The quaddie cargo handlers looked quite reproachful, as the direction of their work was reversed for the second time. But they limited their implied criticism to a plaintive, “Are you sure now, sir?”

“Yes,” sighed Leo. “But find some place to store this stuff in a detached module, you can’t leave it in here.”

“Yes, sir.”

Leo turned again to the pusher crew supervisor. “I’ve still got to have those fuel rods.”

“Well, you’ll just have to wait. I won’t do it. Van Atta’s going to have enough of my blood for this already.”

“You can charge it to my special project. I’ll sign for it.”

The super raised his eyebrows, slightly consoled. “Well… I’ll try, all right, I’ll try. But what about your blood?”

Already sold, thought Leo. “That’s my look-out, isn’t it?”

The super shrugged. “I guess.” He exited, muttering. One of the pusher crew quaddies, trailing him, gave Leo a significant look; Leo returned a severe shake of his head, emphasized by a throat-cutting gesture with his index finger, indicating, Silence I

He turned and nearly rammed Pramod, waiting patiently at his shoulder. “Don’t sneak up on me like that!” he yelped, then got better control of his fraying nerves. “Sorry, you startled me. What is it?”

“We’ve run into a problem, Leo.”

“But of course. Who ever tracks me down to impart good news? Never mind. What is it?”

“Clamps.”

“Clamps?”

‘There’s a lot of clamped connections Outside. We were going over the flow chart for the Habitat disassembly, for, um, tomorrow, you know—”

“I know, don’t say it.”

“We thought a little practice might speed things up—”

“Yes, good…”

“Hardly any of the clamps will unclamp. Even with power tools.”

“Uh…” Leo paused, taken aback, then realized what the problem was. “Metal clamps?”

“Mostly.”

“Worse on the sun side?”

“Much worse. We couldn’t get any of those to come at all. Some of them are visibly fused. Some idiot must have welded them.”

“Welded, yes. But not by some idiot. By the sun.”

“Leo, it doesn’t get that hot—”

“Not directly. What you’re seeing is spontaneous vacuum diffusion welding. Metal molecules are evaporating off the surfaces of the pieces in the vacuum. Slowly, to be sure, but it’s a measurable phenomenon. On the clamped areas they migrate into their neighboring surfaces and eventually achieve quite a nice bond. A little faster for the hot pieces on the sun side, a little slower for the cold pieces in the shade—but I’ll bet some of those clamps have been in place for twenty years.”

“Oh. But what do we do about them?”

“They’ll have to be cut.”

Pramod’s lips pursed in worry. “That will slow things down.”

“Yeah. And we’ll have to have a way set up to re-clamp each connection in the new configuration, too… gonna need more clamps, or something that can be made to work as clamps.… Go round up all your off-shift work gang. We’re going to have to have a little emergency scrounging session.”

Leo stopped wondering if he was going to survive the Great Takeover, and started wondering if he was going to survive until the Great Takeover. He prayed devoutly that Silver was having an easier time of it than himself.

Silver hoped earnestly that Leo was having an easier time of it than herself.

She hitched herself around in the acceleration couch, increasingly uncomfortable after their first eight hours of flight, and rested her chin on the padding to regard her crew, crammed in the pusher’s cabin. The other quaddies were drooped and draped as she was; only Ti seemed comfortable, feet propped up and leaning back in his seat in the steady gee-forces.

“I saw this great holovid,” Siggy waved some hands enthusiastically, “that had a boarding battle. The marines used magnetic mines to blow holes like bubble cheese in the side of the mothership and just poured through.” He added a weird ululating cry for sound effects. “The aliens were running every which way, stuff flying everywhere as the air blew out—”

“I saw that one,” said Ti. “Nest of Doom, right?”

“You got it for us,” reminded Silver. “Did you know it had a sequel?” said Ti aside to Siggy. “The Nest’s Revenge.”

“No, really? Do you suppose—”

“First of all,” said Silver, “nobody has found any intelligent aliens yet, hostile or not, secondly, we don’t have any magnetic mines,” thanks be, “and thirdly, I don’t think Ti wants a lot of unsightly holes blown in the side of his ship.”

“Well, no,” conceded Ti.

“We will go in through the airlock,” said Silver firmly, “which was designed for just that purpose. I think the jumpship crew will be surprised enough when we put them in their escape pod and launch it, without, um, frightening them into doing who-knows-what with a lot of premature whooping. Even if Colonel Wayne in Nest of Doom led his troops into battle with his rebel yell over their comm links, I don’t think real marines would do that. It would be bound to interfere with their communications.” She frowned Siggy into submission.

“We’ll just do it Leo’s way,” Silver went on, “and point the laser-solderers at them. They don’t know us, they wouldn’t know whether we’d fire or not.” How, after all, could strangers know what she didn’t know herself? “Speaking of which, how do we know which Superjumper to,” she groped for terminology, “cut out of the herd? It ought to be easier to get permission to come aboard if the crew’s someone Ti knows well. On the other hand, it might be harder to…” she trailed off, disliking the thought. “Especially if they tried to fight back.”

“Jon could wrestle them into submission,” offered Ti. “That’s what he’s here for, after all.”

Husky Jon gave him a woeful look. “I thought I was here as the pusher back-up pilot. You wrestle them if you want, they’re your friends. I’ll hold a solderer.”

Ti cleared his throat. “Anyway, I’d like to get D771, if it’s there. We aren’t going to have much choice, though. There’s only likely to be a couple of Superjumpers working this side of the wormhole at any one time anyway. Basically, we go for whatever ship that’s just jumped over from Orient IV and dumped its empty pod bundles, and hasn’t started to load on new ones yet. That’ll give us the quickest getaway. There’s not that much to plan, we just go do it.”

“The real trouble will start,” said Silver, “when they’ve figured out what we’re really up to and start trying to take the ship back.”

A glum silence fell. For the moment, even Siggy had no suggestions.

Leo found Van Atta in the downsiders’ gym, tramping determinedly on the treadmill. The treadmill was a medical torture device like a rack in reverse. Spring-loaded straps pulled the walker toward the tread surface, against which his or her feet pushed, for an hour or more a day by prescription, an exercise designed to slow, if not stop, the lower body deconditioning and long bone demineralization of free fell dwellers.

By the expression on Van Atta’s face he was stamping out the measured treads today with considerable personal animosity. Cultivated irritation was indeed one way to muster the energy to tackle the boring but necessary task. After a moment’s thoughtful study Leo decided upon a casual and oblique approach. He slipped out of his coveralls and velcroed them to the wall-strip, retaining his red T-shirt and shorts, and floated over and hooked himself into the belt and straps of the unoccupied machine next to Van Atta’s. “Have they been lubricating these things with glue?” he puffed, grasping the hand holds and straining to start the treads moving against his feet.

Van Atta turned his head and grinned sardonically. “What’s the matter, Leo? Did Minchenko the medical mini-dictator order a little physiological revenge on you?”

“Yeah, something like that…”he got it started at last, his legs flexing in an even rhythm. He had skipped too many sessions lately. “Have you talked to him since he came up?”