"Pretty grim," McCollum said. Picking up her napkin, she dabbed delicately at her mouth with it.

"Still, I'd be willing to bet the meat loaf tonight could have given him some competition."

"Still not getting the right proportion of spices?" Faraday hazarded, remembering her standard complaint about the cooking here.

"I don't think they even got the right kind of spices this time," she said, laying the folded napkin back down again.

Only instead of laying it down on her tray, she set it on the table beside the tray.

"Probably supply problems again," Faraday said, feeling his heartbeat pick up as he carefully avoided looking at the discarded napkin. In five years of the close observation that naturally came of living in such confined quarters with these people, he had long ago pegged McCollum as a neatness freak. Never in those five years had he ever seen her leave so much as a stray spoon behind her in the cafeteria.

If that napkin was still there on the table when she got up to leave, he might just owe her an apology.

"Probably," she conceded, glancing casually around. "I guess you can't blame the cooks for that."

"Not really," he agreed, forcing himself back onto this innocuous train of thought. "You could try blaming the security crackdown on the Inner System, though. That's probably what's slowing down the shipments."

"Or I could blame the protesters on Mars and Ceres," she suggested. "That's what inspired the crackdown."

"Or you could blame the overall System economy for not creating the unlimited wealth that would let us do anything we wanted to," Faraday said, getting into the game now. "With infinite money, we could develop Saturn's moons, colonize Pluto and Charon, and give every Martian their very own individual gold-plated dome home."

"Or I could blame God for only putting nine planets into the System to begin with," McCollum said.

Faraday made a face. "You win," he conceded. "Once you blame God, you've gone as far back as you can."

"And usually overshot the real target anyway," McCollum said.

"Indeed," Faraday said. "Well..."

"Maybe this scheme of Arbiter Liadof's will work," McCollum said. "If we can get a stardrive, the whole universe will be open to us."

"We can hope," Faraday said, nodding. "So. What have you got planned for the evening?"

"Not much," she said with a little shrug. "Probably read for a while and then go to bed. At some point soon, I'm guessing we're all going to be pretty busy. Might as well get caught up on my sleep before that happens."

"Sounds like a plan," Faraday said. "Maybe I'll do the same."

"Might be good for you." Picking up her cup, she drained the last sip. "Well. Good night, Colonel," she said, standing up. "See you in the morning."

"Good night, Ms. McCollum."

They exchanged nods, and she picked up her tray and headed toward the drop-off rack.

Leaving the folded napkin on the table.

Faraday returned to his meal, forcing himself to eat slowly and casually. McCollum's abandoned napkin seemed as visible and obvious as a smoking assault rifle, and it seemed to him that every eye in the cafeteria must surely be locked on it. On it, and on him.

But the buzz of conversation never faltered, and no one strode up to his table and demanded to know what was going on. Either Liadof's agents were playing it very cool, or else there really wasn't anyone watching him.

Still, there was no point in taking chances. He finished his meal, gathered his dinnerware back onto his tray, and stood up. Then, almost as an afterthought, he casually picked up McCollum's napkin.

It was heavier than a simple square of linen had any right to be. Setting it on top of his own napkin, he headed off across the room.

And as he leaned over to place his tray on the drop-off rack, his body blocking the view from the rest of the cafeteria behind him, he slipped the folded napkin and its unknown contents inside his jacket.

No one leaped up, shouting in triumph. No one suddenly appeared in front of him, ready to slap a pair of cuffs across his wrists. No one even yelled at him for stealing a napkin.

Still, he could feel the sweat gathering across his forehead and the back of his neck the entire way to his quarters. There, behind a locked door, he pulled out the napkin and carefully unfolded it.

There were two items inside. One was a folded piece of paper. The second, the one that had provided most of the weight, was a piece of heavy metal mesh about fifteen centimeters square.

And he definitely owed McCollum an apology.

He started with the mesh. He had seen such things before, on the old experimental "open-skin" probes that allowed Jupiter's atmosphere to flow freely in and out of noncritical areas so as to equalize pressures during rapid descent and ascent. The wires of this mesh were thinner than those had been, though, no more than three centimeters in diameter, and with larger interstitial spaces between them. The mesh seemed more flexible than the open-skin version, too, though with a sample this size it was hard to say for sure. He couldn't identify the metal, but from the slight raggedness of the edges of his sample where it had been cut, it seemed to be pretty tough stuff.

Setting the mesh aside, he unfolded the paper. At the top were five lines of precise script he recognized as McCollum's handwriting: I managed to finagle myself a short visit to Bay Seven. The probe looks something like this: I scrounged the mesh for you from a junk bin. Sorry I can't tell you more, but my new friend was pretty close-mouthed about his work and most of this tech stuff is way beyond me. Hope it helps.

The rest of the sheet contained a rough sketch of a pair of connected ovoid shapes, the smaller one atop a much larger one, like a fat torpedo riding a dirigible. The upper ovoid had what looked like tether grab-rings fore and aft, a set of two large turboprop propellers inside protective ring-shaped cowlings, and a cluster of transmission and sensor antennae on its upper surface.

The lower ovoid, in contrast, had what looked like a hundred antennae dangling from its underside.

The wrong place for antennae; but what else could they be? In addition, assuming he was interpreting McCollum's crosshatching correctly, it was the lower structure that was made out of the metal mesh.

He smoothed out the paper, frowning at it. A small probe, possibly a modified Skydiver, riding on top of a definitely nonstandard open-skin one. Was the upper one designed to push its way down to Level Three or Four, with the lower one then to jettison and go deeper, either flying free or tethered to the upper one?

Problem was, there was no tether shown between the two shapes. No tether rings, either. And while the upper probe had those massive free-flight turboprops, there was no indication of any engines at all on the lower ovoid. Nor did the lower one show any sign of floats, stabilizers, or airfoil surfaces.

On the other hand, as he studied the drawing more closely he realized it was amazingly short of details of any sort. Aside from the general shape of the external structure, there was basically nothing. There wasn't even a scale to give him an idea of the overall size of the thing.

McCollum hadn't been kidding when she said that tech stuff was beyond her, he realized with a flash of annoyance. Someone like Milligan or Beach could have gathered more data with a single glance than McCollum probably could have with a sketch book and half an hour to study the problem.

Which was, he had to concede, probably why her new friend had been willing to risk letting her see it in the first place. Briefly, he wondered what that glimpse had cost her, then put the question out of his mind. He probably didn't want to know.

Still, it was a start. Maybe there would be time for McCollum or one of the others to gather more data in the week and a half that remained before Liadof's current target date.