The ship ran the gauntlet of the Phage belt and arrived with another dent in the hull from a glancing blow. J’merlia gave it one moment’s inspection to make sure the damage was superficial, then boarded the Dreamboat and set a least-time return course.

No messages came in during the flight back to Glister. In his preoccupation with the problem at hand, J’merlia did not think to send any record of his decision to abandon Dreyfus-27 in favor of a trip to the planetoid.

At two thousand kilometers Glister became visible. So did the matrix of pinpoint lights whirling in orbit around the little sphere. J’merlia gripped the controls himself, ready to override the collision avoidance system if he had to. The computer was ready for the free-fall trajectories of natural bodies, not the directed attack of energetic Phages; Kallik might have been able to devise alternative programs in the time available, but J’merlia certainly could not.

Two hundred kilometers. There was a jerk of violent acceleration. A close approach — near enough to stare down a Phage’s dark pentagonal maw as it whizzed past only forty meters away. Eighty kilometers. Another, closer, miss, and a second violent thrust to the left. Fifty. The Dreamboat began decelerating so hard that J’merlia’s front claws could not move on the controls. He sat rigid, staring out of the port as the ship corkscrewed its way through a sea of Phages. He counted scores of near misses.

When he was convinced that the ship was doomed, they were suddenly clear and in the final moments of descent. The whine of overstressed engines died to a high-pitched whisper. J’merlia, already in his suit, activated the display screens for an all-around look at the surface.

Nothing. No orange shimmer, no moving humans, no sign of the Have-It-All.

But from his position close to the surface he could see less than one percent of the surface of the planetoid, and during the flight down there had been no time for a visual search. Maybe Kallik and the other ship were just a few hundred meters away, hidden behind the curve of Glister. And Kallik had been wrong. That surface was not totally featureless. He could see something, a slate-gray mass peeping above the horizon.

According to Kallik and Hans Rebka, the atmosphere outside was breathable. But according to them, the whole place was safe. J’merlia put his suit to full opacity and stepped outside. He started to walk across the smooth surface toward the drab surface lumpiness.

Halfway there he paused. Was that thing what it seemed to be? He stared for a long time, then turned his lemon-colored compound eyes upward. Was it imagination, or were they moving still lower and faster than Darya Lang’s report had suggested?

He turned and went back to the Dreamboat, placing the ship into full self-protect mode.

On the surface once more, he again began to walk around the curve of Glister. That crumpled mass might have been there when the others arrived on the planetoid, hidden beyond the horizon. It might have been there for a million years. J’merlia certainly hoped so.

But it might be a very recent and ominous addition. Every few steps, he found himself pausing to scan the sky.

Was it? It certainly looked that way, although every Builder specialist swore one would never be found in a substantial gravity field.

The closer he came, the more the object he was approaching looked like the gray remnant of a shattered Phage.

Where was she?

Darya’s first thought when the shimmering mist faded was huge relief. Nothing was changed. She was standing exactly where she had been when the cloud swept over them. Ahead of her was the same convex, gray, faintly luminous plain, barren of features, stretching away from her feet to a near horizon. The light that shone down upon it was the same cold, orange gloom.

But there was no sign of the Have-It-All, or of Kallik. And the strange light did not cast shadows.

Darya raised her eyes. Gargantua had vanished. The pinpoint brilliance of stars and orbiting fragments was gone. In their place was a smooth overhead illumination, as featureless as the floor beneath her feet.

She felt a touch on her arm.

“All right? No aftereffects?” Hans Rebka sounded as unruffled as she had ever heard him.

What was the old saying? If you’re calm now it means you just don’t understand the problem. “What happened to us? Where are we? How long were we unconscious?”

“I’ll pass on the first two. But I don’t think we were unconscious at all. We were held for less than five minutes.”

She grabbed his arm, needing the sheer feel of a human being. “It seemed like forever. How do you know how long it was?”

“I counted.” He was staring hard at the curved horizon, measuring it with his eye. “It’s something you learn on Teufel if you’re trapped outside during the Remouleur — that’s the dawn wind — and you have to go to earth. Count your heartbeats. It does two things: lets you estimate time intervals, and proves you’re still alive. I just counted to two hundred and thirty. If you’ll stand there for a minute, I think I’ll be able to answer your second question. I know where we are.”

He walked away fifty paces, turned, then called to Darya, “I’m going to hold my hand out and gradually lower it. Let me know when it goes below the horizon.”

When she called to him. “Now!” he nodded in satisfaction and came hurrying back to her. “I thought so from my first look; now I’m sure. The surface we are on is still a sphere, or very close to it — but the radius is less than before. You can see it in the way the surface curves away on each side.”

“So we’re on another sphere, inside Glister.”

“That’s my best guess.” He pointed up. “Kallik and the Have-It-All are right up there, through the ceiling. But there’s no way to reach them, unless we can persuade that cloud to come back and carry us through.”

“Don’t say that!” Darya had been staring around her.

“Why not? Uh oh. Damnation. Is it listening to me? Here we go again.”

As though responding to his words, an orange shimmer was flowing up and around them from the smooth gray surface. Darya resisted the urge to run. She was sure it would do no good. Instead she reached for Hans Rebka’s hand and held it tightly. This time when the twinkling points cut off all light, sound, and mobility, the result was far less disturbing. She waited, sensing the faint throb of her own pulse and counting steadily.

One hundred and forty-one… two… three. The fog was dispersing. One hundred and fifty-eight… nine. It was gone. She was free, still gripping his hand hard enough to hurt.

At her side, Rebka grunted in surprise. “Well, it may be no better, but at least it’s different.”

They had sunk through to another level. The curvature of the surface was no longer noticeable, because there was no visible horizon against which to check it. They stood in a connected series of chambers. All around them structures ran in an eye-baffling zigzag of webs, pipes, nets, and partitions, from slate-gray floor to glowing ceiling. The “windows” between the chambers were set at random heights, and there were few openings at floor level. Whatever inhabited these chambers did not move like humans.

Nor did they walk through walls. Darya noticed that the retreating fog of orange lights did not penetrate the new structures. Instead it crawled around and over them, to wriggle its way through the small openings in nets and webs.

She glanced down to her feet. The outer layers of Glister had been unnaturally clean and totally dust-free, but here there were fragments of broken pipe and long lengths of cable. Everything had the neglected and disused look of a room that had not seen a cleanup in a million years. And yet the walls themselves seemed perfectly solid.