“You might say that.” Birdie gave E. C. Tally a thoughtful glance. “Didn’t you ever play cards?”

“Never.”

“If we get out of this alive, why don’t I teach you?”

“Thank you. That would be informative.”

“And don’t you worry,” Birdie patted Tally on the shoulder. “We won’t be playing for high stakes. At first.”

“That could have been us.” Julius Graves was staring straight up. “Not a comforting thought.”

They had finally decided that since the Dreamboat needed time and maneuvering space to land on Glister, it would be a mistake to have the Incomparable fly in all the way to the surface. Instead, the bigger ship had been programmed to zoom down to ten kilometers and then veer away from the planetoid, with luck luring the cloud of attacking Phages with it.

As the Dreamboat increased the power level of its drive for the last hundred-meter deceleration to the surface, the Incomparable could be seen skirting the northern horizon of Glister. The old ship was at the center of a dense cluster of marauding Phages. Already it had sustained a dozen direct hits. The drive was still flaring, but Phage maws had gouged great chunks from the body of the freighter. About twenty Phages clung to the flanks of the Incomparable, like dogs worrying an old bull.

“They’ll be back,” Julius Graves went on. “The way they’re going, they’ll have swallowed the freighter completely in another half hour. And Phages don’t get indigestion, or lose their appetite, no matter what they ingest.”

Birdie had chosen an approach trajectory to bring them no more than fifty meters from the Have-It-All, on the side of the ship away from Kallik’s field inhibitor. There had been no time to examine that installation during their descent, and would not have been even if the Dreamboat’s evasive movements from a handful of isolated Phages had been smooth enough to permit it. Now they had to hurry over to the inhibitor and decide what to do before any Phages returned to harass them.

The two men and the embodied computer had their suits set to full opacity. Kallik, Darya Lang, and Hans Rebka had certainly been able to breathe the atmosphere; and just as certainly, they had disappeared from the surface of Glister. Their vanishing and failure to reappear was unlikely to be the result of Glister’s air — but it could be. As E. C. Tally pointed out, quoting from the most ancient part of the data banks, “Taking a calculated risk, sir, does not oblige one to act rashly.”

While Graves and Tally went on to the site of the field inhibitor, Birdie took a quick look inside the Have-It-All. He headed first for the control room. The ship was untouched, ready to fly within a few seconds of giving the command. That gave Birdie his first warm feeling for quite a while. He patted the control console and hurried back outside.

He had half expected to see the surface of Glister littered with crashed Phages, but there were only two crumpled remains in sight. Did they lose interest if no organic life-forms were present? That was a new thought — though not an encouraging one, to an organic life-form.

Birdie followed the stretched cable from the Have-It-All’s stanchion to the place where Graves and E. C. Tally were standing. Tally had his hand on the line, close to the point where it disappeared into the gray surface, and he was tugging on it vigorously. As Birdie came up to them Tally released the cable, reached down, and pushed his hand easily into the slate-colored plane.

“Observe,” he said. “The field inhibitor is still operating, with near-perfect field cancellation. The surface offers negligible resistance to the penetration of my hand, and at this point it must, I think, be a weakly secured gaseous form. But the cable itself offers considerable resistance to its own withdrawal. We conclude that it must be secured at its lower end, within the interior of Glister.”

“In other words,” Graves said, “it’s tied to something.”

Now that he was close enough, Birdie could see that the surface for a radius of a few meters around the field inhibitor appeared slightly indistinct. And the legs of the inhibitor equipment stood not on Glister, but buried a few centimeters in that hazy gray.

“So who shall be first?” Graves asked.

“First for what?” But Birdie knew the answer to that question before he asked it. The one thing that made no sense was to come all the way here, run the gauntlet through that belt of aggressive Phages, and then sit and wait for the same Phages to come back and dive-bomb them. The only way to go was down, into that gray horridness.

Tally had taken hold of the cable without waiting for discussion. “It is possible that I will be unable to return messages to you through the suit communications system,” he said calmly. “However, when I reach a point where it is appropriate for another to descend, I will strike the cable — thus.” He hit it with the palm of his suited hand. “Feel for the vibration.”

He pushed his feet over the edge and swung hand-over-hand down the cable. His body disappeared easily into a gray opacity. When only his head showed above the smoky surface he paused.

“It occurs to me that my words leave the required action for some possible future situation inadequately defined. A contingency may arise in which I become unable to strike the cable in the manner that I described. If I do not signal in a reasonable time, say, one thousand seconds, you should assume that contingency.”

“Don’t worry your head about that,” Birdie said. “We’ll assume it.”

“That is satisfactory.” E. C. Tally disappeared completely. A second later his head popped up again from the gray haze. “May I ask, if I do not signal in one thousand seconds, what action you propose to take?”

Birdie stared off to the horizon. The hulk of the Incomparable had vanished — devoured, or flown far away, he could not tell. There was a cloud of glittering motes visible in the same direction. The same Phages, probably, sensing motion on the surface of Glister and coming back for another go at it.

Except that these Phages were not interested in the surface of Glister. They wanted to have a go at humans. At him.

“I don’t know what action we’ll take, E.C.,” Birdie said. “But don’t be surprised if it happens before you count out your thousand seconds.”

The cable went down ten meters through gray obscurity, then emerged into a spherical region with another gray floor and a ceiling above it that glowed with cold orange light.

Birdie clung to the line, high up near the ceiling, and peered downward.

It was a long drop — a horrid long drop, for somebody from a planet where the buildings were never more than a couple of stories high; and there was no sign of E. C. Tally down there. But the cable went on, straight downward, into the floor.

Birdie slightly relaxed the grip of his hands and knees and continued his controlled descent. When he came to the part of the second floor where the line ran through, that surface proved just as insubstantial as the first one. The field inhibitor had been focused downward, and for all Birdie knew, its effect went right through Glister and out the other side. He allowed himself to drop on through. Somewhere above him, Julius Graves was waiting for his signal, as he had waited for E. C Tally’s. But this was no time to give it, suspended in midair.

The gray fog filled his nose and mouth, passing through his supposedly sealed suit as though it did not exist. The gas was thin, tasteless, and odorless, and it did not interfere with Birdie’s breathing. In another ten meters he was through that and dropping again toward a spherical surface.

This level was more promising. There were structures and partitions and webs, dividing the space into giant, oddly-shaped rooms. Birdie was coming down into one of the bigger open areas. He released the line with his crossed legs, let go with his hands, and dropped the last few feet. The gravity was more than he had realized. He landed heavily and flopped backward to a sitting position. Before he stood up he took a quick look around.