“Frank!” Louise shouted over and over in Athena’s control room. “Are you there? Come in, Frank!”

“Bozhemoi,” Oleg Lopatin said softly when he saw the stained spears Juksal was displaying.

The warrior was proud of himself. “He had a little hammer with him, but he hardly even got it up before I struck him.” He raised the hand on the far side of his body, showed the Russian the geologist’s tool he had taken from the man he’d slain.

“Bozhemoi,” Lopatin said again. The idea of going to war had been attractive in the abstract. Having a fellow human killed by a Minervan, though, was not really what he had had in mind, no matter how socially advanced the Skarmer were.

“Don’t let your eyestalks droop, Oleg Borisovich,” Fralk said. “You’ve told us how the humans on this side of the gorge are enemies to your great clan.”

“Yes, but-“ Sudden ghastly consequences flowered in Lopatin’s mind. The Americans would assume he had killed their comrade. With the situation reversed, he would have jumped to the same conclusion. When a man with a rifle was around, who would think twice about natives and their spears?

Scowling, he thought furiously. Though the habit of secrecy was deeply grained into him, he decided it could not serve him here. He would have to let Tsiolkovsky know what had happened, and that he had had nothing to do with it. He could not guess how far that would go toward mollifying the Americans, but nothing, now, could be worse than silence.

He thumbed the ON switch of his radio, brought it to his lips. “Calling Tsiolkovsky, calling-“ he began. Then he noticed the SEND light had not gone on. When he switched to mWAVE, no carrier wave hum, no static, came from the speaker.

Hopelessly, he peeled off the back of the set. Water gleamed on the integrated circuits inside. He had tried to keep the radio dry crossing Jotun Canyon, but its case was not waterproof. Who would have thought, on frozen Minerva, it would have to be? He dried the works as best he could, tried again to send. The radio was still dead.

Of course, it had taken a good many bangs, too, as he scrambled up toward the top of the canyon. Without tools he did not have, he could not tell what was wrong with the cursed gadget if nothing obvious like a loose wire leapt out at him. He could not fix anything more complicated than a loose wire, either.

And this, he asked himself bitterly, makes you a modem electronic engineer? The trouble was, it did. But that, at the moment, was the least of the trouble he was in, and he knew it.

Emmett Bragg would be wild when he found out about his countryman’s death. And even Tolmasov was leery of Bragg.

“You get him on the radio and you find out what the hell he’s playing at, do you hear me, Sergei Konstantinovich?” Bragg sounded like an angry tiger, Tolmasov thought. He did not blame his American opposite number, either.

“I am calling, Brigadier Bragg, calling repeatedly, I assure you. But he does not reply.”

“Neither does Frank Marquard. What does that say to you?”

“Nothing I like,” Tolmasov admitted.

“Me either,” Bragg growled. “Near as I can see, it says your man’s gone rogue on this side of the canyon. I don’t like that, Sergei Konstantinovich, not one little bit. You better believe I’ll do anything I need to, to protect the rest of my crew. Anything. Don’t say you weren’t warned.”

“I understand.” If Tolmasov could have got Lopatin in his sights, he might have dealt with him himself. “You’d better. Bragg out.”

Silence crashed down in the tent outside Hogram’s town. Tolmasov sat storing at the radio for a minute or two before he got up. The mission had gone so well for so long, but when it decided to come apart, it didn’t fool around. Someone on Tsiolkovsky-Rustaveli or Voroshilov, that had to be-calling the Americans, and whoever had not called cutting him off in midsentence. The pilot did not know whether to be angrier at caller or cutter.

And Lopatin! Tolmasov still did not know what to make of that. He did not want to think even a chekist could go out of control the moment he got off on his own, but he did not know what else to think, either. The fool’s stubborn refusal to start or accept communication did not speak well of him.

The pilot turned to Valery Bryusov and Katerina, who had listened to his exchange with Bragg with as much shock and dismay as he had felt. “Comments?” he asked. Maybe, just maybe, one of them had seen something he had missed.

“Sergei, we have a major problem,” Katerina said. Bryusov nodded solemnly. So, after a moment, did Tolmasov. The only trouble was, he already knew that.

Irv peered down into Jotun Canyon. He’d had the weight of a pistol on his hip before, but now he really felt it. The idea of using the gun on a Minervan horrified him. The idea of using it against an AKT4 horrified him, too, for a different reason-he was glad he had made a will before leaving Earth.

By rights, he thought, trying to blend into the bushes, this was Emmett Bragg’s job. Emmett was a soldier, not an anthropologist playing pretend. But Emmett was also the pilot-the number one pilot and, if the worst had happened to Frank, the only pilot. He was not expendable as a scout.

The Minervans down in the canyon did not look any different from Reatur’s males. Irv knew, though, that none of Reatur’s males were there. These had to be the enemy, then-the Skarmer, the Russians called them.

And Oleg Lopatin. Without the frantic call from Tsiolkovsky, Irv would not have know which Russian accompanied the Skarmer over Jotun Canyon, but a human being’s jointed, jerky motions were instantly recognizable against a backdrop of waving Minervan arms and tentacles. For one giddy moment, Irv hoped the human down there was Frank, but the Americans did not wear fur hats.

How had the Skarmer crossed, anyhow? Irv let his binoculars sweep past the knot of natives to water’s edge. At first, the round bowlshapes he saw there meant nothing to him. Then he realized they had to be boats. They looked dreadfully small and flimsy to stack against the current in the canyon, let alone the drift ice there.

Maybe, he thought, the Skarmer had not known the risk they were taking when they set out. Being too ignorant to worry about trouble had fueled a lot of human enterprises, too. Too bad this one was aimed in his direction.