“Stop it! Both of you! We have to work this out.” The African’s voice was frantic.

A long silence. Carl tried to imagine what was going through Linbarger’s mind. The man had apparently concealed from the Psych Board his fanatical hatred of Percells. Or maybe he’d just snapped. Could he think around that now, be halfway rational?

They’ve lost, dammit. Could Linbarger see that? Or would he prefer his moment of revenge?

And Carl would know of it by a whispering in the pipes…

“Okay.” Linbarger’s voice was grating, sour.

Ould-Harrad answered, “What? You agree?”

“We’ll trade the hydro for the tritium and slots.”

“No!” Carl cried. “We have them!”

“Quiet, Osborn!” Ould-Harrad shouted.

“The alternative,” Linbarger said slowly, “is that I blow up the Edmund Halley. Better… all of us here agree… better a quick end… than…”

Carl felt a cold chill at the croaking, slurred, mad voice. It was utterly convincing. He really means it. “Sweet Jesus,” Carl muttered.

First his captain, dead. Now the Edmund.

Ould-Harrad spoke at last. “We… we will make the exchange.”

What is a spacer without a spaceship? Carl wondered numbly. What will we be, when the Edmund is gone? It was too awful to even think of.

“You can offload the hydro stuff,” Linbarger said. “Get Osborn out of there and I’ll set the mechs to doing it.”

“No. I stay here until it’s done.”

Another silence. “Well…” More whispered arguing. Finally, “Okay. You can use those mechs to detach the main greenhouse module as a unit. Make it fast—or we’ll fry that piece of Percell shit.”

Carl let out a long, slow breath. The thought he had suppressed all these long minutes, that kept jabbing him, finally came swarming up: Why are you doing this? You could die, fool.

Now that he let it surface, he had no answer.

“Hurry up,” he said irritably.

Wriggling, fluttering in a saline solution, the tiny bests flicked here and there, hunting, always hunting.

Certain substances, flavors, drew them to the equivalent of sweetness. Others repelled. The choice was always as easy as that, a logic of trophic chemistry. On the level of the cell, there were no subtleties, no future to worry about. No past to haunt one’s dreams.

Saul was pensive as he watched the tiny creatures pulse under the fiber microscope. They were the last and most potent of the new developments cooked up during the two months since the mutiny. Biological smart bombs for an unwanted war against Comet Halley.

So many of the rules he had lived by—codes of slow caution when experimenting with the stuff of life—had been pushed aside in order to get here. He envied the little microbes, in a way. For they would do as they were programmed, but he, their “creator,” was left with his load of doubt and mystery.

No. Of course you don’t worry, little ones. Guilt is a teamwork thing—a trait of eucaryotic metazoans—vast collections of conspiring cells gathered to form men and women, societies… gods.

Look at me, tampering with what I barely understand, on the questionable excuse that all our human lives depend on it.

The cyanutes had fully as much history behind them as he did. Their tiny ancestors had spent well over three billion years evolving in Earth’s waters. Then, some few millions of years ago, they adapted to take up a different way of life in another salty soup—the bodily fluids of complex creatures with great, nucleated cells.

How many thousands of my own ancestors did they kill in order to establish that first beachhead? How many trillions of them, in turn, were fought off by my forebears’ immune systems—latched onto by antibodies and transported to destruction, or engulfed and digested by white cells? How long did it take for a truce to be called at last… for evolution to work out a negotiated peace, a symbiosis ?

It was an unanswerable question. But at some point in the past some human being and some ancestral cyanute struck an accidental bargain. In exchange for a minor cleansing function in the lung cavity, the creatures were granted safe conduct from the body’s immune system. They settled down to an innocuous existence, so innocuous, in fact, that they weren’t even discovered until the waning days of the last century.

In our wisdom, we meddled with them, turning them into “cyanutes.” And, Heaven forgive me, I’m not ashamed at all. A hundred skilled, devoted men and women spent half a decade altering the fruits of four gigayears’ evolution. Given special permission, we used the tools of Simon Percell—and forged a useful thing of beauty.

But this!

The creatures on the screen had been changed even more, given jagged new protein coats, snipped and edited with tailored chain molecules, analyzed and reanalyzed by “reader enzymes”… warped by the drives of an emergency nobody had expected.

The job had taken only eight weeks since the mutiny. And, except for Virginia and her biocybernetic familiar, and a few tentative suggestions from brave colleagues on Earth, he had had no help at all.

By all the laws of biology I should not have succeeded. Not without a research team and thousands of hours of careful simulation. Millions of tests. Heaps of luck.

I knew better!

It‘s a wonder that I even tried.

Saul’s eyes flicked over the unrolling data display, seeing nothing but success. The uniformity of it made him more nervous than any flaw. It was too perfect.

I took both the sample cyanutes and the reader units from my own blood. The data on that line goes back more than five years.

There are elements of Halley-Life in the new form… I had to include them.

Saul shook his head. He couldn’t see how that would explain this convenient success.

To the left, one of JonVon’s unbiquitous color simulations turned a complex, jagged chain over and over.

The involute compound sugar was unknown in the literature. Last night, while holding Virginia close, he had told her that the Academy on Earth wanted to name it after him.

“That’s quite an honor, isn’t it?” she had asked sleepily. The cable snaking out from her neural tap looked like a braid of hair, and hardly got in the way.

He had smiled and stroked her glossy bangs. “Sure. They’ve reinstated my membership, too. But naming a chemical after me…”

“You don’t want them to?” she had asked.

“Hell, no!” He’d laughed. “Think of poor Thomas Fruck, with his name tied forever to fructose!”

She was too logy and languid from their lovemaking to do more than reach if back and pinch him for the affront of a joke.

SERIOUSLY, I SHOULD SUGGEST A NAME, he subvocalised. By now JonVon knew their surface networks well enough to deliver clear words most of the time. Saul felt her understanding echo back, amplified, the way her sexual fury and climax had confirmed themselves in his own mind a while ago, like explosions trying to lift the surface of his skull.

“Hnmimm,” she mumbled. He could sense her drifting off into slumber.

…COMET-OSE… came her suggestion.

He had been so offended by the horrible pun that it didn’t even occur to him until later that she must have already been asleep when he heard it.

Whatever its name, the sugar compound was the key… the sweetness he had used to forge a gingerbread cannon.

The missing madman, Ingersoll—by now a legend of the lower caverns—had given him the idea. Not long after he had glimpsed the man grazing on Halley lifeforms in the outer hallways, he had done something admittedly foolish; he had tasted some of the wall growth himself.

The stuff had been sweet, tangy, like lemon drops.