I felt the despair like a ceiling crushing down on me. No matter how hard I pressed back, it was always there; it just kept coming back, each time pushing closer than before. I couldn't make it go away. If I kept busy, I could pretend I didn't feel it. If I kept busy, I could distract myself. If I kept busy, I wouldn't have to deal with that thing I didn't want to admit. But there wasn't anything to do, and the desperate pressure came rolling in again, like a big rosy, smothering wall.

I suppressed a shudder; it didn't work. I covered by pretending to stretch. I leaned back in my chair; it creaked alarmingly, but it held. I put my arms behind my head and stretched-but no, I couldn't quite get the vertebrae in my back to give one of those long, satisfying knuckle-crunching cracks. Damn. Everything today was almost, but not-quite.

Willig was watching me carefully. I glanced over at her. "You know what?" I said.

"What?" she asked.

"You remind me of a dog I had once."

"Oh?"

I nodded. "She'd lie on the floor at my feet, content to wait patiently for whatever I might decide to do-a cookie, a walk, a ball-but the giveaway was that she never took her eyes off me. She even slept with her ears open. I swear she even counted the sounds of pages turning. Whenever I finished whatever I was reading, she'd sit up and look at me. She never asked for anything outright, but she was always there. Always. She was totally tuned to my every move." I gave Willig a speculative look. "Does that sound like anybody we know?"

Willig was pouring out a fresh cup of brown stuff. She put it into the holder on my work station and looked at me with her big soft brown eyes. "Try throwing a ball and find out."

"Right. It'll have to be a masked ball, so no one will recognize you." I picked up the steaming cup and sipped at it cautiously. Ugh. Nobody liked the stuff, but we all drank it anyway. The fact that it was probably poisonous was an added benefit.

The most effective way to kill every dangerous bug swimming in a volume of water was to make brown stuff out of it. You could leave an uncovered container of brown stuff standing in a field full of Chtorran parasites for a year and come back to find that nothing, absolutely nothing, had grown in it. What brown stuff did to your internal plumbing was every bit as wonderful. The technology of antisepsis had advanced light-years.

Brown stuff was also good as rust preventative, transmission fluid, shark repellent, and sheep dip. Aside from that, it was delicious. "Ahhh," I said, appreciatively. I made a great show of licking my chops and wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.

"Yum."

Willig raised an eyebrow at me. "Oh, really?"

"All right," I lied. "Next time, you could put in a little more battery acid, okay?"

"We're out of battery acid. I had to substitute buffalo sweat."

"Ah, good choice." I swung around back to my station. The remains of my dinner sat forgotten to one side. I put the mug down next to it and realized that at some point between yellow stuff and brown stuff, I'd made a decision. "Siegel," I called.

"Jawohl, mein Kapitkn?"

"Heat up the prowler again."

"Huh?"

"As long as we're sitting here, let's get some work done. Let's find out what happens in that hole when the pink starts hitting the ground."

"You got it." A moment later. "We're alive again."

I pulled the helmet down over my head slowly, fitting myself back into the cyberspace reality as gently as I could. It didn't work. I shuddered into position, and I was struggling queasily to maintain my footing at the bottom of a giant wet stomach. Everything was slippery here, everything had an oily look. It made me squeamish and uncomfortable.

But Siegel had done something to the audio-video spectra, and nothing was quite as intense as it had been before. I could still sense the rhythmic pumping, the pulsing, the incessant industrial throbbing of this living factory; but it was no longer quite so overwhelming.

"Let's start by taking samples," I said.

"We have another problem," said Siegel. "We need to get Sher Khan out of this sludge at the bottom. It's rising. Not fast, but fast enough to worry me."

"Right," I agreed. Then I understood the problem. "It's too slippery to climb."

"Can I use the claws?" Siegel asked.

"Guess we're going to have to. But do it gently. Let's try to avoid any serious damage, and let's hope that this thing doesn't have enough of a nervous system to feel real pain."

Siegel took the controls of the prowler. Almost abruptly, the skidding sensation underfoot disappeared, replaced by a catlike plucking that accompanied every step. We began picking our way upward and out. I could feel the fleshy surface twitching beneath us. I wanted to pull my hands out of the responders and wipe them off. Already I felt sticky, dirty, and covered with slime. I suppressed the feelings and forced myself to focus on the job. "There-" I said. "See that big red jellyfish structure?"

"Got it."

"Let's get closer. I want to see what all those little flecks inside it are. I want samples of that first."

"Working," said Siegel.

I kept my mouth shut while Siegel concentrated on the task at hand. Most of the subtasks were preprogrammed, but someone still had to guide the software, telling it exactly what was wanted.

We slid in close to the huge blubbery mass and examined it carefully. Eyestalks extruded from the prowler's head and focused on the target from both above and below; then a pair of three-fingered pincers slid out from the place where mandibles would have been if Sher Khan had been a living creature. We grasped a section of the blood-colored blob and pulled on it; it stretched out as if it were made of some kind of rubber cement. There were responder pads on the fingers. We could feel the sticky wetness of the stuff as if we were touching it with our bare hands. It wasn't a pleasant sensation. It was warm and fleshy, and it twitched and pulsed like it was trying to wriggle out of our grasp.

"How do you want to do this?" asked Siegel. "Poke, drill, or cut?"

"Wait a minute-" I was studying the flecks suspended in the gelatinous mass. They were all different sizes and shapes. There was a very fine network of capillaries or nerves or something woven throughout the suspension, but I couldn't tell what its function was. "Backlight this," I muttered, and one of the eyestalks angled its bright beam directly through the mass I was studying.

"Expand the focus," I said, and reality exploded as if I were shrinking. The flecks grew suddenly into boulders, and then asteroids hanging in reddened space. The pale fibers became a branching net of gigantic cables floating in the distance.

"Siegel, look at this."

I heard his sharp intake of breath. And then, "Beautiful."

"Enhance," I whispered, and the spectrum shifted; the colors seemed to stretch and change within themselves; outlines intensified, and things that were previously unidentifiable became sharply etched structures.

Each of the myriad little flecks was a shining black node, surrounded by pale fibrous sheets that uncurled outward and faded into the distance. We moved in closer, and we could see that many of the black flecks were surrounded by the faintest hints of shells, outlines that intimated the existence of dividing membranes.

As we watched, the enveloping suspension pulsed. A wave of movement swept through the gelatinous mass. Fifteen seconds later, another wave passed through the ocean of tiny objects. What were we looking at here? Seeds? Eggs? What kind of horrors grew here? How long before these tiny flecks produced a host of new monsters, breaking free and rising open-eyed into the world, black and raw and hungry?

"Wow," said Siegel.

"Yeah," I agreed.

Siegel told the processing engine to try several other enhancement patterns, and we examined the minuscale structures through a series of shifted spectrum and false-color images. Their structures grew clearer and clearer.