Sigh.

Saul pushed off from the packing crate as scattered applause rose from various parts of the hall. After the first stumble caused him to drift above the floor for a few seconds, he had to endure being passed from hand to hand by those more experienced in microgravity.

Along the way he saw that much of the applause came from certain groups— Matsudo and Malenkov, who had helped in the analyses, from the Hawaiians up in front, from some of the Percells…

There were some among the African and Latin contingents who looked aside and lowered their arms, unable, like him, to forget Jerusalem.

Someone put her hands under him and pushed hard. He went sailing, without a bit of spin, in a smooth arc that landed him right beside Dr. Bethany Oakes. Good shooting, he thought as the small woman swung him around to face the audience.

“Don’t worry, Saul,” Cruz whispered to him. “You’ll get your space legs yet. Your problem is you’ve spent too much time in that damned wheel.”

Saul shrugged. “Some of us are too old to change, Mike.”

Cruz laughed and gestured that the “floor” was his. Saul gingerly slid a foot forward. He looked out over the assembly.

“Um, I’m sure you’ll all recall…”

“Louder, Saul!” a thickly accented voice called out from the back of the hall. “You don’t have to whisper to prove to us you’re not a loudmouthed Levite!”

Gasps rose from the crowd and several dark faces seemed suddenly to go pale. Saul recognized Malenkov’s shout and wave from the back of the room. The grinning Russian bear had the tact of a tornado, but Saul smiled.

“Sorry. I’ll try to speak up.

“I was about to say that I’m sure you’ll all recall the fantastic array of organic compounds that the expedition to comet Encke found while they were testing out the techniques needed for this mission. Many of those compounds were totally unknown until then, and led to some revolutionary changes in industrial chemistry.

“In fact, one of our lesser goals here is to see if nature has cooked up any more wonderful polymers and agglutinates for us, perhaps as valuable as Enkon and Stannous-Clathride have become.”

Directly below the platform, Joao Quiverian frowned. He had discovered those compounds, on that earlier mission, so in a way he was responsible for some of the motivation to explore and “exploit” comets.

“But one of the most exciting discoveries at Encke was that the core of that aged, nearly dead comet contained an abundance of chemicals best called ‘prebiotic’… accumulations of purities, pyrimidines, phosphates, and amino acids nearly identical to the sort of mixture modern biologists believe made up the primordial `soup’ that led to life on Earth. It was hoped, when we set off on this trip, that by studying a large, younger comet, we might, well, shed some light on the way things were on our homeworld four billion years ago, when we all began.”

Saul cleared his throat, and hoped the raspiness in his voice would be attributed to general hoarseness and excitement. Ten rows back or so, among the colorful Hawaiians, he saw Virginia Herbert smiling up at him. The admiration in her eyes was pleasant, if a bit disconcerting.

Down, boy. Don’t imagine more’n is there. No doubt she looks on you as some sort of surrogate dad.

“Well,” he resumed. “Dr. Malenkov and Dr. Quiverian and I have studied one of the latest cores collected by Dr. Otis Sergeov—”

“Don’t be modest, Saul.” Malenkov interrupted again. “You did it! You get the blame!”

This time, at least, people laughed and applauded. Saul smiled. Thanks, Nicholas. Deep inside he wondered if the Russian wasn’t really right… if blame might someday be the right word. Look at what had happened to Simon Percell, whose name should have gone down alongside Galen’s and Schweitzer’s. Dame Fame was a fickle bitch.

“… Uh, well, with the help of those gentlemen I was able to isolate…”

Oh, come on, Saul, he chided himself What would Miriam think if she had lived to see you now, standing here stammering, when you have a chance to make an announcement like this!

Saul straightened his back, almost losing his footing in the process. He looked out at the audience and borrowed one of Miguel Cruz’s gestures, spreading his hands apart.

“The signs are strong. The specimens are unambiguous. No contamination could explain what we have found. We’ve worked for a week to be certain it is nothing brought from Earth.

“How it got here, nobody can imagine as yet. How it survived or evolved, we haven’t a clue. But what we do know now is that we appear to have stumbled on what mankind has been looking for ever since our first explorers stepped onto another world, nearly a century ago.”

He smiled. Let them make of it what they will…

“For the first time, ladies and gentlemen—for the first time we have found definite signs of life beyond Earth.”

The great, tumbling ice mountain hurtled outward into the void. Behind it, smaller and fainter with every passing watch, the Hot fell away into the eternal blackness.

Briefly, the sun’s blazing furnace had scrubbed and gouged and broiled away at the snowy worldlet—had cracked and charged its temporary atmosphere, sending waving flags of ionized gas flapping in the interplanetary breeze.

But then quick summer passed. The flames were left behind again, still bright, but growing more harmless hour by hour. The savage exuberance of perihelion passage was fast fading from memory.

Autumn was marked by a gentle fall of dust. Tiny bits, carried away from the surface in the waning blow of escaping gas, had never quite reached escape velocity, even from the comet’s feeble pull. Gradually, they drifted back again, laying a dark, talclike patina over the icefields and rocky outcrops. The flickering snake of the plasma tail had already vanished, and now the foreshortened dust tail—so like shimmering angels’ banners not long ago—dissipated as the ancient comet streaked past Mars and on, toward the orbit of Jupiter.

Virginia found it beautiful. The dark regolith was laid bare, here and there, exposing a slumbering icy substrate. Although a thin coma of shimmering ions still hung overhead tenaciously, the vault already showed more stars than the dark, tropical nights back home.

I’ll bet the view is even more spectacular in person, she thought. One day I really must go up to the surface myself.

She could feel the soft webbing holding her to her link-couch, in a cave laboratory deep under millions of tons of primeval matter. But otherwise it was almost as if she were up on the comet’s Surface, in person. The holographic images brought her a nearly perfect sensation of being out on the ice.

She was wearing—teleoperating—a Class III surface mech, moving its spindly, spider legs as she would her own, looking with its swiveling eyes, feeling the faint brush of drifting gas molecules as a wind on her face. Her fingertips moved gently in their waldo grips as she sent a chain of mental commands to the host mech on the ice, making it turn.

The method had first been tried back in the late twentieth century, and had seemed quite promising at the time… until several famous disasters led to near abandonment of direct mind-machine interfaces. It turned out to require a special kind of personality to control a mech in this way, without letting random thoughts and a hundred human reflexes interfere, sometimes catastrophically. This had been discovered the hard way, during those early, naive applications to aircraft and factory equipment. To this day, spacers like Carl Osborn tended to distrust the technique, preferring voice and touch controls.