Smiling, the Georgian sank his barb. “He’s all out of ice, and wants to borrow your heart for a few minutes.”

“Why, you!” Lopatin grabbed for the buckle of the safety harness that held him in his seat.

Tolmasov brought his hand down on top of the KGB man’s. “No brawling,” he snapped. Lopatin kept struggling for a few seconds to open the harness, then subsided. Tolmasov turned his glare on Rustaveli. “I will log this incident. You are reprimanded. There will be no repetitions.”

“Yes, Comrade Colonel.” Rustaveli clicked his heels, a gesture only ludicrous in freefall. “Reprimand all you like. But it means nothing.”

“You will think differently when you get back to Earth,” Tolmasov ground out. “Are you a mutineer?” He was a military man; he could not think of anything worse to calm Rustaveli.

“No, merely practical,” the biologist answered, quite unruffled. “If we get back to Earth, I will be a Hero of the Soviet Union, reprimand or no. If we don’t, the reprimand certainly will not matter to me. Truly, Sergei Konstantinovich, you should think things through more carefully.”

The colonel gaped at him. The worst of it was that Rustaveli even made a twisted ‘kind of sense.

“There, there,” the Georgian said, seeing his popeyed expression. “To please you, I will even accept the reprimand- provided you also log the KGB man, for mocking my people.”

Lopatin let out a scornful laugh. He knew how likely that was. So did Tolmasov. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, the KGB might have been made to answer for misconduct. Too bad Gorbachev had only lasted nine months. Tolmasov still wondered if his cerebral hemorrhage had been of the 5.54mm variety.

“You’ve talked yourself out of your bloody reprimand,” the colonel told Rustaveli. “I hope you’re satisfied. Now go away.” Grinning, the biologist sailed off.

The male shoved Fralk toward the bridge. “Go on,” he said harshly. “Never let us see you on this side again.”

See me you shall, Fralk said, but only to himself. He stepped out onto the cables of the bridge.

“Once you are across, we will cut it,” the male told him. “If you do not hurry, we will not bother to wait.”

Fralk hurried. His toes wrapped around the lower rope; his fingerclaws gripped the upper one. He walked out over empty space. On the eastern side of the gorge, the one he was leaving, the males of Reatur’s clan grew smaller.

The western side, though, the lands of the Skarmer clans, did not seem any closer. Even down close to its bottom, the gorge was too wide to yield him sight of progress so soon. And with one wall visibly receding while the other appeared fixed in place, Fralk had the eerie feeling that the canyon was stretching itself like a live thing as he traveled, that he might never reach the far side.

The wind whistled around, above, below. Over the heart of the gorge, Fralk let an eyestalk turn downward, and another up. The other four, as usual, looked all about. Only the thin lines of the rope bridge, extending in the direction he had come and toward his destination, gave his vision a clue he was not a mote suspended in the center of infinite space.

The sensation was so daunting that he stopped, forgetting the male’s threat. If the gorge were infinitely wide, how could movement matter? He looked down and down and down, to the boulders far, far below. For a giddy moment, he thought they were calling to him. If he let go of the ropes, for how long would he fall?

‘That reminded him he might indeed fall, regardless of whether he let go. The Omalo males would know how long someone took to cross the bridge and surely would allow him no excess time, not when they knew he and his wanted to supplant them. Telling that to Reatur had perhaps been less than wise. But then, Fralk had reckoned there was a fair chance the domain master would yield. How little folk on one side of a gorge understood those on the other!

Fralk hurried onward. Every tremor of the bridge in the wind set him to quivering with fright, thinking he was about to be pitched into the abyss.

At last the far side of the gorge began to appear closer, while the one from which he had come seemed frozen and distant in space: the reverse of the stretching he had nervously imagined before. The males he could see were his own solid Skarmer budmates, not scrawny easterners.

They helped pull him off the bridge and clustered around him. “What word, eldest of eldest?” called Niress, the commander of the crossing.

Fralk gave it to him: “War.” A moment later, as if to underscore it, the bridge jerked like a male who had just touched a stunbush. Then, like that same imaginary male a moment later, it went limp and hung down into the gorge. Fralk feared its stone supports would give way now that it was not attached to anything on the far side, but they held.

Niress’s eyestalks wriggled with mirth. “As if cutting the bridge will stop us,” he said. He and Fralk began the long climb up to the top of the gorge.

The red numbers on the digital readout spun silently down to zero. “Initiate separation sequence,” Emmett Bragg said.

“Initiating.” His wife flipped a toggle.

Strapped in his seat, Irv Levitt heard distant metallic bangs and rattles different from the ones he no longer consciously noticed. After a while, Louise said, “Separation sequence complete.”

We’re on our own, Irv thought. As if to emphasize the point, Athena’s monitor gave him an image of the rocket motor package that had accompanied the ship to Minerva. While he watched, the motors slowly grew smaller as they drifted away. They would wait in orbit while the hypersonic transport that was Athena proper went down to the planet and-if everything worked exactly right-returned to rejoin them for the trip back to Earth.

He glanced over at his wife, whose seat was next to his in the cabin. Sarah’s answering smile was forced. “Just another flight to a new research lab,” he said, trying to cheer her by coming out with the most ridiculous thing he could think of.

“I hate them all,” she said. “I don’t like being in any situation where I don’t have full control of things, and I can’t do that in an airliner-or here,” she added pointedly. “Once we’re down, I’ll be all right.”

He nodded. A lot of doctors he knew felt that way, some of them much more than Sarah. That was, he supposed, why so many of them flew their own planes. He smiled. Sarah would get her chance at that.

Athena:

“Thank you, Sergei Konstantinovich,” Bragg said. “The same to you and Tsiolkovsky. Give our regards to Comrade Reguspatoff.”

“To whom?” Puzzlement crept into the Russian colonel’s precise voice.

“Nichevo, “Bragg replied. “It doesn’t matter.”

“As you wish,” Tolmasov said: an oral shrug. “We will see you on the ground, then. We also are about to uncouple.”

“Expected as much,” Bragg said. “We’ll both be busy for a while, so I’ll say goodbye now. Athena out.” He cut the transmission.

“Reguspatoff?” Frank Marquard asked. He made a good straight man.

“Registered-U.S. Patent Office,” Bragg explained with a grin that looked more like a wolf’s lolling-tongued laugh than any gentler mirth. “Or do you think Tsiolkovsky looks so much like Athena just by accident?”

“It’s bigger,” Frank said. “Why don’t we copy their rockets?”

“I wish we would,” Bragg said. “Well, we do what we can with what we’ve got. Not too bad, I suppose: we’ll be down ahead of them.”

His wife broke in. “Or maybe we won’t. Radar shows two images from Tsiolkovsky. I’d say that means they have uncoupled from their engine pack.”

The mission commander’s head jerked toward the screen. “Son of a bitch,” he said softly. He picked up the mike, punched the Transmit button, and started speaking Russian. “Athena to Tsiolkovsky.”

“Tsiolkovsky here: Lopatin.” The engineer’s English was accented but easy to follow.