Idas, then Lynceos, pushed away from the rail and ran up the bridge.

“Come on!” the Mouse cried, following.

Sebastian and Tyy came after, with Katin at the rear.

Ten meters below the rim, Dan paused on a rock, arms before him, preparing an infernal dive.

As they reached the head of the bridge—the twins were already climbing the rail—a figure appeared at the canon’s lips above the old man.

“Dan!” Von Ray’s face flamed as the light fanned him. He vaulted. Shale struck from under his sandals and shattered before him as he crabbed down the slope. “Dan, don’t—”

Dan did.

His body caught on an outcropping sixty feet below, then spun on, out, and down.

The Mouse clutched the rail, bruising his stomach on the bar as he leaned.

Katin was beside him a moment afterward, leaning even further.

“Ahhh!” the Mouse whispered and pulled back to avert his face.

Captain Von Ray reached the rock from which Dan had leaped. He dropped to one knee, both fists on the stone, staring over. Shapes fell at him (Sebastian’s pets), rose again, casting no shadow. The twins had stopped, ledges above him.

Captain Von Ray stood. He looked up at his crew. He was breathing hard. He turned and made his way back up the slope.

“What happened?” Katin asked when they were all on the bridge again. “Why did he…?”

“I was talking with him just a few minutes before,” Von Ray explained. “He’s crewed with me for years. But on the last trip, he was… was blinded.”

The big captain; the scarred captain. And how old would he be, the Mouse wondered. Before, the Mouse had put him at forty-five, fifty. But this confusion lopped ten or fifteen years. The captain was aged, not old.

“I had just told him that I had made arrangements for him to return to his home in Australia. He’d turned around to go back across the bridge to the dormitory where I’d taken him a room. I glanced back… he wasn’t on the bridge.” The captain looked around at the rest of them. “Come on to the Roc.”

“I guess you’ll have to report this to the Patrol,” Katin said. Von Ray led them toward the gate to the take-off field, where Draco writhed up and down his hundred-meter column, in the darkness.

“There’s a phone right here at the head of the bridge—”

Von Ray’s look cut Katin off. “I want to leave this rock. If we call from here, they’ll have everybody wait around to tell his version in triplicate.”

“I guess you can call from the ship,” Katin suggested, “as we leave.”

For a moment the Mouse doubted all over again his judgment of the captain’s age.

“There’s nothing we can do for the sad fool.”

The Mouse cast an uncomfortable glance down the chasm, then followed along with Katin.

Beyond the hot drafts, night was chill, and fog hung coronas on the induced-fluorescent lamps that patterned the field.

Katin and the Mouse were at the group’s tail.

“I wonder just what Illyrion means to handsome there,” the Mouse commented softly.

Katin grunted and put his hands under his belt. After a moment he asked, “Say, Mouse what did you mean about that old man and all his senses having been killed?”

“When they tried to reach the nova the last time,” the Mouse said, “he looked at the star too long through sensory input and all his nerve endings were seared. They weren’t killed. They were jammed into constant stimulation.” He shrugged. “Same difference. Almost.”

“Oh,” Katin said, and looked at the pavement.

Around them stood star-freighters. Between them, the much smaller, hundred-meter shuttles.

After he’d thought awhile, Katin said: “Mouse, has it occurred to you how much you have to lose on this trip?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re not scared?”

The Mouse grasped Katin’s forearm with his thin fingers. “I’m scared as hell,” he rasped. He shook his hair back to look up at his tall shipmate. “You know that? I don’t like things like Dan. I’m scared.”

Some stud had taken a black crayon and scrawled “Olga” across the vane-projector face.

“Okay,” the Mouse said to the machine. “You’re Olga.”

Purr and blink, three green lights, four red ones. The Mouse began the tedious check of pressure distribution and phase readings.

To move a ship faster than light from star to star, you take advantage of the very twists in space, the actual distortions that matter creates in the continuum itself. To talk about the speed of light as the limiting velocity of an object is to talk about twelve or thirteen miles an hour as the limiting velocity of a swimmer in the sea. But as soon as one starts to employ the currents of the water itself, as well as the wind above, as with a sailboat, the limit vanishes. The starship had seven vanes of energy acting somewhat like sails. Six projectors controlled by computers sweep the vanes across the night. And each cyborg stud controls a computer. The captain controls the seventh. The vanes of energy had to be tuned to the shifting frequencies of the stasis pressures; and the ship itself was quietly hurled from this plane of space by the energy of the Illyrion in its core. That was what Olga and her cousins did. But the control of the shape and the angling of the vane was best left to a human brain. That was the Mouse’s job—under the captain’s orders. The captain also had blanket control of many of the sub-vane properties.

The cubicle’s walls were covered with graffiti from former crews. There was a contour couch. The Mouse adjusted the inductance slack in a row of seventy microfarad coil-condensers, slid the tray in to the wall, and sat.

He reached around to the small of his back beneath his vest, and felt for the socket. It had been grafted onto the base of his spinal cord back at Cooper. He picked up the first reflex cable that looped across the floor to disappear into the computer’s face, and fiddled with it till the twelve prongs slipped into his socket and caught. He took the smaller, six-prong plug and slipped it into the plug on the underside of his left wrist; then the other into his right. Both radial nerves were connected with Olga. At the back of his neck was another socket. He slipped the last plug in—the cable was heavy and tugged a little on his neck—and saw sparks. This cable could send impulses directly to his brain that could bypass hearing and sight. There was a faint hum coming through already. He reached over, adjusted a knob on Olga’s face, and the hum cleared. Ceiling, walls, and floor were covered with controls. The room was small enough so that he could reach most of them from the couch. But once the ship took off, he would touch none of them, but control the vane directly with the nervous impulses from his body.

“I always feel like I’m getting ready for the Big Return,” Katin’s voice sounded in his ear. In their cubicles throughout the ship, as they plugged themselves in, the other studs joined contact. “The base of the spine always struck me as an unnatural place from which to drag your umbilical cord. It better be an interesting marionette show. Do you really know how to work this thing?”

“If you don’t know by now,” the Mouse said, “too bad.”

Idas: “This show’s about Illyrion—”

“—Illyrion and a nova”: Lynceos.

“Say, what are you doing with your pets, Sebastian?”

“A saucer of milk them feed.”

“With tranquilizers,” Tyy’s soft voice came. “They now sleep.”

And lights dimmed.

The captain hooked in. The graffiti, the scars on the walls, vanished. There were only the red lights chasing one another on the ceiling.

“A shook up go game,” Katin said, “with iridescent stones.” The Mouse pushed his syrynx case beneath the couch with his heel and lay down. He straightened the cable under his back, beneath his neck.