"How did you arrive at that figure?"

"By throwing darts."

"How many suspect stars did we wind up with?"

"About eighty."

She sighed.

"Hutch, we need to go back and do a complete survey at Oz. Establish the extent to which there's been ground movement."

"How long would that take?"

"Years. Right now, nobody at the Academy wants to hear anything about either Quraqua or Oz. And I don't think there'd be much enthusiasm for sending out eighty expeditions either. Especially when we have no idea whether our margin for error is too conservative. Which it probably is." He looked discouraged. "At least, we've had some movement."

Hutch was looking at the black Lab in the photo.

"Her name was Spike," he said.

"Odd name for a female."

"My nephew named her." He followed her gaze to the picture. "Something wrong?"

"Animals," she said.

"Beg pardon?"

"You said there were animals. How about a divert"

"I'm sorry?"

"A diver. The sea bird that was connected with Lisandra."

"Damn. I never thought of that."

The sky moved again. "It had a long beak," she said.

"You think that'll help?"

"It's the diver's primary characteristic. I looked it up. Like Hercules' club, or the dipper's handle. It would be a row of stars. Three or more. Maybe even prominent, if we're lucky."

"That's optimistic. More like two stars, I'd think. Maybe one. You know how constellations are."

"No," she said. "Two won't work. You can draw a straight line between any two stars in the sky. If we don't have three, we're wasting our time."

"Okay," he said. "What's to lose? The horgon's eye, the diver, and the virgin should all be in the same neighborhood. We'll line up every red star that gets close to either crosshair, and look for the beak."

This was not the sort of search that was likely to produce a sudden, blinding result. They worked through the afternoon, recording those stars which might possibly have served as the all-seeing eye: Olphinax, forty light-years farther along the shore of the Void; Tulikar, with its dense companion; Kampatta Prime, centerpiece of the Quraquat Pleiades. They added Anapaka to the list, and Hasan and Alpha Qui and three stars whose only designations were their catalog numbers. Each was accompanied by a nearby line of stars that might, by imaginative observers, be classified as a beak. "How do we know," asked Carson, "that it isn't curved?"

"Beg pardon?" said Hutch.

"The beak. How do we know it's supposed to be straight? It could look like a pelican."

"No," said Hutch. "I saw a picture of one. It's straight."

It was all too inexact. Their margin for error resulted sometimes in multiple hits: a single horgon's eye candidate produced two, three, and in one case six, targets in the other crosshairs.

The search for the beak proved fruitless. They discovered a basic universal truth: Almost anywhere one looks in the sky, stars line up in threes and fours. Eventually, they cataloged more than fifty candidates and began the process of elimination. All stars that were not class G or M, or that were not at least three billion years old, were excluded. ("A bit arbitrary there," said Carson. "But Rome wasn't built in a day.") Multiple star systems, which are probably too unstable to permit life to develop, were also disregarded. Stars which had already been surveyed were removed.

By the end of the afternoon, the number of candidates was down to thirteen.

"We've done pretty well," she said.

"We've done a lot of guesswork. I liked the old days when we could just order up a survey. This isn't nearly good enough. We have to pin it down, isolate it. And then we have to persuade Ed Horner."

Hutch felt desperate.

"Let's quit," Carson said. "Day's over."

It turned into a gloomy, rainswept evening. She wondered whether Carson had already given up, whether he was hoping she would see the futility of continuing, of risking their careers for a cause that most of the Academy people considered ludicrous. And that, it suddenly struck her, was the point. From his perspective, she had nothing to lose. She was a pilot, with no professional career at risk. Whatever happened, no one would laugh at her. It was Carson who was taking the risk, his colleagues who smiled tolerantly, his judgment at issue.

They went to dinner again, in Georgetown. But it was a mistake because they reinforced one another's discouragement. Afterward, Hutch was glad to get home. She climbed into a simmy and sat with it until she fell asleep.

Somewhere around two, she jerked fully awake. There was another test they could try. The obvious one.

Carson would have to go to the commissioner, and they'd have to pull some strings. But it could be made to work.

The Tindle Array, Farside, Luna. Monday, January 24. 2203; 1130 GMT.

Alexander Coldfield walked into his office, peered through his tinted windows across the vast expanse of Mare Musco-viense, and slid into his seat. Off to his left, a coffee machine perked noisily. The thick columns and spidery dishes of the Tindle Array marched across the lunar plain.

Coldfield loved places that were isolated and hostile. He'd grown up in the Bronx, and had escaped to North Dakota at his first opportunity. He discovered an affinity for fireplaces and barren plains, for good wine and heavy snow. Solitude became his watchword. His affection for a landscape grew in direct proportion to its inconvenience for natives and inaccessibility to travelers.

He was a career government employee. He had worked in outposts from Manitoba to New Brunswick. The break of his life had come when, at thirty-two, he'd been appointed observer and technician at the one-man weather station on uninhabited Kaui Island, two thousand miles west of Hawaii. When he went there, he expected to remain forever, and would have, had not the lunar assignment come up.

The Tindle Array, located in the Tsiolkovsky area, had required a technician/operator. The tour was designed to last one year, and he could take his family if he wished. Of course, Coldfield had no family. That had been a problem at first. One of the busybodies in OHR had wondered about his psychological well-being. But Coldfield was solid if anybody was, and he'd made his case convincingly. The analysts agreed.

The appeal of the assignment was enhanced by the fact that Tsiolkovsky was located on the far side of the Moon. The Earth would never rise over the Array.

None of this should be construed to suggest that Coldfield was a misanthropist. He most definitely was not. In fact he liked people, felt he had been fortunate in his acquaintances over the years, and made good use of the relay circuits to a dozen points on Earth to talk with old friends. The truth about him was complicated. It involved a degree of self-doubt, of discomfort with strangers, and a thoroughgoing dislike for crowds, combined with a genuine love for remote places and a strong meditative inclination. (He would never have admitted to the latter.)

The Tindle was to have consisted of one hundred eleven fully steerable antennas, each sixteen meters in diameter. They would occupy an area forty kilometers across, and be set on individual tracks ranging from eight to sixty meters long. The project was only two-thirds constructed, but the government had run out of money. No one seriously believed that it would ever be finished. But it added up to tens of thousands of moving parts, which had to be kept operational under extreme conditions. It would not have been correct to say there was always work, but repairs were needed often enough to justify Coldfield's presence.

The tasks were simple enough. When something went down, the systems isolated the problem for him, and usually all he had to do was trek out to the offending unit and substitute a microboard or a crystal.