From the time two hours earlier when the tug's autopilot had performed its preset maneuver (the details, the endless details; how could she have thought of them all?), Lilo had been overcome with a paralyzing lethargy, a certainty of death. Not that she hadn't struggled against it; she and Cathay had talked over every possible chance of escape. But when the background of stars began to swing around her in a direction she could account for in only one way, she knew her fate was sealed. She had missed the hole, but not by enough.

Vaffa had missed it, too, but by an even smaller margin. His body had come close enough to be compressed into a speck too small to see except for the light of its annihilation. It lasted only a second, then dispersed into space.

Lilo had not come that close. A hole could be a dangerous thing, though not so much from the danger of falling into it. That was very unlikely, since it was so tiny and the space she floated in was so vast. But a near-miss could be fatal. The strength of the gravity field changed sharply as one neared the hole. If Lilo had fallen into a close, hyperbolic orbit around it, the tidal strains induced by the hole's gravity attracting different parts of her body with varying strength would have torn her apart. Or if she came close enough, as Vaffa had done, the gravity could collapse her body to a pinhead-sized mass of neutronium.

She had been lucky, in a way, but not lucky enough. She would remain far enough away from it to stay alive, but she was definitely in a slow orbit around it.

She had discussed it calmly with Cathay. He was going to try getting her with the scooter until she told him what she had seen when the tug boosted. The acceleration had torn the fragile scooter from its moorings and it had come apart. Then he wanted to move the tug in close, but that was out of the question. Even a superbly skilled pilot would not have dared to get that close to the hole.

In a way, Cathay was suffering worse than she was. He still had choices to make, things to do, and none of them was easy. Lilo spelled it out to him with the detached brutality of one whose fate is certain.

"You can't go back to Poseidon; not now. They'll be waiting for you. You have to hope that Cass and the others are okay. You have to go to Saturn. Go to the coordinates I told you, and sit tight. Broadcast on the frequency I gave you. Parameter is not likely to have moved far from the lab, even in a year. I'm out there, somewhere. You have to find me, and Parameter. They'll help you. You have the tug. You can get weapons somehow. Then come back for the children. Come back, Cathay."

"I will. But I don't want to leave. I can't leave you here."

"You have to. I don't want you listening in when... when the end comes. I don't want that." She felt the panic just below the surface, and made her voice as hard as possible. "Now go. You did everything you could."

It was not until she noticed a faint pressure on her back that she began to wonder how she was going to die.

The pressure built with incredible rapidity. She was slicing straight into Jupiter's atmosphere, like a meteor, but the suit was going to protect her. An orange glow built up around her, became so bright that she could see nothing else. Her spinning motion stopped as aerodynamic forces stabilized her with her back to the planet, arms and legs pulled out in front of her by the drag. The deceleration built up steeply, but she knew she could take a tremendous amount with the suit lung feeding oxygen into her blood.

The suit became rigid. Now the tugging sensations at her feet and hands were gone. The only sensation of motion was the feeling that her belly was trying to meet her backbone. The skin on her face was drawn tightly to the sides, and her breasts were trying to find new homes in her armpits.

She had no way of knowing how long it went on. There must have been a blackout in there, though she did not recall going under or waking up. But the pressure had stopped. She had reached terminal velocity for the upper atmosphere, and was now falling under the pull of gravity, almost weightless. She looked around for the hole, which should have been visible as it sucked in the surrounding gases. Then she remembered that the atmosphere would not have slowed the hole at all; it would be halfway through the planet by now. So it would definitely be Jupiter that killed her.

The air was clear, with towering clouds rising around her. From time to time she felt sharp surges of acceleration as the winds caught her and moved her sideways.

It was a timeless thing, the falling. At first she had followed old habits, speculating on how long it would take her to reach the dark clouds below, what the temperature outside her suit field might be, at what point the density of the gases might cause her to float instead of fall. But she became content just to observe. It was a staggering sight. If she had to die, she could do worse than meet death in such surroundings, alone.

That didn't last. She reached the cloud layer and visibility dropped to zero. There was nothing to see but the silvery hand she held in front of her face to assure herself she had not already died. She wondered if it would be possible to die and not know it.

It began to annoy her that her mind would not stop working. With nothing to do and nothing to see, she began speculating again. What would kill her? Would she survive it all, and live until her oxygen supply ran out? That should be an easy death, gradually losing consciousness and never waking up.

She remembered the exhaust valve on her suit, the metal flower below her collarbone through which waste gas and heat was pumped from her body. It was made from a very tough alloy, but it could heat up, jam, melt—any of a number of things. Death would be quicker that way, and possibly more painful. But there was nothing she could do about it. She felt a momentary regret that she would not make it to the layer of hot liquid hydrogen. That would have been something to see.

Later, more soberly, she realized it would probably be as dull as this lousy cloud layer she was passing through.

But now she burst out of the cloud layer. A vast, dim space lay open beneath her. At that, it was still much brighter than she would have expected from the thickness of the cloud layer above.

For some reason, her fear returned then with paralyzing intensity. There was nothing she could do to prevent it. Some part of her mind had taken another look at her situation, concluded she had no hope of surviving, and did not want to accept it.

She suffered another blackout, or an episode of insanity. The clouds were much closer now, a blend of red and violet shapes fringed with bright sparks—(white, with fluffy gray bottoms)—tumbling and boiling like a cauldron of electric eels.

There were some yellow shapes just visible, darting from the cloud bank below her—(above me, floating in a blue sky)—into the clearer air, then back into obscurity. They were almost certainly alive. She wondered if they were Invaders, or members of the intelligent Jovian race, or simply animals.

(The ground beneath me was soft, yielding. I grabbed a handful of it; it trickled through my fingers. Sand. I writhed deeper into it, trying to bury myself. A breeze cooled my body, and blew the soft white clouds past me in the blue sky. A yellow shape darted from one of the clouds)—and back into the cloud bank again. They were getting closer. Her detached calm had returned to her now, and she wondered if they would try to eat her. It made her eyes hurt to try to look at them—

(Left, right, receding from me, then... Ouch! My eyes crossed, and my head started to hurt. I buried my face in my hands, welcoming the hurting grit I rubbed over my face. I rolled in the sand, over and over, hard beneath me, wetness, sliding)—it was rising, coming directly at her. Her eyes could not define its shape. In the center of it, if it could be said to have a center, was a hole, and in the middle of the hole was a tree—(a tree)—and the feeling of sand in her mouth, water—(rushing over me, rolling me, pulling, in my mouth and nose)— salt and sand and a roaring noise. Disorientation, time running sidewise, nausea building in the pit of her stomach—