I’ve been privileged to know many fine human beings, Saulthought. But none braver than this good woman.

She had volunteered to be the first to try this untested treatment. When offered a chance to escape into the slots instead, she had rejected the idea outright. “I’ll not leave you and Akio as the only physicians awake during this crisis,” she had told him flatly.

Days had passed while the technicians built and rebuilt the new beamer to Saul’s specifications… always scratching for priorities against the hall crews and those overhauling the Edmund Halley. By now, there was little choice left. If this treatment didn’t work, Marguerite would have to go on ice.

Secretly, Saul feared it was already too late even for that. There was no guarantee that cooling down to a degree above freezing would stop these vicious, multicolored, funguslike growths, once they were this deeply established.

A third of the awake crew—and even a few of the slotted corpsicles—have these creeping skin disorders. They worry Akio worse than the Crump Mumps or even the Red Clap. They’re the biggest reason why I may not be able to go out with the Edmund after all. Osborn and the others may have to take their chances without a doctor.

And there was one more cause for his hurry to make the new treatments work.

Yesterday, while they were making love, he had fund a fine lacelike webbing of green strands spreading under Virginia’s shoulder blades and issuing across her back. He hadn’t said anything to her, yet. But his motive was stronger than ever to find a cure.

The machines had finished moving into place. “All right, Marguerite,” he told his patient. “Now remember, hold still.”

“Yes, Saul.”

Her hands clenched the table’s rails. Saul turned to the hulking, spiderlike medical-mech. “Access five—” he began. But he had to stop as a sudden wave of dizziness swept over him. He managed to lift the collar of his gown just in time to contain a violent sneeze.

Saul’s head rang. The dull body aches that he had managed to put out of his mind for half an hour or so returned in force now. It was a long moment before he could look up, blinking through drifting blue spots, and address the machine again.

“Access… five-two-seven Jonah.”

A receptivity light winked across the mech’s plastic panel. He continued, “Play sixty milliwatts in preprogrammed fungoid RNA resonant spectrum A dash two-nine-four, focused on foreign subdermal growth, patient’s right inner rear thigh, five hundred seconds, safety factor beta.”

They had adapted a unit designed for magnetic resonance and ultrasound inspection of internal injuries. The sophisticated mech would be able to aim and evaluate the focused radar far quicker than any human operator.

“Preparing to project,” the machine announced flatly.

Saul’s best assistant, Keoki Anuenue, was watching a data tank, supervising the procedure. Not only was Keoki a skilled laboratory technician, he was also one of the strongest men Saul had ever known. Three days ago, he had had a chance to see the big Hawaiian in action, when there had been a cave-in up on Level B.

A particularly nasty variety of vermin had lodged a beachhead in the utilities shaft leading to Airlock 1, their main lifeline to the Edmund Halley. The major cooling vent—essential for keeping the ice around them from melting—was nearly chocked off with an ocher variant of worm bigger than the purple horrors.

Saul and Keoki had arrived on B Level just as the halls erupted in loud screams and alarm Klaxons. Most terrifying of all was the grinding groan and squeal of collapsing ice. The cable Saul had been climbing broke loose and whipped from the wall like a tortured snake, flinging him away just as a block of dark, mottled crystal pierced through the fibersheath lining and smashed the side of the shaft.

Keoki Anuenue caught Saul and planted him into a safe niche, then turned and leaped up toward the glittering stone boulder that had seven men and women trapped in the utility tunnel. They had minutes, at best. Keoki went at saving them the only way possible.

He braced his back against the tattered plastisheath, planted his feet on the iceblock, and heaved. It must have massed a hundred tons not counting the rubble lying atop it. “Kei make nei mai…” Keoki had grunted as the boulder, unbelievably, grumbled and started to move.

A blast of fetid dankness flowed through the gap. The Hawaiian’s face was a beaded torrent in the humid air, his neck tendons bunched like knotted ropes. Saul had no time to stop and think. He dove into the narrow opening.

Along with a dozen other odors, the air was filled with the scent of almonds. If any of their suits had been punctured, even the blood cyanutes wouldn’t have protected the trapped crewmen much longer from the rich vein of cyanide that had been broken open by the falling rock.

Saul had wriggled in though quite aware that he wasn’t wearing a suit at all. He tried not to think about the big man behind him, struggling with enough mass to crush a building, on Earth… prodigious even at half a milligee.

Thus had begun a hellish race to drag the survivors out. No one ever told Saul how long the ordeal took. All he knew was that Keoki Anuenue could have let go after one, or two, or three had been pulled free.

But Keoki did not. A figure carved in stone, he held the ragged, primeval mountain until Saul verified that the last two trapped crewmen were dead—and stopped briefly to take a ten-cc sample of pasty, reddish fluid from a crushed, pulped thing the size of an anaconda. Only after Saul had wriggled out of the utility tunnel—to see the relief party come jetting up the shaft at last—did the silent giant finally ease slowly back in a groan of ice and flesh.

All Keoki had said, when Virginia’s mechs moved in to take his burden away from him, was a mumbled phrase Saul remembered as clearly as his own name:

“Ua luhi loa au…”

Strange, magical words—a phrase ripe with secret strengths, the mysteries of exotic gods.

Later, Virginia told Saul that it meant, simply, “I’m very tired.”

That had been just a few days ago. The hall battles continued slowly tapering down. Diseases took their toll. And preparations for the Newburn rescue mission neared completion. One did not dwell on past heroics to any benefit. Let the billions following the “war news” on their vid sets, back on Earth, keep score. Here, people were simply too busy.

Keoki stood by his monitor screen and motioned to Saul. All appeared in readiness.

Saul stepped back and gave the spidery medical-mech the go-ahead command: “Five-two-seven Jonah, commence.”

An oval spot of light, about five inches by three, appeared on Marguerite von Zoon’s right thigh—only a soft laser spotter beam depicting where the machine’s synthetic aperture was now projecting invisible, finely modulated microwaves from Saul’s slapped-together treatment device.

Rube Goldberg science, he thought ruefully. This was much more difficult than using those giant beamers in the passageways to blast the bigger comet lifeforms.

There, we can just pour energy into the animals’ major cells through protein resonance bands. Don’t have to be too accurate in choosing the right frequency. Whatever misses just spills over into heat. Shove in enough power and the cells tear themselves apart.

Here, though, he couldn’t use that kind of overkill. In this microwave scrub of Marguerite’s skin, he wanted to wreck only the invader cells. Not only must the machine be tuned not to disrupt any of the patient’s own tissue, he could not even allow much waste heat.

They had to finely adjust each scrub beam to a narrow set of frequencies, and play the atoms like beads on a string, tapping and tapping again until the overstrained molecular threads fell apart. Tuning had to be orders of magnitude more exact than for the weapons being used by the hall crews.