Then in the distance, Cliff saw a round blob high in the air. Dark, small, impossible to tell how far off even with zoom lenses. No discernible movement. He watched it for a while and wondered if it was some suspended artifact. Another mystery.

Cliff drank some water and curled up under some low hanging limbs. He conspicuously pulled his hat over his face. This was an important test, he sensed, peeking at them. They looked at one another once more. Irma shrugged. They settled in.

Cliff took the hat off and said, “Aybe, you up for taking the watch?”

“Uh, sure.” The lean, muscular man climbed up on a thick limb to improve his field of view.

The others laid out soon enough. Hats went on faces. Within minutes, somebody was snoring. The hard bright daylight remained.

He woke—two hours later, by his left eye watch—and sat up, disoriented. He had been dreaming of Beth, a jangled bunch of lurching images and a vague sense of threat offstage. Aybe was lying on the branch, head turned the other way. Cliff walked around and looked up at his face. Aybe’s eyelids fluttered and he jerked up. “I, I was—”

“It’s okay. Sleeping rhythm’s going to be a problem for a while.”

They roused slowly. Howard still was gray, worn. Irma looked at his wound, and his eyelids fluttered with pain. In the enduring sunlight, they ate and drank and didn’t talk much. The air was dry and dusty and a breeze had kicked up dust clouds in the distance. Cliff wondered how anybody could figure out the weather here. There might be something like the Hadley circulation in the atmosphere, since the Cupworld wasn’t a perfect spherical surface—but the scales were immense. Surface gravity varied over the entire hemisphere, but not solar heating. He found it hard to think through the atmospheric dynamics. It seemed unlikely that Cupworld had seasons; no axial tilt. What carried moisture around, in what patterns? What happened to evolution, without the seasonal cycle?

He made them go downwind, slanting off the ridgeline. That way they could see whatever was interested in them, coming up ahead. Their rear guard could be pretty sure of no surprises—from animals, at least. The sapient aliens were after them with smart technology, so they could come from anywhere.

Out of the sky? Cliff gazed up into the gossamer blue bowl. Birds of many sizes flapped across the immensity. Their body designs were familiar, excellent examples of convergent evolution shaped by the laws of physics—but some were huge, oddly angular, and rode thermals until they vanished in puffy high clouds. He could not see the rest of Cupworld through the high white water haze, or the jet. No sign of industrial pollution, at least. The aliens were somewhere out there, looking for them. Their only advantage was the size of this place, its refuges.

They made their way down a valley, seeing nothing much. Yet the air of strangeness kept them uneasy, on guard. Cliff led by example—always looking around, keeping them from talking. That way they could let their ears do the advance warning.

Irma got it. “Think like we’re in Africa,” she said. “Lions around every corner.”

The two new guys, Howard Blaire and Terry Gould, seemed capable tech types, but with little field experience. They didn’t hike well, kept talking. Irma shushed them a lot. The trees got shorter, and on all sides were brown bushes and tall gray grass. Birds trilled and sang in the tree bowers and stopped whenever anybody spoke.

They crept carefully into the high grass. In the dry perpetual afternoon, the stalks rattled as they brushed by. Thirty meters in, Cliff sensed something moving up ahead.

He felt a cold adrenaline shock trickle down his spine, his chest tightening. They went to ground in tall grass and watched a bobbing, tawny spike move across their path at about twenty meters ahead. Cliff saw the spike—a tail?—turn and then stop, directly downwind of them. They all tensed.

Then it moved off again, faster, at an angle. Maybe they smelled funny to it. Or maybe, he thought, it was going to get some buddies.

Crossing the grass had been a mistake. Their lasers gave them control of a ten-meter perimeter, but that shrank to how far they could see in grass or dense forest. They all got edgy. They got out of there fast and headed partway up the side of the narrow valley, to get viewing range. They were still seeking water. Cliff had them do an inventory on the way.

He had chosen to fill out his backpack carry weight, fifteen kilos, with other gear. Luckily, he had guessed right, and brought a light sleeping bag and cooking equipment. He had left behind all the techy gadgets and gimmicks available in Seeker’s supplies for planetary landing. Most of those presumed a power supply and backups. One item he had found and brought was a pair of sturdy boots and, most important, spikes for climbing trees—or anything fairly soft. Light, foldable carboaluminum, they weighed little and clamped snugly around the boots. They popped out on a sharp heel-clinking command—smart tech, quite cute.

They moved carefully and kept down talk to a minimum, but they were basically city types, able to keep the expedition’s technology running. Not a bad group for this place, which was, after all, an enormous machine. Their attention wandered after the first hour.

Without warning, something like a wiry, fanged slick-skinned squirrel leaped down on Irma and tried to eat through her hat. Howard snatched off her hat by its brim and hurled it like discus. The squealing creature hung on until the hat landed in thorns, then dived into the briars and was gone.

Irma snatched at her hat as if it would fight back. She was flushed and trembling. “Why’d it do that?” she asked.

“It thought you looked like some tasty thing, I figure,” Cliff said. He wondered what that thing might be, but kept the thought to himself. “Or maybe he liked your hat.”

There were worried faces all around. He waved the matter away and changed the subject. “Try to listen for water. Or better, smell it.”

“Smell it?” Aybe frowned. “Water doesn’t smell.”

“Sure it does.” Aybe and Terry really were a bunch of office engineers and computer types, he thought, living out their lives indoors. And they had been inside for a long time. Good thing they didn’t have to learn to build a fire or make bows and arrows. Or at least, not yet.

Except Howard Blaire, who was grinning at Aybe. Howard had run a private zoo, and collected for it, too. A field guy, he’d know the smell of water. “It smells fresh, kind of,” he said.

They sniffed the air as they moved. Cliff wondered why they had seen no aircraft. It was the obvious way to search, and anyway, wasn’t there routine air commerce? Anywhere on Earth, they’d have seen commercial flights by now. He recalled a glorious week rafting through the Grand Canyon, when the only sign of civilization was contrails scratched across the deep blue.

But this place was alien, and they should learn from it. What had his mother used to say? Problems are just disguised opportunities. Sure, Mom.

Maybe the natives were afraid of aircraft puncturing their atmospheric cap? He filed the puzzle for future study and went back to scanning the woodland they moved through.

They were halfway across a clearing when something charged them.

Irma got off a shot at something that looked like a giant red badger. The shot didn’t slow it down much. Cliff and Irma both walked backwards fast. Without a word spoken, the other three ran for the trees.

Irma shot at it again, and Howard, but it didn’t seem to notice. It turned away from them—for Cliff.

His fingers itched for a laser, but instead he ran for the nearest tree. He jumped, clicked his heels in midair, and had his spikes dug into the tree bark before he thought about it. Then he was up and over, just as the badger clawed up at him. He could hear teeth snap behind him. It was a pretty nasty beast, all big teeth and claws and temper. Smelled bad, too.