She had to decide—drop it, start all over, or let the heating work against both the pipe and her hand. She decided to let things be. The pipe was already hot; she could see vapor rising from it as the metal boiled away. She shifted her hand as best she could to relieve pressure, but she could not get it away.

She waited, adjusted her feet again, and studied the pipe intently. Its firm edges began to blur and run together. She could feel nothing in her right hand. Nikka tried to move her fingers and felt some faint sensation as reward. She braced herself and pulled as strongly as she could against the pipe. It slowly gave, bending away from the invisible wall, and an oxygen bottle popped free of its mount under the pressure.

She was gasping. She grabbed the bottle as it rolled across the sled and forced open its safety warrant valve. There was no answering reading on the smashed dial. She held a finger against the nozzle and felt no pressure. The bottle was empty. Without thinking, not allowing herself to feel any despair, she reached for the next bottle.

The pipe still forced it against its mount, but she wormed it away and the bottle popped free. This was it, she thought. There were no other bottles not already ruptured. Nikka tripped it open and the meter registered positive. She swung it around to her back mount without hesitation, screwing the cluster joints into place automatically.

The gush of air washed over her in a cool steady stream. She collapsed across the sled section, unmindful of the invisible shield, the tangled metal that gouged her even through her suit, the glare of the sun above. The bottle was good for at least three hours. If she rested and kept still Alphonsus might get through.

Something tingled at her wrist and she lifted her right hand to look at it. Against the mottled colors of the plastiform there was a spreading red patch.

The tingling sharpened into a dull, throbbing pain. As she watched, the blood ran down her wrist to her elbow. She lay absolutely still. She was bleeding into free space. Her suit fitted firmly against her skin, so the rest of her body felt no immediate pressure drop.

As she watched, a small group of bubbles formed in the blood and burst slowly. A thin veil of vapor rose from her hand as the blood evaporated.

She stared at it, numb. Exposure to vacuum meant death, surely. How long did it take? A sudden pressure drop should force nitrogen narcosis. How long? A minute, two? She took a deep breath and the air was good. It cleared her mind and she looked up again at the dome. It seemed to loom over her.

Blood against metal. Life against machine. She lifted her feet and rolled off the sled. Her ears popped; her body pressure was dropping. It was a hundred meters to the sled. In her repair kit there was tape, organic seals— something to close off the wound.

She took a step. The horizon shifted crazily and she almost lost her balance. A hundred meters, one step at a time. Concentrate on one, only one. A step at a time.

Her ears popped again but by now she was moving. Scarlet drops spattered into the dust. The pain had turned into a fierce burning lance.

She slipped and quickly regained her balance, and in the movement glanced back for an instant. The silent and impersonal dome squatted above her. In less than an hour it had done all this to her, brought her to the edge; perhaps it could do more. But she was in charge of her life at last. She wasn’t going to simply let things happen to her. And she was damned if she was going to die now.

Mr. Ichino put his lunch bag aside and lay down on the tufted grass that grew in patches here. He cocked his hands behind his head and peered up into the canopy made by the massive pepper tree that rustled softly in a light midday wind. Yellow dabs of sunlight speckled him and shifted and danced. Mr. Ichino felt an inner calm that came from having made a decision and put it behind him for good. He suspected Nigel’s telephone call from Houston was designed to stop him from reaching that final point and tendering his resignation. But if that were so, Nigel was too late. Mr. Ichino’s letter was now worming its way through channels, and in a month he would be free of the stretching tensions he felt in his work; and he could then walk a bit more lightly through the years that remained to him. Precisely how many years that might be was a minor issue, though the incidence of pollutive diseases these days did not seem reassuring. He had never smoked and had watched carefully what he ate, so that—

“Sorry I’m late,” Nigel’s voice came from above him. Mr. Ichino blinked lazily and drifted up from his reflections. He nodded. Nigel sat beside him.

“Had a devil of a time getting in from the airport.”

“I see.”

“Snagged a bite on the way,” Nigel said, indicating Mr. Ichino’s paper bag. “Go ahead and eat.”

He sat up and carefully unfolded the wrapping papers for his sandwich and vegetables. “Then you did not truly intend to have lunch here.”

“No.” Nigel glanced at him sheepishly. “When I called I had to have some reason to get you away from JPL. I didn’t want to be overheard or have anyone wondering what we were talking about.”

“And why is that?”

“Well, first off, your prediction was dead on.”

“How?”

“NASA’s going to keep the Marginis operation as in-house as possible. They’ll use retreads like me—they have to. There aren’t that many younger types who’re trained for a variety of jobs.”

“The cylinder cities are too specialized?”

“So NASA says.”

“That seems a weak argument.”

“These things aren’t relentlessly logical. It’s politics.” “The old guard.”

“Of which I am, blessedly, one.”

“You were successful?”

“Right.” Nigel beamed. “I’ve got a lot of swotting up to do on computing interfaces and that rot.”

“You know the material well.”

“Not well enough, the specialists say.”

“The specialists wish to go themselves,” Mr. Ichino murmured lightly.

“Check. Quite a round of throat-slitting going on back there, I gather. Had to be careful not to slip on the blood.”

“Yet you survived.”

“I collected on a lot of old debts.”

“The legacy of Mr. Evers.”

Nigel grinned slyly.

“I have never truly approved of that, you know,” Mr. Ichino said carefully.

“I’m not bursting with pride over it,” Nigel’s voice took on a hesitant, guarded note.

“We have all conspired, implicitly, to conceal the truth.”

“I know.” Nigel nodded with a touch of weariness. “But it was necessary.”

“To protect NASA.”

“That was the first-order effect. It’s the second-order effect I was after—keeping NASA from getting itself gored by outsiders, so they’d have a free hand and a bigger budget. Money to explore the moon.”

“And you have been proved correct.”

“Well—” Nigel shrugged. “A lot of other people felt the same way. Finding that wreck was pure accident.”

“The girl would not have been flying there had the lunar budget not been expanded.”

“Yes. Nifty syllogism, eh? Logical to the last redeeming comma.” Nigel chuckled with hollow mirth.

“You are not convinced.”

“No.”

“It has worked out well.”

“I don’t like lying. That’s what it was, that’s what it is. And you can’t ever be sure, there’s the rub. We think the politicians and the public and the New Sons and God knows who else, we think they’d be horrified to learn that Evers fired a bomb at the Snark, drove it away. And blew our chance. Hell, he could’ve been risking a war, for all he knew. And the backlash might’ve gutted NASA so that we’d never have got to search for the Marginis wreck. But we don’t know that would have happened.”

“One never does.”

“Right. Right.” Nigel fidgeted with his hands, flexed his legs into a new sitting position, stared moodily out at the knots of people lunching in the park. Mr. Ichino felt the unbalanced tensions in this man and knew Nigel had something more to say. He pointed toward the western horizon. “Look.”