As much as he tried to take a middle ground in the Ortho-Percell conflict, his personal life was something else. And while it was smart for a Percell to maintain that everybody was the same, that didn’t mean you could ignore human nature. He was sure that even after the stupidity of the Ortho governments Earthside had run its course, the human race would eventually have to split. The Orthos would always be edgy with Percells—that was natural. Better the two breeds kept their distance—by making space mostly a Percell domain. Cross-breeding wasn’t going to solve anything, just worsen it.

“There’s no reason we can’t work together, be friends.” He held out a gloved hand toward her.

She grasped it tightly. Through her bright blue skinsuit he could feel an intense, clutching desire in her. Her body gave away what her face had concealed. Gently, he released her hand.

—I… had hoped.—

“I, I can see…”

—There will not be many of us awake on each watch.—

He frowned. “Yeah. We’ll have to work out the rotation.”

—Yes. It will require… public discussion.—She sniffed, made to brush her nose with her hand, and stopped when her glove touched her helmet. She had to use the drip catcher behind the glassine plate. —I…—

Carl felt miserable. To have her weeping over him, when all this time he’d never even thought of her that way. He hated things like this, where you discovered you had been a callous deadhead without even knowing it. As though other people were tuned into frequencies you weren’t picking up.

Beneath this consternation there was also a small current of delighted pride. The old ways were still strong enough to make a man pleasantly surprised by an unexpected overture. He would never tell anyone, of course, but maybe, years from now, he might drop a hint to Virginia…

Lani sniffed again. Her eyes closed and she sneezed loudly, the outgoing choooh! booming almost painfully in his ears.

She recovered, blinked, and gazed bleary-eyed around her glittering crystal palace, indifferent now to its beauty.

Carl realized ruefully that she had not been weeping over him at all. She had already put aside her failed overture and was concentrating on more immediate matters.

Lani had a cold.

Saul blew his nose and quickly put away the handkerchief.

The hectic weeks of Base Establishment had diminished into the long, hollow quiet of the First Watch. And as this damned cold of his lingered on and on, he found himself more and more avoiding Nicholas Malenkov and the big Russian’s skeptical medical scrutiny. Saul knew it was only a matter of time until Malenkov said something about his perpetual sniffle.

He wasn’t sure what Nick would do if it didn’t get better soon, but Saul did not intend to be slotted. Not for a while, at least. There was simply too much to do.

He pinched the sinuses above his nose. The momser antihistamines had him in a perpetual state of half-dizziness these days, but that simply couldn’t be helped.

Saul blinked at the pastel walls of the weightless lounge—designed to supplement the cramped recreational facilities of the centrifugal wheel. It was a barren, empty scene. Except for a few chairs and cabinets, the only finished area was here, near the autobar. It would be years before the lounge looked anything like the schematics called for in the Grand Design.

Flimsy readouts lay scattered over the chart table in front of him, except where a portable holo unit projected a cutaway view of the nineteen-kilometer-long prolate spheroid that was Halley Core.

Only at the top of the display, near the north pole, was there a sparse, spaghetti tangle of tunnels where humans had made their inroads.

Too much real estate to ever really know. And yet far too little to make a home.

The man across the table from him coughed politely.

“I’m sorry, Joao,” Saul said.

The tall Brazilian comet expert resumed what he had been saying before being interrupted by Saul’s dizzy spell.

“It’s these caverns, Saul.” He inserted his hand into the computer-generated image and executed an intricate little finger flick. Although there was nothing more material in that space than air, the machine read his intent as if he were turning a page. Cutaway layers peeled back to show new tunnel traceries to the north and east, linking a number of oblong cavities.

“I believe I have figured out how the chambers got here in the first place,” Quiverian announced.

Saul looked back and forth from the display to Quiverian’s sallow, patrician features. His Roman nose enhanced the impression of a bird of prey. The image fit, the man was so unpredictable, excitable. Saul chose his words carefully.

“I thought that was already decided, Joao. The comet formed out of the primordial solar nebula, peppered with a lot of short-lived radioactives from a nearby supernova. Beta decay warmed parts of the interior, forming the cavities, while the outer shell—exposed to space—remained cool, a protective blanket around the molten regions.”

Quiverian waved his hand impatiently. “Yes, yes, that old theory. Aluminum 26 and other short-lived elements must surely have created some molten channels, for a time.”

“I’d started trying to develop a biogenesis model based on that idea. But now you say it’s no good anymore?”

Quiverian edged forward eagerly. “Radioactives can’t have provided sufficient heat for all the melting we’ve observed! And they don’t explain the extent of fractionation we find, either!”

“Fractionation?”

“The degree to which elements and minerals were separated from each other by some dynamic process, forming these ore bodies we’ve found everywhere. Saul, the radioactives theory just couldn’t explain that! You see? That is why I started digging around the literature for another method, another way it might have happened.”

Saul stood closer to the table. “Well, it sure sounds interesting, Joao. I was just telling Nick Malenkov that there didn’t seem to be enough—”

“Bear with me a minute, Saul.” Quiverian held up a hand as he shuffled through a pile of readouts. “There is something I want to show you. I have it here somewhere.”

“Take your time, Joao.” Saul shrugged. For now he was content to enjoy a momentarily clear head—the almond-flavored air was, for once, fresh in his nostrils. He watched the computer’s slowly rotating depiction of the comet’s nucleus.

Seismic studies had filled most of the three-dimensional map with a vague gray and white tracery, showing in blurry outlines the locations of many of the major faults and cavities. Still, essentially all but a small fraction of the rough globe remained mysterious—a realm to be explored over the long, quiet watches ahead. Less than five percent of the volume, centered on the north pole, was at all well known.

Piercing the north rotation axis was a narrow orange line marked SHAFT 1, which dropped a kilometer straight down to an ant colony of chambers labeled CENTRAL CONTROL COMPLEX—including this lounge and most of the science labs. That shaft continued inward another two kilometers or so, terminating, at last, less than halfway to the center of Halley Core.

Along the way, Shaft 1 met a series of horizontal tunnels, starting with red-colored “A” near the surface, passing green “F” here, where they now stood, and ending in yellow “N.”

The pattern was a lot less neat elsewhere. Several passages opened into big caverns that the spacers had discovered the hard way. Three huge chambers now held the fore sections of the slot tugs Sekanina, Whipple, and Delsemme, and the majority of the sleeping colonists. Another, near the surface, now held the Edmund Halley’s nearly reassembled gravity wheel.

The computer-generated graphics were good, showing even the field of storage tents scattered among the hummocks up on the north pole. A finely detailed model of a partly dismantled torch ship hung in miniature near the tiny, glittering Shaft 1 airlock, tethered to three mooring towers.