“You might want to rethink this.”

“Heads up now.”

“Don’t get too close.”

“Ed,” she asked, “can’t you find something else to do for a few minutes?”

She activated her e-suit, but when Tor started to follow her lead, she shook her head. “Stay here,” she said. “There’s no need for both of us to be out there.”

He started to protest, but she looked at him and he demurred.

The satellite was a disturbance at twilight, a shifting of light tones not quite seen. But it was impossible not to know something was there.

She put on a go-pack and stepped into the airlock. “Tell me what to do,” he said.

“Just stay put. If something happens, you’re the backup. Rescue me. If you can’t, clear out. Tell Bill to take you back to the ship. Under no circumstances monkey with the satellite.”

SHE USED THE go-pack to circle the object. Even from a few meters, the thing had no definition, but was rather a swirl of darkness and mirror images. She didn’t touch it until she’d finished a complete scan. The AI detected the field device which coordinated the unit’s stealth capabilities.

“If I shut it off,” she told Tor, “we’ll be able to see what we’re working with.”

“If you shut it off,” said Tor, “it might explode.”

“No. Can’t be.” The satellite that Preach had shown her had been shut down. And it hadn’t blown up.

“But maybe it starts a timer.”

He had a point. Well, she would find out. She maneuvered in close, found the switch, hesitated for the briefest moment, and moved it to its opposite setting. Off.

Nothing happened.

She retreated to the lander, climbed inside, and they withdrew to a thousand meters. And waited.

Still nothing.

They gave it two hours. When the time expired, and the satellite remained quietly whole, she returned to it.

She went over it with a scanner, assembled a complete schematic, collected more scrapings, and waved to Tor, who was watching anxiously from the pilot’s seat. She was getting advice from everybody by then. Especially from Tor. Mostly it consisted of Don’t touch anything and Look out now.

When she was finished she went back to the lander. They rendezvoused with the Memphis and she forwarded the results to Outpost.

THE SETUP WAS the same as at 1107. Hutch used the position of the stealth to calculate the locations of the other two satellites. They found one of them. The missing one, of course, would be the satellite that the Condor had located.

They were congratulating themselves on their success when the results came in from the Brandeis transmission.

It contained a surprise. The stealth that the Condor had been examining at the time of the incident was less than a century old. Closer, the experts thought, to eighty years.

It was brand-new.

LATE THAT EVENING, the Brandeis found sections of the engine room. By morning, Park had concluded that the fusion engines had exploded. “We don’t know why,” he told Hutch, “but at least we can dismiss the idea there’s something spooky running around out here.”

“I guess I’m glad to hear it,” she said.

“Something else: The stealth you looked at.”

“What about it?”

“It’s active. The imagers react to light. Change their focus. Look at sunrises, sunsets. They even took a look at us.”

“They watched you?”

“Yes.”

This kept getting stranger. “Is it still watching you?”

“No. We moved off behind it. I don’t think it can see us anymore.”

PARK’S PEOPLE SPENT two days climbing around on the stealth. The unit was a sophisticated package of sensors, telescopes, and antennas. It had computers and navigation equipment and thrusters, to allow it to adjust position. It had radio transmitters and receivers. And early analysis indicated it used vacuum energy as its power source. But it had no explosive device.

“Not bad,” said one of the technicians. “I’m not sure we could have designed something like this.”

“The pieces don’t fit,” George said that night. “They’re capable of going out to 1107, but they don’t have lightbender technology. And the bus at their moonbase looked pretty primitive.”

“We have different levels of technology on display, too,” said Tor. “There are still satellites in orbit that were put up by the Soviets.”

“What I’d like to know,” said Pete, “is whether this is the same kind of device that’s orbiting 1107.”

They were treating themselves to pastries, wine, and cheese. The gloom of the first days following the loss of the Condor had been partially dissipated by the successful (that is, uneventful) exploration of the moonbase. They had a major find. There were a few questions to be answered, but they were feeling pretty good. A survey mission was being assembled and would be there in a few months. Park and some of his people joined them, congratulated them, and he announced he’d finished everything he could do and was returning to Outpost in the morning.

Pete had been quiet most of the evening. He was sitting, enjoying a jelly donut. He’d gotten some of the powdered sugar on his nose but hadn’t seemed to notice. “I just don’t believe it,” he said abruptly. His eyes found Hutch. “The notion that the engines happened to explode just as they were starting to look at the satellite isn’t credible.”

“What other explanation is there?” asked Nick, reasonably.

Nobody had an answer.

AFTER THE MEETING drifted to an uncertain close, and Park and his people had returned to the Brandeis, Hutch went back to the bridge.

One of the disadvantages of living for an extended time on any of the Academy’s superluminals was that there were no places that guaranteed isolation from the other passengers, save in a private compartment. There was no such thing as a remote restaurant or a rooftop or a park bench.

Hutch needed someone. Captains were expected to maintain the tradition of not mixing romance with their passengers. But she felt desolate. She’d have liked to spend an evening somewhere with Tor. Not that she expected that particular romance, long dead, to reignite. Or even that she would have wanted it to reignite. But increasingly, since Preach had gone down, she’d felt the need for an intimate evening with somebody. She needed somebody to talk with, someone to look at her with longing, someone with whom she could retreat into the distance and pretend the past week had not happened.

She’d been given only a few hours with Preacher Brawley, and yet his loss had hit her hard. She found herself thinking about him at odd moments, during conversations with Bill, during meetings like the one she’d just attended, during workouts in the gym. She remembered how he had looked on that one rainy night in Arlington.

Gregory MacAllister had written somewhere that life was a series of blown opportunities. She remembered the Overlook and Beth the Singer and the good night kiss and watching his taxi turn back in the direction from which they’d come.

To Beth?

She shook it off and was grateful to hear someone enter. She noticed the lights were dim and brought them up to normal. It was Nick.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Am I disturbing you?” He was carrying a flask and two glasses.

“No,” she said. “Come in.”

“I thought you could use a drink.”

She invited him to sit. “I think I already had too many.”

He filled the glasses with dark wine and held one out for her. She took it, smiled politely at it, and set it down on the console.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Sure. Why do you ask?”

“It’s quiet up here.” He sipped his drink. “The lights were down. I just thought you haven’t really been yourself lately. But I can understand it.”

“I’m fine,” she said.

He nodded. “Maybe it’s time to start home.”

“Is that the consensus?”

“We’ve been talking about it. George’ll stay out here forever if he can. He’s got some puzzles to play with. And he wants to go down to the ground.”