—Saul,—Lani whispered. He turned from a scraping he had been taking, and saw that she was at the other end of the chamber pointing down one of the side passages. When he arrived where she was standing, his first reaction was one of quick combat adrenaline. For there was a telltale squirming ripple that told of purples, grazing on the gunk-lined fibersheath.

Then he saw something else. A hundred meters or so down, near one of the fungus-dimmed glow bulbs, an indistinct figure floated.

“Another deader?”

She shook her head.

—No. I… I think it’s Ingersoll!—

Saul cursed the scratchy, intermittent blurriness caused by the antihistamines. He peered down the tunnel. The dim figure was moving.

Ingersoll. Everyone simply assumed he was dead, by now. At first he thought the missing madman wore a green spacesuit tinted to match the growth-lined hallway. But then…

“What on Earth?” Stunned, he realized that the figure was not wearing clothing.

—That’s dried gunk he’s covered himself with! What’s he picking of the walls, Saul? What’s he doing?—

Fortunately, their suit helmets contained the sound of their voices. Saul tried to float closer quietly, using an awkward puff of his gas jet. “I think…”

The man must have heard something in the thin air. He whirled, and Saul saw that only his face was not coated by a thick layer of green, living growth. He cried out, eyes clouded with madness. Saul could make out only a few words.

“… Perfect!… Sweet, sweet, sweet an’ warm!… You’ll know, know, no, no, no!…”

It was hard to pay close attention when one saw what hung dripping from the man’s mouth… a purple bleeding mass.

Then in a sudden spin and kick, Ingersoll was gone. Lani and Saul could only stare after him, momentarily too stunned even to think of giving chase.

Finally, Lani broke the silence.

—Yuk,—she sent. Even through her suit he could see her shudder.

Saul nodded.

“Well, that’s one fate I’ll be spared. If it were me, I’d probably be allergic to the stuff.”

He touched Lani’s arm and winked at her. Finally she smiled.

Then Saul sneezed.

‘These damn antihistamines are wearing off again. Come on, Lani. Let’s mark this passage and go home.

With a backward glance down the purple-lined hallway, they turned and headed back, alone with their separate thoughts.

An hour later, they had looped around toward Central again and were approaching the worst area—the Border—where the warmth and air and moisture of human habitation most excited the comet forms. Lani was tuning the disruptor back to settings deadly to the purples, in case they had to fight their way through. Saul, though, felt his spirits rise. Beyond No Man’s Land, he knew, there was warmth, and food, and one special person waiting just for him.

His thoughts were a mix of shapes. The frankly sexual image of one of Virginia’s nipples, warm from his hand and stiffly erect. Her soft breath in his ear and the electronically enhanced tendril-touch of her emotions, channeled directly to his own…

And yet his mind kept drifting back to the little cells, multiplying in profusion, growing in mottled, many-hued hordes, forming cooperative macro organisms where no one with any common sense would have expected them to exist, let alone thrive.

There was a common chord to the images. A symphony of self-replicating chemistry… a young woman’s sexual flush, her deep currents of love, the surging tide of Comet Life, rising to meet waves of heat from a spring that came but once every seventy-six years…

Only indirectly, without malice, did the native forms wreak havoc on the visitors—killing them, and bringing retaliation in turn. Saul might have felt guilty over inventing weapons for such a war. But guilt would miss the point. Nothing we do here will set the Comet Life back. We are like the summer. And we, too, shall pass.

The speaker above Saul’s right ear crackled.

—Lintz, this is Osborn. You awake up there?—

Saul nodded. “Yes, Carl. What’s up?”

—There’s been some developments, Saul. Can you come to Shaft Four, K Level? I… We may need your help.—

“Oh? What’s happened?”

There was a pause.

—I want to talk to you privately, if possible.—

“Why’s that?” Saul frowned. “Is it something you can’t mention on a coded channel?”

There was another pause.

—No, not exactly. But… Well, I think I know where the missing slot tug is. I’m pretty sure I know what’s happened to the Newburn.—

Now it was Saul’s turn to stop, blink.

“We’re on our way in. Lintz, over and out.”

“JonVon,” she said pensively, “I can feel what you’re doing.”

“No, really. There’s a tingling, a tickling.”

“I can feel it.”

“Well, something’s moving. Like fingers dancing on my scalp, only… deeper.” The sensation was unsettling, like tendrils lacing through her head. She stirred uneasily on the webbing. Only a thin buzzing came from the banks of equipment that ringed her.

“Can people feel magnetic fields?”

Just like the pedantic program—and she should know, she wrote it—to throw in an irrelevant detail.

Or maybe it wasn’t irrelevant. The tumbling of infinitesimal spinning electrons inside her skull demanded fine tuning of an order unusual even in research. She quelled the temptation to slide her eyes sideways to see the poles of the big superconducting magnet. Even that much movement would set up unwanted trembling in her head.

“Do. It itches inside my head.”

“Did Saul mention any effects?”

“Ummm. Maybe I should’ve done this sedated.”

Just like me, she thought. Anxiety loves company.

There was virtually no difference now between JonVon’s grasp of her surface thoughts and her speech, since JonVon read both directly through the neural tap. Still, it felt different to her. Her mind processed the words in subtly different ways. The pre-speech processing center in her brain gave its own pacing to the phrases, feeding the words “forward’ in the unconscious cadence that made her own speaking style. When she thought without the subtle intention to speak, there often were no words at all. A quick. almost holographic perception of the idea shot through her. She wondered if JonVon could tell the difference.

“Of course,” she said/thought ruefully.