And later, for just a little while, there would be rain.

It was an old biologists’ drinking song from the twentieth century. Saul had learned it in England, during a rainy winter at Cambridge. It seemed appropriate that it should come to mind now, as an earthenware bottle lolled and sloshed in his lap and he sat in the dimly lit corridor outside his lab, trying a Polynesian remedy for what ailed him.

Keoki had given him the jar of homemade hooch saying, solemnly, “You need drunk, Saul.” And, of course, the fellow was right.

There was a refrain to the ditty, to a jazzy, hip beat.

Saul nodded, sagely. “There. You see? They knew about symbiosis even back in th’ eighties, when they weren’t even sure yet they were in the Hell Century. Goes to show there’s never anythin’ new, under th’ sun.”

Nobody was there to hear him, of course. He had finally sent Keoki back… the big Hawaiian’s wives must be worried about him, by now. Saul had assured his friend he would go right to sleep, and so Keoki had left, charging him to try to cheer up.

In fact, sleep wasn’t in prospect, right now. Saul sat and nursed the bottle. He had never felt so far away from home.

Strictly speaking, in four years we’ll be at aphelion and headed back to Earth again. But orbital dynamics was not on Saul’s mind, right now.

She’ll never approve, he told himself.

Oh, yeah? Well, how do you know unless you ask her?

Truth be told, he was simply afraid…afraid of what Virginia might think of his latest experiments. Miracle cures where one thing. Experiments with animals and plants, fine.

But among the gifts from Earth had been data on the force-growth of human bodies. It was like Houdini being challenged by a new lock, or a painter by a blank canvas. The need was there… the dare irresistible.

How do you know what Virginia would say? Maybe you don’t have to sleep in a cold, lonely lab.

Saul shivered, and knew that he was just too much of a coward to test it.

Ah, but what if he could give his love a gift? A gift of the very thing she most wanted in the world? The thing she had reconciled herself never to have?

One night, weeks ago, as she lay in exhausted slumber, he had taken the samples he needed.

From Lani Nguyen— trustful Lani— he had acquired the secret cache of human sperm and ova she had smuggled with her from Earth. He had all the materials he needed, now.

But since then, he had remained indecisive. Until tonight.

He had spent all day laboring in the Arcist enclave down at the south pole— as Colony Doctor he was neutral in all disputes— and had returned depressed. Life was miserable and cold, down in those warrens. Their fusion pile sputtered and barely put out enough power to maintain their greenhouses. Worse, Joao Quiverian had his own factions to deal with— fanatics that made his own Arcism seem moderate, whose loathing of anything associated with Percells seemed to know no bounds.

Keoki was right… I needed drunk.

Another ditty passed through Saul’s mind. One about the fifth Irish Civil War. It was a sad song of fratricide, but nobody had everwrittenanything better for either drinking or pity.

He was humming to himself when a flicker of movement made him look to the left. He squinted at the faint line of phosphors, diminishing in the distance, and saw that several were being occulted by dim shapes approaching down the narrow hallway.

Nobody was supposed to ever come this way. It was part of his agreement with the clans. Then who… ?

He blinked. Felt a chill.

Weirders…

They drifted into view… manlike shapes, but tufted all about like slime-covered sea creatures. The assemblage of native forms each carried was different. In one case there was nothing of the original man left but the eyes. In the other, there was still a face visible through the symbiotic tangle.

This is synergism taken farther than even I can stomach it, Saul thought queasily.

Several times, since that day when the ex-spacer turned mystic, Suleiman Ould-Harrad, left the upper levels to go down and join these creatures, small notes had appeared tacked to Saul’s door. He had filled every request, often leaving bottles of his sera outside. Each wakeshift, when he arose, the packet was gone. In its place lay a small sample of some strange lifeform Saul had never seen before.

It was a trade, medicine for more pieces to the puzzle that was Halley. It suited Saul fine, for he had wanted to find a way to treat the weird denizens of Far Gehenna, anyway. Since Ould-Harrad had gone down to join them, they had seemed to become better organized, less suspicious and violent when someone from a more “normal” clan crossed their path.

He blinked, however, when both emissaries bowed low.

“We c-come and beseech-ch your help-p.”

The stuttering voice took Saul by surprise.

“I-I didn’t know any of you could still talk!”

The one with the face shook its head. “Some c-cannot. But that does not mean we no longer think-k.”

Saul nodded, hurriedly. “I’m sorry. It’s just that… well, you never show yourselves. The others fear you so.”

“As we fear them. But you are Ssssaul. The Doc-c. We c-come to you with hurt.”

Saul was about to ask them to come into the lab when the lead weirder opened a gap in its foliage and brought forth a small brown bundle. Whimpering sounds came from it.

“C-can you fix-x-x?”

The otter had a broken leg. It writhed and bit at the one holding it, to no apparent effect.

“Of course,” Saul said as he stood up and pressed the thumb-code plate by the door. “Bring her in. This shouldn’t take long.”

Except for Lani and an occasional mech, nobody else but him had ever crossed this threshold. Saul was sure that nobody stranger ever would again.

But then, he had never been very good at predicting.

It was an hour after the Weirders had left that he found himself standing beside the master cloning chamber, with his mind made up. There were sound scientific reasons to proceed with the experiment. The colony needed it. Humanity needed it.

He nodded. “JonVon, I want to set up a secret data base.”

If he squinted against the sun’s hard knot of yellow, the icescape lay before him like a land of dreams. Armies of men and mechs surged across the slashed, stained territory. They towed long cylinders of buffed steel and alabaster aluminum oxide, or swiveled great clumps of electrical gear, or tugged transformers that, made to operate in cold vacuum, looked more like crusty brain coral than loops of gleaming copper and iron.