The scar was almost healed now. He still wasn’t sure how he had been cut, during that frantic struggle with the purples in sleep slot 1. At first he had been certain it was a bite from one of the horrible native worms, but after what happened to Peltier, and Ustinov, and Conti, he figured it couldn’t have been. There had been a swelling and soreness, then it had gone away.

Just a scrape, I suppose. A man like me won’t die of a purple bite, anyway. And there’s too little gravity here to be hanged.

His nose itched.

I’ll probably die in a sneezing fit.

Saul finished dressing. He put on an isolation helmet and passed into the booth with a flashing green light over the entrance.

Someone had indeed awakened. It was Bethany Oakes, the first person decanted after Captain Cruz’s death. The assistant expedition leader had been a tough case. Her thawing had not been easy.

Hibernation wasn’t a natural human function. Inducing it involved complex, massive doses of drugs that dropped the body into a slumbering, near-death state—reducing metabolism an pH, cooling tissues down to a bare degree above freezing. The process was anything but routine, even after decades of use in space flight. To prove it for interstellar travel times had been one dream of Miguel Cruz-Mendoza. It was supposed to be another gift from the Halley Expedition to the people of Earth.

Working alone, with equipment that might or might not still be polluted with Halleyforms, Malenkov had chosen the slow-thaw method, allowing the patient to throw off sleep-center suppression naturally. The decision had been questionable. It might be safer, but it left the possibility that the decanted would awaken with no one left alive to greet them.

Bethany Oakes was still an ample woman. Three weeks’ hibernation under an IV drip wouldn’t change that much. But her eyelids were already dark with the blue heaviness of slot stupor. As Saul approached, they fluttered open. Her pupils contracted unevenly in the light.

He dimmed the wall panels and picked up a squeeze tube of electrolyte-balance fluid to wet her lips. Her tongue flicked out, drawing in the sweetness.

Good, he thought. The sipping reflex was a rule-of-thumb test Nicholas had taught him. A sign of good progress.

In the hazel eyes, an apparent struggle—a mind climbing laboriously out of the cold.

“S-Saul… ?” Her voice was barely audible.

“Yes, Bethany. It’s me, Saul Lintz.” He bent forward.

“Are we. …” She swallowed, and smiled thinly. “Are we at aphelion yet?”

Saul blinked. Of course, the expedition’s second-in-command hadn’t been scheduled to be unslotted for thirty-three years, when the comet would have nearly reached its farthest point from the sun, when the colony would be briefly busy again preparing for the rocket maneuver that would send them hurtling past Jupiter toward rendezvous with the waiting harvesters, nearly four more decades beyond that.

How could he tell her that it had been more like thirty-three days!

He shook his head, wishing he had better news, and wondering how to tell it.

Saul smiled in his best bedside manner. “No, Betty, not quite…”

What a difference a mere three weeks made!

Virginia wondered as she glide-walked past hurried, bustling workers. Had it been only that long? Only twenty-five days since the remnants of the First Watch had gathered, weary and haggard, to note the passing of the year 2061?

An ebullient New Year’s Eve it had not been. Even with the wall holos set to their cheeriest summer scenes, it still felt like the winter of Ragnarok. They had huddled near the farthest end of the mammoth Central Complex Lounge—four poor survivors—and toasted from Carl’s carefully hoarded supply of Lacy Traces liqueur.

The bottle had gone quickly. There seemed little point in saving anything.

All attempts at conversation had lapsed. The vids from Earth were too depressing to watch—snappy scenes of commercial consumption or, even worse, an awful melodrama about the Scott expedition to the South Pole… no doubt somebody’s stupid idea of a gesture in their honor.

At her suggestion, Saul and Carl had tried to play their first game of chess since the death of Captain Cruz—or since Saul and Virginia had taken up shared residence together. But it wasn’t like before. The two men had hardly exchanged a word or a glance, and the play was savage. When Saul’s wrist comp called him away to tend the thawing sleepers again, Lani and Virginia had shared a look of relief.

She would never forget that gloomy evening for as long as she lived.

That had been less than a month ago. Now… well, things were different. At least superficially, they were much better. One at least heard voices in the cool hallways again, and people were trying to find solutions.

Virginia was also getting better at moving about in Halley’s soft gravity. She skim-glided quickly, grabbing the fiber floor with velcroed slippers and pulling along a wall cable on her way toward Control Central.

It was still a new experience, coming this way without a mind fogged from lack of rest, or a body nearly limp from fatigue. A full seven hours’ sleep was like a sinful luxury.

Yesterday, her shift had coincided with Saul’s. They’d had a chance to make love for the first time in a week, and slept side by side, linked through her electronic familiar, touching in the dim glow of JonVon’s status lamps. Saul had to leave early to get ready for today’s test of his new invention, but Virginia had awakened feeling his warmth still on the webbing beside her, his musty, now-familiar scent on her arm.

Someday, when I have some free time again, I’ll have to find out what JonVon’s making of our dreams. Saul and I are getting closer all the time, our shared, enhanced senses more and more vivid. I wonder—is it possible that I might have been right, after all? Is it possible to simulate human mental processes so well that you can achieve “telepathy” of a sort?

If so, can we give Earth at least one present, before we all die?

This morning she had stopped just before leaving her cubicle, hesitating by the slide door, and turned back to pick up a stylus. On the face of a memory pad she had scribbled quickly… not a poem—not yet—but a sketch for one.

The mixed verse had reminded her of her homesickness. She missed Kewani Langsthan, the only other Hawaiian on the first shift, who had lost an arm to an explosion on A Level, on Christmas Eve, and had to be slotted immediately when the stump went infected.

No Hawaiian was among the replacements. She didn’t know whether to regret it or to be glad that her countrymen were being spared this terrible time.

Anyway, the news from the island republic was not good. The last time she had had time to listen to the Earthcasts, tensions had been rising. Nations of the Arc of the Living Sun had accused Governor Ikeda’s government of “unecological projects.”

Ever since that evening months ago, when she had briefly shared Saul’s memories of his lost homeland, she had suffered from a deep, lingering fear for her own people’s precarious renaissance.