Too late. Didn’t matter anyway: Howard, Terry, and Aybe would be sharing. Nobody alone. Cliff and Irma—

Terry and Aybe looked at him, long steady gazes, and he realized that they knew. He would be with Irma and the compartments sealed off very nicely, thank you. Never mind who was gay, the big issue here was about him and Irma. He had been ignoring it. So consumed with his own emotions, he had not thought through what happened to a small band with cross-currents working below the surface. Now that they were inside again, back in a moving machine, somehow everything suppressed in the pseudo-wilderness of the Bowl melted away. It was about the old elementals—survival, sex, the splendor of the deep sensual accents. Life.

Realizing that left him speechless, which he also saw was a good idea. Life is just one damn thing after another.

“So what happens,” Terry said evenly, “when we stop at a station?”

Irma said quickly, anxiously, “We need an exit.”

All agreed. They trooped to the back end, aft on the starboard side, to consider the pressure door. “We’ve got to try it,” Terry said.

The door opened with a shove. It led to a short lock chamber, and in the wall was a simple pressure gauge—long-lasting analog, of course—with release valves. Simple stuff, artifacts so clear they could serve generations without an instruction manual.

They factored through into a dark room that lit up slowly when they entered, phosphors brimming with sleepy glows.

“Freight,” Terry said.

Dark lumps of webbed coverings secured units the size of Earthside freight cars at multiple points. It all looked mechanically secure and professional, robot work of a high order by Earthside standards.

Aybe said, “We fall back to here?”

“We don’t have much choice,” Terry said.

“If we start to slow down, send an all-alert,” Irma said.

“Who’s up on watch?” Terry asked innocently.

“You,” Cliff said. He hadn’t much hope the thin, angular man would stay awake more than five minutes beyond the rest. But it was good to set some standard, even if it was obviously not going to work. In their tired eyes he saw that they knew this, too.

So they went back, chose compartments, and cut the phosphors. For the first time in their new, strange lives here, blessed night descended.

*   *   *

Cliff sat up. A subtle long slow bass rumbling came through the floor. He blinked, thinking fuzzily that maybe he was under a tree, maybe some animal was nearby—and suddenly knew that this was real, solid darkness. Not shade. It wasn’t going away.

He found the wall switch and powered up the phosphors. Irma jerked, shook her head, shot a palm up to block the light. “Uhh! Noooo…”

“Got to. We’re slowing down.”

Cliff clicked on his phone, sent an all-alert. Until this moment he hadn’t thought if the walls of this train would block the signal. Well, too late—

“I’m up,” Irma said unconvincingly. She got unsteadily to her feet, pulling on her gray underpants.

Cliff couldn’t help himself. He started laughing, quick bursts of it. He bent over, tried to stop, couldn’t. The laughs slowed, developed a hacking sound.

“What?” Irma said, struggling into her cargo pants.

He made himself stop. “I—I was thinking about … sex.”

Skeptical frown. “Uh, yeah?”

“No, not now. I mean—just that—I worried about us and them, Terry and Howard and Aybe. Last night. Never realized that sleep was the big thing we all wanted.”

She grimaced, yawned, stretched. “Well, yeah. This is a sleep high—feels so good.”

“Wow, yes. I musta slept—” He glanced at his phone. “—oog … fourteen hours.”

“And you thought about sex?” She tried to smile, failed, rubbed her eyes.

“Not really. Just thinking about the team, y’know—oh, hell. I’m not up to speed.”

“Speaking of—”

Yes. The train was slowing. They had been so joyful, they’d ignored it. He hastened into his own pants, boots, backpack, field gear. All he had, now. Into battle, maybe.

He went out into the corridor, pulling up his backpack harness. He had run away from enough threats to know that you never can count on going back for your gear. Terry and Aybe were already there, standing warily as they looked out the windows at the dark sliding by.

“Y’know,” Irma said, “we should’ve looked for underground places to sleep.”

“We did. We ran into nothing like this train station, but yeah, we shoulda looked harder.”

The phosphors were pulsing as the train passed by, their gray hoops fluttering so slow now, he could see the flicker. “I see a platform up ahead,” Aybe said.

Cliff went forward. Harder glows showed the prospect ahead. He close-upped it with his binocs. There were teams of robots, standing in gray files. Beyond them … figures on the platform.

“Back into our rooms,” Cliff said. Irma came up, still a little bleary eyed. “Seal the doors, too.”

“What if some Bird Folk are assigned to our room?” Terry asked.

“Then we deal with it as it comes,” Irma said, rolling her eyes.

The small surges of deceleration came slower now. Each segment of the rail line handed off to the next smoothly. Cliff went into the same compartment as Irma and they fell silent. This one had a window and they crouched down to be invisible from outside. The train slowed without any braking sound. Cliff felt hungry and fished out some of the salty food stock he had gotten from the machines. With plenty of water, it was bearable. They were long past the point of testing everything before eating now.

The train stopped. They waited. Distant clanks and rumbles. Irma and Cliff finally cast darting glances out the window. This went on and on. Robots trundled by, some as large as a car, their forward opticals never wavering. Irma put her hands on the floor, to feel any vibration from doors in their car.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Like a snowball in hell.”

Footsteps outside, faint and hesitant. Stop, pause, then going on. Again. And again, closer.

The footsteps stopped outside. Cliff took out his laser and held his breath. The door had a mechanical lock that, despite their supposedly having secured it, now rotated. Cliff stepped forward and jerked it open.

A sleek, tawny creature held up its large, flat hands and said in slurred Anglish, “I share no harm.”

Cliff glanced along the corridor, saw no one, gestured inward, and stepped back. The alien moved with grace, shifting its body to wedge into a corner, leaving the most space for the humans.

Irma said, “You speak … our language.”

“Astronomers shared language with lessers, to make hunt easier. I loaded into my inwards. Please forgive my talk error. We were to seduce you into friendship giving out.”

Cliff said, “Is anyone else coming on this train?”

The slim alien paused and consulted some internal link, Cliff judged, by the way it cast its gaze to the side. Cliff realized by standing they were visible to the platform and quickly squatted down. The alien mimicked this, bending as though it had no joints, only supple muscle.

“No. Distribute was to be, but I erased the possibility.”

Its skull was highly domed, with high arches and a crest running along the top. Those and its short muzzle would give it strong jaw muscles, a classic predator feature. Yet it had no retractable claws, or maybe they were just relaxed. As he watched, the thick fingers extended sharp fingernails. Ah! Cliff thought. Binocular vision, too, with eyes that flicked restlessly from Irma to him.

“Erased?” Irma said cautiously.

It spoke with a low, silky growl that carefully enunciated vowels, as though they were strange. “Intersected controls so alone could greet you. And in keeping-with, deflected the pursuit team to the train orthogonal to this line.”

“So we are safe here?” Irma persisted, focused intently on the alien.