She would have liked to talk frankly with George, explain why she was not responding. She did not, after all, want to discourage him. But she could say nothing until he provided the opportunity by making an overt move.

When it came, she blew it.

They had fallen into the habit of pronouncing each session formally closed with a midnight toast, and marking off another day on the mission calendar which Carson had constructed and placed on a bulkhead in the lounge. (The ever-present four-master loomed above the five weeks and two davs allotted for the outbound flieht.1 On the twentv-sixth evening, George had seemed especially vulnerable. He had seated himself across from her, where he could demonstrate monumental unconcern. But color went to his cheeks early in the session, and stayed there.

When the group broke up, he approached her. "Hutch," he said in his most serious manner, "can we walk?"

Her pulse fluttered. "Of course."

They descended into the lower reaches of the ship. The configuration had changed for this mission. She was still carrying three rings, but they were smaller. The vast cargo areas had been removed; the living quarters were reduced. There was still ample space to store artifacts, should the need arise, but Hutch no longer felt she was walking into an aircraft hangar. This Wink would present a considerably smaller target to scanners.

"Hutch," he said almost timidly, "you're one of the loveliest women I've ever seen."

"Thank you," she said.

"When we get back, I'd like to have an evening with you. Just us."

Yes. "We can do that."

He was very near, not quite touching her, his breath warm and uneven. She steered them toward a viewport. Outside, the mist of the interdimensional world drifted slowly past. They might have been in an old house on the edge of a moor.

"It's like you" he said, watching the fog. "You can't see into it, you can't quite get hold of it, and it keeps moving."

She laughed. They both did. And she made the first move. It was subtle enough, and would not have been noticeable to a bystander: she leaned in his direction, a mere centimeter or so. A signal passed between them, and she sensed his body make its own decision.

"Hutch—"

He reached out, tentatively, and touched her hair. His lips were very close.

Hutch felt her tides begin to run. Fingertips touched. Flanks brushed. His eyes held her. His hands curled around her shoulders, and her cheek touched his. It was warm. She was up on her toes, lips parted, open, waiting.

The moment expanded. Her breathing, her heartbeat, melted to his. Breasts, protected only by the flimsy material of her work uniform, touched him. He bent to her, met her mouth with his own, not pressing her. She accepted him, let him explore the thrust of her lips. Her heart hammered, and she lost her breath. When finally he broke away, she caught the nape of his neck, softly, firmly, and drew him back.

She had one final moment of clarity, of reluctance, and then folded herself against him, inviting him, becoming part of him. She had to get up on her toes to reach him, but she loved it. His fingers brushed her right breast, lingered, drew away.

She'd been on flights which featured people padding between rooms in the middle of the night. She didn't want any part of that. "Come with me," she said.

He moved silently behind her.

"Only tonight," she said.

His hand settled on her shoulder, touched her throat. And then he stopped. "Hutch," he said, "do you really want to do this?"

Yes, you fool.

She led him into the shuttle bay. The Alpha lay in its cradle, shadowy, silent, potent. The cockpit windows glittered in the uncertain light. (They had replaced the damaged tread, bent by the tsunami.)

He swung her easily off the floor, strode across the deck, and paused at the shuttle cargo door. He jabbed at the release mechanism, but nothing happened.

She did it for him; there was a maintenance seal that had to be removed.

He ducked inside with her, found a blanket, and spread it out.

"You didn't answer my question," he said as he bent to her again. "Because I don't want to spoil anything. I love you, Hutch."

She kissed his cheek. Drew his head down. "Be careful what you say. I might hold you to it."

"Now and forever," he said. The response was sufficiently artificial that she almost laughed. But he added, solemnly, "I mean it, Hutch."

What waited at Beta Pac? Maybe they were being invited to join the Galactic League. Or to receive a history and detailed atlas of the Milky Way, with its civilizations and its points of interest and its rest stops. Carson sprawled comfortably in his chair, feet propped up. "How do you suppose an individual in such a culture would define fulfillment?" he asked. "What would they want out of their lives?"

"Same as us," said Janet.

George sipped dark wine. "What would that be?" he asked.

"Power," she said. "And love."

"It's impossible to know," said Carson. "That's why they're alien."

Hutch sat with a book open on her lap. "But we are able to understand alien mythologies, at least the ones we've encountered so far. Which means we are motivated by the same drives." She thought once again about the footprints across the ridge on lapetus. "I would guess they'd live, as we do, for achievement. To do something. And to want others to know what they've done. That's the whole point of the Monuments."

The wall panels were open, and the internal lights played off the fog. There was always a sense of something just beyond the limits of vision. Hutch remembered an old story that pilots who had gone outside during transdimensional flight occasionally heard voices.

George kept their bargain and stayed at a distance. She was pleased that he understood the need for discretion, and that he refrained from demonstrating the possessiveness which was so often the immediate downside of a sexual encounter. There was no second event. Both had been around long enough to recognize the damage that pairing up does to a small team on an extended mission. So they strove for the same pleasant amiability with each other that they displayed toward each of their colleagues. In Hutch's case, at least, it required no small effort.

Unlike her personal life, Wink glided placidly through the veils. It never trembled, never quivered, never accelerated. No inner systems quickened, and of course it received no messages from outside.

Hutch enjoyed doing simmies with this crew. She portrayed a series of love interests attached to cynical antiheroes, like Margo Colby in Blue Light and lisa in Casablanca. George charmed her as Antoine in the one, and Carson was appropriately vulnerable as Rick in the other. (It showed her a side of his personality that she had not anticipated. And she was moved almost to tears when George/Antoine left her behind and rode to his death near Moscow.)

Carson had a taste for open-air historical spectaculars. He looked dashing, if a little beefy, as Antony at Actium, astride a white charger, the sun glittering against his horsehair helmet. Maggie was, they agreed, sensational as Cleopatra.

When it was her turn to choose, Maggie inevitably went for the Maclver Thomson cliffhangers, in which she excelled as the quintessential damsel in distress. (It struck Hutch as odd that their most intellectual member would opt for thrillers.) And, by God, she was good: she screamed her way through Now the Dawn, hunted by the members of a bloodthirsty cult; fled the maniacal clown Napoleon through the deserted amusement park in Laugh by Night; and fought off Brother Thaddeus, the murderous monk, in Things That Are Caesar's, while her would-be rescuer, the globe-trotting adventurer Jack Hancock (George), tried to recover from a vicious whack on the head and an attack in the rook tower by a pair of eagles.