The solution had been lying around him in pieces all this time, invisible until he’d changed. He grinned dementedly, possessed. He yielded himself up to it without reservation. All. All. There was no limit to what one man might do, if he gave all, and held back nothing.

Didn’t hold back, didn’t look back—for there would be no going back. Literally, medically, that was the heart of it. Men adapted to free fell, it was the going back that crippled them.

“I am a quaddie,” Leo whispered in wonder. He regarded his hands, clenched and spread his fingers. “Just a quaddie with legs.” He wasn’t going back.

As for that initial base—he was floating in it right now. It merely required relocating. His cascading thought clicked over the connections too rapidly to analyze. He didn’t need to hijack a spaceship; he was in one. All it needed was a bit of power.

And the power lay ready-to-hand in Rodeo orbit, being gratuitously wasted even at this moment to shove mere bulk petrochemicals out of orbit. What might a petrochemical pod-bundle mass, compared to a chunk of the Cay Habitat? Leo didn’t know, but he knew he could find out. The numbers would be on his side, anyway, whatever their precise magnitudes.

The cargo thrusters could handle the Habitat, if it were properly reconfigured, and anything the thrusters could handle, one of the monster cargo Super-jumpers could manage too. It was all there, all—for the taking.

For the taking…

It took an hour of stalking before Leo was able to catch Silver alone, in a monitor blind spot in a corridor leading from the free fall gym.

“Is there someplace we can talk in private?” he asked her. “I mean really private.”

Her wary glance around confirmed that she understood him perfectly. Still she hesitated. “Is it important?”

“Vital. Life or death for every quaddie. That important.”

“Well… wait a minute or two, then follow me.”

He trailed her slowly and casually through the Habitat, a flash of shimmering hair and blue jersey at this or that cross-branching. Then, down one corridor, he suddenly lost her. “Silver…?”

“Sh!” she hissed at his ear. A wall panel hinged silently inward, and one of her strong lower hands reached out to yank him in like a fish on a line.

It was dark and narrow behind the wall for only a moment, then airseal doors parted with a whisper to reveal an odd-shaped chamber perhaps three meters across. They slipped within.

“What’s this?” asked Leo, stunned.

“The Clubhouse. Anyway, we call it that. We built it in this little blind pocket. You wouldn’t notice it from Outside unless you were looking for it at just the right angle. Tony and Pramod did the outside walls. Siggy ran the ductwork in, others did the wiring… the airseals we built from spare parts.”

“Weren’t they missed?”

Her smile was not in the least innocent. “Quaddies do the computer records entry, too. The parts just sort of ceased to exist in inventory. A bunch of us worked together on it—we just finished it about two months ago. I was sure Dr. Yei and Mr. Van Atta would find out about it, when they were questioning me,” her smile faded to a frown in memory, “but they never asked just the right question. Now the only vids we have left are the ones that happened to be stored in here, and Darla doesn’t have the vid system up yet.”

Leo followed her glance to a dead holovid set, obviously in process of repair, fixed to the wall. There were other comforts: lighting, handy straps, a wall cabinet that proved to be stuffed with little bags of dried snacks abstracted from Nutrition, raisins, peanuts and the like. Leo orbited the room slowly, nervously examining the workmanship. It was tight. “Was this place your idea?”

“Sort of. I couldn’t have done it alone, though. You understand, it’s strictly against our rules for me to bring you in here,” Silver added somewhat truculently. “So this better be good, Leo.”

“Silver,” said Leo, “it’s your uniquely pragmatic approach to rules that makes you the most valuable quaddie in the Habitat right now. I need you—your daring, and all the other qualities that Dr. Yei would doubtless call anti-social. I’ve got a job to do that I can’t do alone either.” He took a deep breath. “How would you quaddies like to have your own asteroid belt?”

“What?” her eyes widened.

“Brucie-baby is trying to keep it under wraps, but the Cay Project has just been scheduled for termination—and I mean that in the most sinister sense of the word.”

He detailed the anti-gravity rumor to her, all that he had yet heard, and Van Atta’s secret plans for the quaddies’ disposal. With rising passion, he described his vision of escape. He didn’t have to explain anything twice.

“How much time do we have left?” she asked whitely, when he had finished.

“Not much. A few weeks at most. I have only six days until I’m forced downside by my gravity leave. I’ve got to figure out some way to duck that, I’m afraid I might not be able to get back here. We—you quaddies—have to choose now. And I can’t do it for you. I can only help with some of the parts. If you cannot rescue yourselves, you will be lost, guaranteed.”

She blew out her breath in a silent whistle, looking troubled indeed. “I thought—watching Tony and Claire—they were doing it the wrong way. Tony talked about finding work, but do you know, he didn’t think to take a work-suit with him? I didn’t want to make the same mistakes. We aren’t made to travel alone, Leo. Maybe it’s something that was built into us.”

“But can you bring in the others?” Leo asked anxiously. “In secret? Let me tell you, the quickest end-scenario for this little revolution I can imagine would be for some quaddie to panic and tell, trying to be good. This is a real conspiracy, all rules off. I sacrifice my job, risk legal prosecution, but you risk much more.”

“There are some who, urn, should be told last,” said Silver thoughtfully. “But I can bring the important ones in. We’ve got some ways of keeping things private from the downsiders.” Leo glanced around the chamber, subtly reassured. “Leo…” her blue eyes targeted him searchingly, “how are we going to get rid of the downsiders?”

“Well, we won’t be able to shuttle them down to Rodeo, that’s for certain. From the moment this thing comes out in the open, you can count on the Habitat being cut off from re-supply.” Besieged, was the word Leo’s mind suggested, and carefully edited. “The way I thought of was to collect them all in one module, throw in some emergency oxygen, cut it off the Habitat, and use one of the cargo pushers to move it around orbit to the Transfer Station. At that point they become GalacTech’s problem, not ours. Hopefully it’d ball things up a bit at the Transfer Station, too, and give us a little more time.”

“How do you plan to—to make them all get into the module?”

Leo stirred uncomfortably. “Well, that’s the point of no return, Silver. There are weapons all around us here, we just don’t recognize them because we call them ‘tools’. A laser-solderer with the safety removed is as good as a gun. There’s a couple of dozen of them in the workshops. Point it at the downsiders and say ‘Move!’—and they’ll move.”

“What if they don’t?”

“Then you must fire it. Or choose not to, and be taken downside to a slow and sterile death. And you choose for everybody, when you make that choice, not just for yourself.”

Silver was shaking her head. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Leo. What if somebody panicked and actually fired one? The downsider would be horribly burned!”

“Well… yes, that’s the idea.”

Her face crumpled with dismay. “If I have to shoot Mama Nilla, I’d rather go downside and die!”

Mama Nilla was one of the quaddies’ most popular creche mothers, Leo recalled vaguely, a big elderly woman—he’d barely met her, as his classes didn’t involve the younger quaddies. “I was thinking more in terms of shooting Bruce,” Leo confessed.