"Models!" shouted Dr. Herat. "Those are models of habitats!"

Crisler cursed under his breath; it was an exclamation of wonder. Michael shook his head. Once again, Herat had beaten him to an essential realization. He was indeed looking at a model habitat. In fact, the little sphere, which must be about a meter in diameter, was a dead ringer for Lake Flaccid.

"What are we waiting for?" said Rue. She sounded tense. "Let's get in there already."

Just then the inscape window flashed so quickly that Michael almost missed it. "What was that?"

"Not sure. Wait— there's some kind of light source coming on in there."

"It knows we're here?"

A slow pulse of light welled up from several small points on the inner hull. It started out deep red, then rainbowed all the way to blue before fading away completely. The mesobot reported that it had started out in the deep infrared and went up to ultraviolet before fading. It happened again and began repeating at nine second intervals.

"What's it mean?" asked Crisler.

"Damned if I know," said Herat. "It doesn't seem dangerous, anyway. We'll wait and see if there's any change. If it's still doing this in five minutes, I'm going in."

As they waited, Rue drifted over to Michael's side. "Hey." She made a sign for him to go on private channel. "Did you get your photos?" she asked when he had.

"Yeah— but none of it makes any sense." He was beginning to feel like he was being had, somehow.

"Well, I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks so," she said. "What about this place? Models? What does that mean?"

"I can't even begin to speculate. And Dr. Herat's stymied too, for once." He said it with some relish.

"The pattern's not changing," said Herat. "I'm going in, unless one of you burly gentlemen has some objection?"

Crisler waved a gloved hand indifferently. Herat reached into the edge of the airlock disk and pulled himself through.

"No resistance," he said as his feet vanished into the black surface. "There's no atmosphere at all in here."

"Any ice?" asked Rue. "We need to find more oxygen."

Michael groped inside the lock and found the familiar bar, then flipped himself through. Pride demanded that he be second inside after Dr. Herat and he was, but only by seconds as the rest of the team followed, leaving three marines with rescue training outside. They snaked some umbilicals through the airlock; these stood up out of the disk like surreal reeds in the light of Michael's helmet lamp.

He called the mesobot and it obediently returned to him. Just then, a sweep of prisming light swept over it, causing Michael to miss his first grab for the bot.

"This is wild," said Rue. "Beautiful— but weird."

For someone raised on planets like Michael, it was a hard environment to get used to. It was natural to choose an up and a down to orient yourself, but here the choice was arbitrary and none of the options was comfortable. If he decided that down was in the direction of the airlock on the outer hull, that meant he was floating at the bottom of a giant bowl, with a huge metal sphere hanging over his head. If he put down in some direction tangent to the airlock, then he was in midair beside a sphere, with a long drop beneath him that curved out of sight. And if he pictured himself at the very top, then he had nothing to hold onto and could imagine sliding down that inner sphere and falling into the space between them.

"The light's brightening," said Crisler.

Michael turned his head and at that moment the small circles that were flashing went out. In their place, a series of red expanding rings appeared on the outer hull. One of these swept over Michael before he had time to even look away. His eye was momentarily dazzled by crimson laser-light. The marines started shouting.

"It's all right!" said Dr. Herat. "We're being scanned, is all. We can't see the beams because we're in vacuum— only the reflections off the outer hull. I think whatever it is that's in here is trying to decide what we are."

"We should leave," said Crisler.

"That might be prudent." They swarmed the airlock disk. Michael let go of the mesobot and popped out into familiar starlight last. The others were all talking at once; he counted to make sure they were all there, then connected to the mesobot again.

The little lamps had come on again, this time steadily. They illuminated the space between the hulls with a bright, steady, yellow-white light. "Look!"

There was another change happening too. The mesobot reported the presence of a faint gas pressure, rapidly rising. The gas was warm— in fact it was a mix of nitrogen and oxygen at the same temperature as the inside of Michael's suit.

It was Michael's turn to swear, very quietly.

"I think we've just been invited in," he said.

RUE WATCHED THE others slide through the black circle of the airlock. It was frightening to think that something inside the Lasa habitat knew they were here and was opening the way for them. On the other hand, Rue had always known she was just the finder of the Envy, not its real owner. The scattered habitats that made up the cycler had kept their secrets for almost two years now; without knowing where it came from or why it was here, she was forced to be humble. So her anxiety was mixed with relief at the thought that if the Envy's true masters appeared now, they could at least take the burden of doubt away from her.

Her turn came and she flipped through the airlock with ease. She nearly ran into somebody's back and climbed over them to get a better view.

The place was transformed. "Humidity, temp, pressure, oxy mix, they're all identical to our suit standard," Mike was saying. The interhull was lit up now too, in brilliant white light like the false sunlight the R.E. people favored. Rue dimmed her faceplate so she wouldn't have to squint.

"Eerie," somebody said. Rue nodded; this cavity between the spheres was strangely like a place on Allemagne known as the Gallery. The Gallery was the last insulating space between the outer shells of the colony and the inner part, where the centrifuge and power plant resided. It was much bigger than this space, but perspective was tricky here due to the smooth reflective metal everywhere. If she just glanced around casually, though, the place had a weird familiarity to it. Almost like home.

"I suggest we designate the airlock as bottom," said Herat. "We can string some lines up the sides so we can orient ourselves." The other men grunted agreement and soon were unreeling lines and jetting off around the sphere in pairs.

Slowly, like a shy animal, one of the little habitat models was drifting in Rue's direction. She held onto the lip of the airlock and studied it. It was an elongated doughnut shape about sixty centimeters wide and a hundred long, made of some burnished white metal. It didn't match any of the Envy's habitats, so it was hard to get a sense of how big the object it modeled would be. But there was an obvious airlock etched in one end and a whole slew of tiny machines, intricately shaped, stuffed into the tubular doughnut hole. It glimmered like some fantastical toy; for a moment she fantasized about some day being able to hang this bauble over her son or daughter's crib. Of course, it might be solid and weigh five hundred kilos.

For some almost superstitious reason, nobody had touched one of these models yet. Rue wasn't about to be the first. As it reached her she drew back, letting it parade slowly past.

"The readings are pretty clear," said Michael. "No organics of any kind, just the perfect breathing mix for us."

That got her attention. "Can we export it? Tank it and take it back to the Banshee?"

"Please!" Uh oh, she'd set Herat off again. His suited figure jetted over to her. "If this is a first contact situation I hardly think we'd make a good impression by stealing their air."