She stopped, her heart thumping.

“Shut up!”

Virginia unbuckled from her couch, threw aside the link coupling, and launched herself for the doorway.

“Shove it, for all I care!”

She moved quickly through the corridors, the long glides between kicks seeming to last forever. It would take only a few minutes to reach Saul’s lab—impossibly short, considering how unreachable he had seemed to be, how much she had missed him.

Just before the turn down Shaft 1, which would take her to him, she ran right into Carl Osborn and Jim Vidor, coming down the hall without their helmets on. Both their suits were scratched and blotted with chemical stains. Vidor’s face was puffy, unshaven, and his eyes seemed to drift far away. They were towing a body in a shroud.

“Who…

“Quiverian,” Carl said. “He’s gotten too sick. We can’t wait any longer, or he’ll die.”

“Hi ho, hi ho,” Vidor said with thin humor, “it’s to the slots we go.”

Virginia clung to a handhold. “We… we’ll have to unslot someone.”

“Right,” Carl said worriedly. “We’ve got six almost thawed. Want to decide who’s next?”

“No, I…” She knew she should help, but… “I’m going to see Saul.”

“He’s still off limits except for real necessity,” Carl said stiffly. He stopped his slow kick-glide rhythm and let the body come to a halt. Vidor compensated awkwardly on his own side, looking tired.

“You guys see him. He works beside you all!”

“Sure, but we aren’t intimate with him. You an I both know what you’ll do—”

“Mind your own damn business, Carl!” She felt her face flush.

Carl turned away, obviously trying to keep in control. “Malenkov said Saul’s to be on at least semiquarantine—”

“I don’t think that means anything anymore, now that Malenkov’s dying. Saul is our doctor now.”

“I think it’s a bad idea to risk—”

“Carl, I’ll take my chances.”

“Stay away from the rest of us, then,” Vidor said sternly. “Lintz is an okay guy, but I don’t let him come too close. You touch him, same applies to you.”

Virginia was startled. She liked Vidor, but the man’s face was a stiff mask now, hostile and wary. He tugged at the comatose Quiverian’s tow-line and started it moving again. But his usual deft sureness was gone and he seemed to be having trouble keeping the forces acting through a single axis. He looked as clumsy as a groundhog.

“Don’t worry, I will,” Virginia said angrily. “Maybe I’ll just quarantine myself, too!”

She kicked off and sped away, not bothering to look back. Hell, Vidor looks worse than Saul. Then she put her irritation behind her as best she could.

When she entered the lab, Saul looked up in surprise. In the enameled lab glow his haggard, gray face lit with joy. She knew she had made the right decision.

“You really shouldn’t risk…” he said without much conviction.

She bore down on him.

The hell with poetry, she thought. I’ll take the real thing.

Jim Vidor wasn’t being much help.

He coughed into his hands, leaning against the wall of the sleep-slot prep room. Vidor was pale, with the same pasty mottling and strange stiff sheen that Quiverian had developed less than two days ago.

Carl finished fitting the nutrient webbing around Quiverian’s body and attached the sensor tabs. Everything looked right, but he went over the whole chemline and circuit layout again. You couldn’t be too careful. One bad connection and they died on you. The monitor computer should pick up errors, but the moment you started relying on the backup systems, well, that was the beginning of the end as far as he was concerned.

As the crisis went on and on, Carl increasingly found himself being meticulous, his way of compensating for fatigue.

“Blood pH stabilized. Metabolic Q-10 on track. Might as well file him,” Carl said.

Vidor nodded, eyes runny, and shuffled forward to help. Together they maneuvered the body into the slot, sealed it, and attached the external hoses. The banks of filled containers in the prep room formed a sphere around them, so they worked under a frosty dome. Cottony clouds drifted lazily in the air currents over their heads. These slots had flown out on the Sekanina and had tricky hose connectors. Somehow nothing ever gets completely standardized on a mission, Carl thought moodily. Then you spend years tinkering and retrofitting.

“No ceremony this time?” Carl said.

“Don’t feel like it,” Vidor agreed.

They were all too worn down to keep up the niceties. “Go on, get some rest,” Carl said kindly. Not that he really thought it would do much good.

He logged Quiverian into the over-all monitoring programs while Vidor left, moving as though his joints were sore. Same as Quiverian, Carl thought. But neither of them got that brown rash that grew all over Samuelson. Different symptoms—or different diseases?

Not that it mattered all that damn much, now. At this rate they’d all be gone inside a week.

Which meant he had to start some more unslottings right away. Now.

They were at a crucial point. The six thawing in sick bay would not be enough to keep Halley Core running, not while they recuperated. If the diseases felled Virginia, Saul, himself, Lani… the expedition would fail. Unattended, the slots would malf one by one. Halley would become an endlessly orbiting cemetery of frozen corpses.

He thumbed in his Priority control code and set to work. Some simple systems had to be warmed up, calculations made, drug inventories drawn on. Carl had some experience with the procedures from the Encke mission. He worked as well s he could, referring to the manual whenever he had doubts. Saul Lintz could advise him if absolutely necessary… even with rusty skills, Saul was still the doctor. But…

But what? Yeah, I know—I don’t want to call him. I don’t care if I never see the bastard again. And I know it’s just childish jealousy, too. But that doesn’t make things any easier. Just the opposite, maybe.

It was a good idea to get this practice himself, anyway. In a few days he would probably be slotting Saul. I hope Virginia doesn’t catch whatever he’s got.

He was working slowly, his thinking mired in mud. He had to shake off the mood, he knew that, or else he’d make some dumb mistake. Music? That was about all he had these days. He’d been listening to Mozart and Liszt and Haydn for sixteen hours every day, the only way to distance himself from the backbreaking, unending job of cleanup. And all the time watching over one shoulder to see if a goddamn purple hadn’t broken through the insulation nearby, wasn’t there waiting for him to. brush against it, burn through his suit, get its deadly poisons into him …

“Carl!”

He turned, surprised by the feminine voice. Virginia! She didn’t go to him after all.

The sight of Lani entering the prep room crushed his sudden hope.

“I heard about Quiverian, thought I’d come down and…oh You’ve already slotted him?”

Carl nodded.

“No ceremony?”

“Wasn’t in the mood. Jim’s not feeling too well, and a ceremony by yourself…”

Lani studied him sympathetically. “I understand.”

“Maybe we’ll all get together tonight, hoist a few beers ….” He let the sentence trickle lamely away, remembering that they had almost started a romance, back a few lifetimes ago. He hadn’t thought of that for some time. Every day he revised his opinion of Lani upward, but his pulse still quickened for Virginia. Not that it matters … We’re all run ragged.

She nodded emphatically. “Yes. We could use a little group solidarity. You’re the leader now, Carl. You’ll have to hold us together.”