Dr. Yei was not usually easy to track down, it being her habit to circulate often among the quaddies, observing behavior, taking notes, making suggestions. But this time Leo found her at once, in her office, with plastic flimsies stuck to every available surface and her desk console lit like a Christmas tree. Did they have Christmas at the Cay Habitat? Leo wondered. Somehow, he thought not.

“Did you hear—”

Her glum slouch answered his question, even as his white face and rapid breathing finished asking it.

“Yes, I’ve heard,” she said wearily, glancing up at him. “Brace just dumped the whole Habitat’s personnel evacuation logistics on my desk to organize. He, he tells me, being an engineer, will be doing facility dismantling and equipment salvage flow charts. Just as soon as I get the bodies out of his way. Excuse me, the damned bodies.”

Leo shook his head helplessly. “Are you going to do it?”

She shrugged, her lips compressed. “How can I not do it? Quit in high dudgeon? It wouldn’t change a thing. This affair would not be rendered one iota less brutal for my walking out, and it could get a lot worse.”

“I don’t see how,” Leo ground out.

“You don’t?” she frowned. “No, I don’t suppose you do. You never appreciated what a dangerous legal edge the quaddies are balanced on here. But I did. One wrong move and—oh, damn it all. I knew Apmad needed careful handling. Everything got away from me. Although I suppose this artificial gravity thing would have killed the project whoever was in charge, we are very, very lucky that she didn’t order the quaddies exterminated. You have to understand, she had something like four or five pregnancies terminated for genetic defects, back on her home world when she was a young woman. It was the law. She eventually gave up, got divorced, took an off-planet job with GalacTech—came up through the ranks. She has a deep emotional vested interest in her prejudices against genetic tampering, and I knew it. And blew it… She still could order the quaddies killed—do you understand that? Any report of trouble, unrest, magnified by her genetic paranoias, and…” she squeezed her eyes shut, massaged her forehead with her fingertips.

“She could order it—who says you’ve got to carry it out? You said you cared about the quaddies. We’ve got to do something!” said Leo.

“What?” Yei’s hands clenched, spread wide. “What, what, what? One or two—even if I could adopt one or two, take them away with me—smuggle them out somehow, who knows?—what then? To live on a planet with me, socially isolated as cripples, freaks, mutants—and sooner or later they would grow to adulthood, and then what? And what about the others? A thousand, Leo!”

“And if Apmad did order them exterminated, what excuse would you find then for doing nothing?”

“Oh, go away,” she groaned. “You have no appreciation for the complexities of the situation, none. What do you think one person can do? I used to have a life of my own, once, before this job swallowed it. I’ve given six years—which is five and three-quarters more than you have—I’ve given all I can. I’m burned out. When I get away from this hole, I never want to hear of quaddies again. They’re not my children. I haven’t had time to have children.”

She rubbed her eyes angrily, and sniffed, inhaling—tears?—or just bile. Leo didn’t know. Leo didn’t care.

“They’re not anybody’s children,” Leo growled. “That’s the trouble. They’re some kind of… genetic orphans or something.”

“If you’re not going to say anything useful, please go away,” she repeated. A wave of her hand encompassed the mass of flimsies. “I have work to do.”

Leo had not struck a female since he was five years old. He removed himself, shaking.

He drifted slowly through the corridors, back toward his own quarters, cooling. And whatever had he hoped to get from Yei anyway? Relief from responsibility? Was he to dump his conscience on her desk, a la Bruce, and say, “Take care of it…”

And yet, and yet, and yet… there was a solution in here somewhere. He could feel it, a palpable dim shape, like a tightness in the gut, a mounting, screaming frustration. The problem that refused to fall into the right pieces, the elusive solution—he’d solved engineering problems that presented themselves at first as such solid, unscalable walls. He did not know where the leaps beyond logic that ultimately topped them came from, except that it was not a conscious process, however elegantly he might diagram it post facto. He could not solve it and he could not leave it alone, but picked uselessly at it, counterproductive like picking a scab, in a rising compulsive frenzy. The wheels spun, imparting no motion.

“It’s in here,” he whispered, touching his head. “I can feel it. I just… can’t… see it …”

They had to get out of Rodeo local space somehow, that much was certain. All the quaddies. There was no future here. It was the damn peculiar legal set-up. What was he to do—hijack a Jump ship? But the personnel Jump ships carried no more than three hundred passengers. He could, just barely, picture himself holding a—a what? what weapon? he had no gun, his pocket knife featured mainly screwdrivers—right, hold a screwdriver to the pilot’s head and cry, “Jump us to Orient IV!”—where he would promptly be arrested and jailed for the next twenty years for piracy, leaving the quaddies to do… what? In any case, he could not possibly hijack three ships at the same time, and that was the minimum number needed.

Leo shook his head. “Chance favors,” he muttered, “chance favors, chance favors…”

Orient IV would not want the quaddies. Nobody was going to want the quaddies. What, indeed, could their future be even if freed from GalacTech? Gypsy orphans, alternately ignored, exploited, or abused, in their dependency on the narrow environment of humanity’s chain of space facilities. Talk about technology traps. He pictured Silver—he had little doubt just what sort of exploitation would be her lot, with that elegant face and body of hers. No place for her out there…

No! Leo denied silently. The universe was so damned big. There had to be a place. A place of their own, far, far from the trappings and traps of human so-called civilization. The histories of previous Utopian social experiments in isolation were not encouraging, but the quaddies were exceptional in every way.

Between one breath, and the next, the vision took him. It came not as a chain of reason, more words words words, but as a blinding image, all complete in its first moment, inherent, holistic, gestalt, inspired. Every hour of his life from now on would be but the linear exploration of its fullness.

A stellar system with an M or G or K star, gentle, steady, pouring out power for the catching. Circling it, a Jovian gas giant with a methane– and water-ice ring, for water, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen. Most important of all, an asteroid belt.

And some equally important absences; no Earth-like planet orbiting there also to attract competition; not on a wormhole Jump route of strategic importance to any potential conquistadors. Humanity had passed over hundreds of such systems, in its obsessive quest for new Earths. The charts were glutted with them.

A quaddie culture spreading out along the belt from their initial base, a society of the quaddies, by the quaddies, for the quaddies. Burrowing into the rocks for protection against radiation, and to seal in their precious air, expanding, leapfrogging from rock to rock, to drill and build new homes. Minerals all around, more than they could ever use. Whole hydroponics farms for Silver. A new world to build. A space world to make Morita Station look like a toy.

“Why,” Leo’s eyes widened with delight, “it’s an engineering problem after all!”

He hung limply in air, entranced; fortunately, the corridor was empty of passers-by at the moment, or they would surely have thought him mad or drugged.