“What… ?” Carl began to say. But the man screamed and leaped forth.

He threw himself at Carl, shouting, incoherently—a high pitched babble, laced with obscenity, and the eyes wide with fevered energy. Hands stretched forward like claws, legs set to kick.

Before Carl could react, hands had grabbed his helmet ring and they went spinning away together. His helmet flew out of his hands when they smacked into a wall. The madman wrapped his legs around Carl and pounded with hard, quick fists.

Carl was sluggish, dazed. He punched at the other but missed. A right cross caught him in the eye—brilliant crimson flashes. He swung wildly. Missed.

He’s fast. Carl blocked another punch. He struck—missed—and struck out again. This time he clipped the man on the shoulder. With the energy of the mad a flurry of fists smacked into his cheek, his arm, his chest. Then, at last, help arrived. Someone yanked and the man sun away, yelling, holding out a handful of something.

Carl felt friendly hands grab him, stop his mad tumble. Lani cradled him.

“What the hell?”

“Who was it?”

“Couldn’t tell.”

“Ingersoll, I think. A guy from Chem Section.”

He blinked unsteadily as the figure launched itself away with well-timed kicks off the tunnel walls. The gibberish went on, fading. No one followed. They clustered around Carl, who was still numb from surprise.

“I’ll have bruises, that’s all,” Carl said groggily, fighting down the adrenaline rush.

“Damnedest thing,” Jeffers said.

Lani touched Carl’s face gently. “It’s swelling already. What could have provoked him?”

“He seemed deranged,” Saul said. “I’d heard he had come down with something, but Akio said it did not appear to be fatal. Whatever it was, it’s obviously affected his mind.”

Sergeov’s face took on a grim, gray cast. “Now he flees into lower tunnels. Be very hard to find him, treat him, in there, if he does not want you to catch.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” Carl said. rubbing his jaw, “he can stay lost forever.”

Saul nodded, but his voice was pensive and worried as he said, “There were Halleyforms smeared on his face. I wonder how many others have what he’s developing?”

At times, the words still haunted him. We are the aliens. Men were the invaders here, the interlopers. Now and then Saul wondered what right they had, killing what they did not understand.

Still, he admitted to a feral pleasure in roaming the deep ice caverns, zapping gunk—a savage thrill in aiming a sort of ray gun down a hallway, whispering “zap, zap” under your breath, and vaporizing the more dangerous outbreaks of comet stuff.

It didn’t surprise Saul that he was of two minds on the matter.

In this instance, it’s the soldier, the caveman in me that wins over the philosopher. My job is to chip flint, to flake new weapons and help save the tribe. It’s a priority that comes down from long, long ago. And it is right.

He touched the dial on his portable beamer. The rheostat kept drifting, and it was important to keep the device tuned exactly on the right frequency, in case they rounded a corner right into a writhing mass of purples.

In the days since that first experiment, the hall crews had learned a lot about how to use the new weapons. There was neither enough power nor labor to keep every passage clear all the time, and the waste heat would prove most unpleasant, if they tried for very long. But the effect on morale had been tremendous anyway. For the first time there seemed to be a chance they might just get through this. Those who weren’t sick were actually starting to catch up on sleep. There was less desperate talk of stripping surface mechs to be brought down below the ice.

Now, if only we can lick the sicknesses. Saul’s major reason for agreeing to come out here, to the remote tunnels near the surface, was to take enough samples to develop his data base, to begin to get some idea how Halley lifeforms interrelated, what roles the microorganisms played.

Just behind him, Lani Nguyen rode a large tunnel mech. The big robot carried a microwave digger that had been modified for hall scrubbing Except for a dicey area back on E Level, they hadn’t had to use it much. The really tough areas were those closest to human habitation, where heat and light and air fed complex lichenoid growths and attracted the deadly, iron-mawed, worm-like colonies.

Here in the outlying tunnels, the phosphor lamps were far spaced and the temperature was kept well below freezing. Only a thin film of green coated the walls. It was easier moving about—even in spacesuits—than back where the purples crawled.

He raised his hand and Lani halted the mech at an intersection that had once been bright in orange and blue plastisheath. Now the walls were dingy under the verdant pallor of a few green-covered glow panels.

Saul scraped away lichenoid, exposing letters on the wall: D-14-TAU.

Good, they weren’t lost.

—I’ll make soundings for crevices, Saul.—

He nodded. “Okay, Lani. Just don’t venture too far from the intersection.”

—I’m leashed to you like a faithful puppy, you betcha.—

Saul smiled. Lani was smart and brave, but she was also cautious. The combination was one reason he was glad to have her assigned as his partner.

She moved carefully along the walls, thumping the fibersheath and listening with an audioscope, skillfully seeking out breaks and soft spots in the ice underneath.

They had found through hard experience that the tiny, almost imperceptible Halley-quakes that had been going on ever since their arrival kept opening narrow cracks in the icy aggregate. The danger was particularly acute at intersections, where the insulation was weakest. Part of their job out here was to map the worst of these crevices for later remelt and sealing… if there was ever enough manpower to get around to it, that is.

The scrapings from the intersection sign went into a sample vial. Saul was almost certain this was just typical Hallivirensmalenkovi. But on this trip he had also discovered a host of other, as yet undescribed types. The ecosystem clearly varied from place to place as conditions changed.

Right now Akio Matsudo was back in Central’s bio lab, working with Marguerite von Zoon and three weary techs to seek treatment for the growing sick list.

Akio was a competent scientist, but he was ideologically incapable of really adjusting to the implications of this unexpected tide of cometary life.

Everyone’s excited over the success of my microwave disruptor. I’ve got a reputation as a man of action, now. But has it persuaded anyone to take my advice? To step back and try to get the wide view?

Ha!

Saul was resigned to investigating the Halleyform problem on his own, in his own way. One part of that investigation was coming out here and looking into it for himself.

The biggest drawback is missing Virginia so much.

Saul said a grateful prayer every day they woke up together, neither of them yet suffering from some horrible, deadly thing. It was a blessing that she had—so far—not caught anything from him.

Virginia had had a few rough days there, back when the news had come about the coup in Hawaii. The resulting Percell-Ortho tensions had almost overshadowed joy over the success of the beamer technique.

Three steps forward, four steps back, Saul thought.

He wiped his nose on the helmet’s drip pad, took another anti-histamine pill, and washed it down with a sip from a water teat. Saul bent-swiveled his body upside down in the faint gravity to take another scraping of an interesting-looking growth.

There was a low growl as Lani returned with the mech. She muttered rapidly in arcane engineering dialect as she recorded her results, then she looked up at Saul.