“He’s been busy. I suppose he wants to think things through a little more before… experimenting.”

“Or maybe— just maybe— he wants to do everything himself. Big Saul saves all.”

Virginia flared. “You have no right to say that!”

He held up his hands. “Okay, maybe so. Let’s say I’ve been dealing with a lot of crazies these years. I’ve gotten used to doubting everything.”

She bit her lip. Containing her anger? Or keeping in the suspicion that maybe I’m right?

“If Saul’s inoculations work,” she said in measured tones, “we will be able to save ourselves. The expedition will succeed. You must put your faith in him. You are going to okay his initial test treatments of volunteers, aren’t you?”

Carl shrugged. “My authority is limited. The ‘tribes’ contribute their labor. I handle routine management and make up a maintenance roster. Cap’n Bligh I’m not. I don’t see where I could stop him from recruiting… volunteers.” He had almost said suckers.

“Good. You’ll see, Carl. This is our hope.”

Hope? He was tempted to tell Virginia about the side effect of Saul’s wondrous symbiosis— Saul’s sterility. But if Saul had already told her, it would make him look mean.

Carl paused. Above her shoulder a caravan of scruffy tan camels plodded tirelessly across a vast sandy waste, heading for a green dab of palms halfway to the hard-edged horizon. Red-garbed traders swayed atop each, peering directly toward Carl with unveiled suspicion. Their images wavered with the heat, making the ponderous caravan ripple like a dream. Psychologically effective, no doubt, but Carl’s feet still felt cold.

“Something bothering you, Virginia?”

“JonVon’s… sick.”

“I’d heard. Is it— he— malfing?”

“He’s an organic matrix, remember. Saul thinks he’s got some infestation of Halleyforms. I hope Saul can find a cure.”

She started outlining the problem, the analogy between JonVon’s nonliving organics versus ordinary flesh and blood, and how JonVon could “catch a cold” in a more than metaphorical fashion. Carl listened, looking into her eyes for a long time. He still felt the old tug, that slow warm yearning that would come swelling up in him if he let it. Her pensive, expectant mouth, the regal cast to the high cheekbones…

“Is JonVon immortal, same as Saul is supposed to be?” Carl asked.

“Saul might make him so. If a cure is found. If Saul is right about himself…”

“I still think it’s all baloney.”

She said primly, “We must test those three from the slots immediately.”

She seems so sure. Could Lintz be right?

Virginia was too honest to let love blind her totally. She would have given some sign if she doubted Saul…

“Okay, assuming a real miracle, we’ll need to activate more farm area. We’ll want to pull nearly everybody out of the slots. Maybe— who knows?—Saul can cure some of those with black borders.”

“Even Commander Cruz?”

The thought struck Carl hard. “Could be,” he said to cover his confusion. Reviving senior officers… I won’t be such a big cheese around here. But it would be great to work with the captain again, with somebody who really knew how to get things done…

“It’ll be a hell of a rush, with only a few years to go to aphelion.”

Virginia brightened. “We can do it. I know we can.”

“Damn right.” And Carl forced a hopeful smile.

Why not be optimistic? It couldn’t hurt, after all that’s happened. At worst Saul Lintz is proven as a fool. At best… well, at best we may even finish the Nudge Launchers, move Halley, actually get on with the mission.

But Carl knew that even miracles have their unwelcome consequences. What will hope do to the tribes? he wondered.

That’s when real infighting is going to come, over where we target this old iceball to fall thirty years from now.

Virginia wiped at her eyes. Without any gravity to speak of, tears upwelled and clung in quivering beads held together by surface tension. You had to shake your head or blot them. It was that or wear little saltwater lenses and watch the world refracted through your pain.

“Is he going to be all right?” she asked. Her voice trembled like a little girl’s, but Virginia wasn’t ashamed. Lots of people cared as much for certain objects as for human beings. And JonVon was a lot more than a Raggedy Ann doll.

“I think…” Saul’s voice faded in and out. His head was immersed in the holo tank, a cubic meter of neatly squared simulation that looked like an aquarium filled with some bizarre concoction, a chef’s nightmare of bright bits and pieces. It was a color-coded depiction of the intricate chemistry of a colloidal-stochastic computer, and on this deep level all of her expertise was useless. Virginia might be a fair programmer, but she knew next to nothing about molecules, or what made pseudoliving things ill.

Saul mumbled. She could not follow what he was doing with his hands, deep inside the holo, but whatever he discovered seemed to satisfy him. He sat back. “Display off;” he told the diagnostic computer.

“Well?” Virginia’s legs tensed nervously and she had to grip the carpeting with her toes to prevent being cast free of the floor. “Well? Tell me. I can take it.”

Saul took her hand and his blue eyes seemed to shine. She gasped as she read the answer in them. “He’s going to be all right!” She yipped, whirled around, and threw herself into his arms. “You fixed him!”

Oh, what an understanding man, she thought, to hold her close and laugh while her teary eyes perforce left trails on his cheek and she snuffled happily on his neck. Oh, how warm and strong and kind.

His hand stroked her hair, near the dressing on the back of her neck where his new medications had fought down her rash. A week ago anyone brushing her near there would have sent her quailing in pain. But it didn’t hurt anymore at all. The infection was nearly gone.

It was nice to be touched again.

“You must think I’m an idiot,” she said at last as she took his handkerchief and sat up on his lap to blow her nose.

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, that shows how much you know. I am one. Carrying on like this over a machine.”

He brushed her loose black hair back into place. “Then. I’m an idiot too. I was nervous as hell about this. So was Carl.”

Virginia sniffed. “Carl’s worried because JonVon’s far and away the best computer we have left. Carl can’t run the Nudge without him.”

“So? That’s plenty enough reason.”

“I suppose so. But still, he didn’t really care.” Virginia’s fists tightened. Actually, what made her mad at Carl was something else. She was still seething, a bit, over what he had said about Saul.

I’ve always like Carl, she thought. A lot. But he can be so damned pigheaded. It’s been weeks since Saul started sharing serums made from his own blood, and only now, after one incredible cure after another, is Carl finally admitting that a miracle has really happened.

Of course that was unfair. Carl had lived for so long with the eroding despair, with the assumption that all was lost, that hope would take some getting used to.

They would all have to do some adjusting.

Much had changed since the Arcist exodus. Now, thanks to Saul’s cures, more and more people were being pulled from the sleep slots, treated, and put to work building and testing the devices that would be needed when Halley’s Comet was to be turned from drifting iceball into spaceship.

Of course, Saul’s methods couldn’t repair impossible damage, or raise the irreversibly dead. But they hoped to bring the colony’s active population up to two hundred or so, more than half the number originally planned when the Edmund and four sail tugs were cast forth from Earth.