“We have fifty centimeters, maybe seventy-five, between the blades and the wall,” Brown thought out loud. “In another two or three minutes the biot will be safe under the overhang. Let’s go to manual and grab it. Now. No mistakes this time, Tabori.”

For an instant a dubious Hire Yamanaka stared at the balding, bespecta­cled scientist sitting in the seat behind him. Then the pilot turned, entered another command into the console, and switched the large black lever to the left position. The monitor flashed, in manual mode. no automatic pro­tection. Yamanaka gingerly eased the helicopter closer to the wall.

Engineer Tabori was ready. He inserted his hands in the instrumented gloves and practiced opening and closing the jaws at the end of the flexible arm. Again the arm extended and the two mechanical mandibles deftly closed around the jointed snail and its shell. The feedback loops from the sensors on the claws told Tabori, through his gloves, that he had successfully captured his prey. “I’ve got it,” he shouted exultantly. He began the slow process of bringing the quarry back into the helicopter.

A sudden draft of wind rolled the helicopter to the left and the arm with the biot banged against the wall. Tabori felt his grip loosening. “Straighten it up,” he cried, continuing to retract the arm. While Yamanaka was struggling to null the rolling motion of the helicopter, he inadvertently tipped the nose down just slightly. The three crew members heard the sickening sound of the metal rotor blades crashing against the wall.

The Japanese pilot immediately pushed the emergency button and the craft returned to automatic control. In less than a second, a whining alarm sounded and the cockpit monitor flashed red. excessive damage. high probability of failure. eject crew. Yamanaka did not hesitate. Within moments he blasted out of the cockpit and had his parachute deployed. Tabori and Brown followed. As soon as the Hungarian engineer removed his hands from the special gloves, the claws at the end of the mechanical arm relaxed and the armadillo creature fell the hundred meters to the flat plain below, smashing into thousands of tiny pieces.

The pilotless helicopter descended erratically toward the plain. Even with its onboard automatic landing algorithm active and in complete control, the damaged flying machine bounced hard on its struts when it hit the ground and tipped over on its side. Not far from the helicopter’s landing site, a portly man, wearing a brown military suit covered with ribbons, jumped down from an open elevator. He had just descended from the mission con­trol center and was clearly agitated as he walked briskly to a waiting rover. He was followed by a scrambling lithe blond woman in an ISA flight suit with camera equipment hanging over both her shoulders. The military man was General Valeriy Borzov, commander-in-chief of Project Newton. “Any­one hurt?” he asked the occupant of the rover, electrical engineer Richard Wakefield.

“Janos apparently banged his shoulder pretty hard during the ejection. But Nicole just radioed that he had no broken bones or separations, only a lot of bruises.”

General Borzov climbed into the front seat of the rover beside Wakefield, who was sitting behind the vehicle control panel. The blond woman, video journalist Francesca Sabatini, stopped recording the scene and started to open the back door of the rover. Borzov abruptly waved her away. “Go check on des Jardins and Tabori,” he said, pointing across the level plain. “Wil­son’s probably there already.”

Borzov and Wakefield headed in the opposite direction in the rover. They traveled about four hundred meters before they pulled alongside a slight man, about fifty, in a new flight suit. David Brown was busy folding up his parachute and replacing it in a stuff bag. General Borzov stepped down from the rover and approached the American scientist.

“Are you all right, Dr. Brown?” the general asked, obviously impatient to dispense with the preliminaries.

Brown nodded but did not reply. “In that case,” General Borzov contin­ued in a measured tone, “perhaps you could tell me what you were thinking about when you ordered Yamanaka to go to manual. It might be better if we discussed it here, away from the rest of the crew.”

“Did you even see the warning lights?” Borzov added after a lengthy silence. “Did you consider, even for a moment, that the safety of the other cosmonauts might be jeopardized by the maneuver?”

Dr. David Brown eventually looked over at Borzov with a sullen, baleful stare. When he finally spoke in his own defense, his speech was clipped and strained, belying the emotion he was suppressing. “It seemed reasonable to move the helicopter just a little closer to the target. We had some clearance left and it was the only way that we could have captured the biot. Our mission, after all, is to bring home—”

“You don’t need to tell me what our mission is,” Borzov interrupted with passion. “Remember, I helped write the policies myself. And I will remind you again that the number one priority, at all times, is the safety of the crew. Especially during these simulations… I must tell you that I am absolutely flabbergasted by this crazy stunt of yours. The helicopter is damaged, Tabori is injured, you’re lucky that nobody was killed.”

David Brown was no longer paying attention to General Borzov. He had turned around to finish stuffing his parachute into its transparent package. From the set of his shoulders and the energy he was expending on this routine task, it was obvious that he was very angry.

Borzov returned to the rover. After waiting for several seconds he offered Dr. Brown a ride back to the base. The American shook his head without saying anything, hoisted his pack onto his back, and walked off in the direc­tion of the helicopter and the elevator.

3

CREW CONFERENCE

Outside the meeting room in the training facility, Janos Tabori was sitting on an auditorium chair underneath an array of small but powerful portable lights. “The distance to the simulated biot was at the limit of the reach of the mechanical arm,” he explained to the tiny camera that Francesca Sabatini was holding. “Twice I tried to grab it and failed. Dr. Brown then decided to put the helicopter on manual and take it a little closer to the wall. We caught some wind…

The door from the conference room opened and a smiling, ruddy face appeared. “We’re all here waiting for you!” said General O’Toole pleasantly. “I think Borzov’s becoming a little impatient.”

Francesca switched off the lights and put her video camera back in the pocket of her flight suit. “All right, my Hungarian hero,” she said with a laugh, “we’d better stop for now. You know how our leader dislikes waiting.” She walked over and put her arms gently around the small man. She patted him on his bandaged shoulder. “But we’re really glad you’re all right.”

A handsome black man in his early forties had been sitting just out of the camera frame during the interview, taking notes on a flat, rectangular key­board about a foot square. He followed Francesca and Janos into the confer­ence room. “I want to do a feature this week on the new design concepts in the teleoperation of the arm and the glove,” Reggie Wilson whispered to Tabori as they sat down. “There are a bunch of my readers out there who find all this technical crap absolutely fascinating.”

“I’m glad that the three of you could join us,” Borzov’s sarcastic voice boomed across the conference room. “I was starting to think that perhaps a crew meeting was an imposition on all of you, an activity that interrupted the far more important tasks of reporting our misadventures or writing eru­dite scientific and engineering papers.” He pointed at Reggie Wilson, whose ubiquitous flat keyboard was on the table in front of him. “Wilson, believe it or not, you’re supposed to be a member of this crew first and a journalist second. Just one time do you think you can put that damn thing away and listen? I have a few things to say and I want them to be off the record.”