That's the spirit! I'm a stranger in a strange land fullof wonders and delights. What was the point of being marooned if you couldn't enjoy it? He needed to embrace Doc Waxman's attitude; or Steve's, or even Mike's. The Round Mound paraded his seemingly inexhaustible store of knowledge with the same sort of delight as the kids Alex knew in the day-care center. Gee, Mister MacLeod, look what I found! Mister Mac! Mister Mac, look at this! Isn't it neat! That was Mike. Each nugget of information was fascinating. The world was full of new-found marvels and he wanted to share the excitement with everybody. They all did. They had a certain sense. It wasn't a sense of ennui or cynicism. It was…

A sense of wonder.

That was it. A sense of wonder, in the fine old original meaning of the word. They wondered at their world. Because when you did that, everything was wonder-full.

Later, after Steve had gone, Alex lay abed in the dark, breathing slowly and naturally, imagining the prana from the air streaming into his body, strengthening it. Prana was the universal energy, manifesting itself in gravitation, electricity, nerve currents, thought. A kind of Hindu unified field theory. It was nonsense, of course. There was no such energy, and Steve knew it as well as Alex did.

Still, the mind-body interface was a funny thing and nobody really knew how it worked. As a metaphor, a mental focus, prana worked quite well. He tried to imagine a ball of light in his body, with glowing strands coming from his mouth and nostrils connecting with the sun and distant stars. Images were the tools of the mind, and a practical person used whatever tools came to hand. Sometimes what was important was not what was true, but what you believed was true.

Like cobbling together a spaceship and flying into space.

Believing wouldn't make it happen; but not believing would make it not happen. Everything starts as somebody's daydream.

"Alex?"

"What?" He turned his head. In the dark he could not see Gordon, but he could sense the youngster's presence in the other bed.

"About… About the dip trip…"

"What? That again?" Couldn't the kid let it be? I'd like to have seen him do better. "What about it?" he snapped.

"I'm sorry I didn't speak English."

"… When?"

Gordon twisted around, painfully, to look at him. "When? In final innocent carefree moment before missile shred Piranha's fin!"

Idiot. "Gordon, it was too late. The missile must have been in flight before I, before, hell. I should have torched off and gone home. They'd found us. We knew it."

Silence.

"Maybe we could have made another orbit. Only, we don't carry all that much oxygen. And we needed the nitrogen, we did, that's not… not just Lonny talking."

"Then it wasn't what I said. Or didn't."

It had really been bothering Gordon. The stilyagin must have flunked some math courses. "What do you picture me doing about anything, with a couple of seconds to work with? What kind of acceleration is that to move a mass like Piranha, with three tiny embarrassed fins and the scoop dragging us, too?"

Silence filled the blackness between them. Finally, Gordon spoke again. "Alex, do you think this Titan business will work?"

Alex crossed his arms behind his head and stared at the ceiling. Blackness should have stars in it, he thought. "I don't know. If there is a ship and if we can find fuel… What do you think?"

He heard a heavy sigh in the darkness. "If we can rendezvous, no problem. If they have to come and snatch us as we go past… They will not do it."

"No, I don't think they would."

Gordon hesitated. "Maybe my family can…"

"Maybe they could what? Overrule Lonny or Sergei? Not a chance. They can count as well as we can. They've got enough fingers. Hell, you know it's not the personal anger. Not a Floater in orbit would hesitate to risk his life to save another. But when we use common resources, the entire station is at risk, and we have to draw the line. Start making exceptions and where do you stop? When everyone is dying because too much has been used up?"

He was beginning to sound unpleasantly like Lonny Hopkins. "No, your folks will cry as you arc past"--Which is more than anyone will do for me--" and they'll curse God that they can't come out and snag you; but they won't jeopardize the station for no other gain than two more mouths to feed."

Alex remembered the old Eskimo on the glacier describing how his wife and daughter had been killed and eaten by his erstwhile comrades. And he hadn't chased after the cannibals and he hadn't wasted any tears. Old Krumangapik hadn't been cruel or heartless. Alex had seen the pain in the old man's eyes. But when you lived on the edge, you learned to cut your losses. Krumangapik had never heard of cost-benefit ratios, but he knew that in his milieu he could waste nothing, not even tears.

Eskimos abandoned their aged and infirm to the Ice. Krumangapik had done it. During their nighttime trek across the Ice, warmed by that invisible beam of prana from SUNSAT, he had told of building his mother's Final Igloo.

She was old and frail and she had insisted. She even picked the spot. When it was completed they had hugged each other and said good-bye; and Krumangapik had sealed the entryway to keep the wolves out and left her there and never looked back.

Alex shivered as he remembered. "A duty to die."

How long would it be before elderly Floaters took themselves to the airlocks out of a similar sense of duty? Yes. That was how they would do it. No injections, because they had to conserve the medicines. No slashed wrists, no blood droplets to purge from the air system. They would climb into the airlock, nude, so as not to lose the fabric of their clothing. They would just turn on the pumps to evacuate the chamber. Alex remembered dying such a death. Later, a detail would reenter the airlock and salvage the valuable organics.

Perhaps that was the most unfortunate consequence of the new era of shortages, both in Orbit and down in the Well. That it forced them all, Downer and Floater alike, to be unkind.

"Is it right to string them along?"

Alex jumped. He'd thought Gordon was asleep. "What do you mean, Gordo?"

"These Downers. Fandom. They're risking a lot to help us, aren't they? Shouldn't we tell them they're wasting their time?"

"Don't burn bridges, Gordo. There might be enough fuel to reach orbit on our own."

"Or no fuel at all. Meanwhile, she puts her neck at risk for us. Maybe we should contact Big Momma for instructions."

"No!" Alex spoke sharply. "No," he repeated more softly. "We'd have to make contact through this Oregon Ghost character. If we do, the fans will know how iffy the whole scheme is and then…"

"And then?"

"And then they might give the effort up. Do you want to be stuck down here the rest of your life?"

"No, but--"

"Look. They're already in deep enough for what they've already done. We'll just let things go long enough to see if there is any chance at all. Then… Then, we'll decide."

"All right, Alex," Gordon said doubtfully. "You're the boss."

Alex relaxed into the pillow and closed his eyes. The room did not become any darker. He listened to his pulse pushing the blood through his arteries. "Gordon?"

"Yeah?"

"She's too old for you."

Gordon didn't answer right away. "She's younger than she looks, Alex," he said after a moment. "Gravity."

"Go to sleep, Gordo." Alex tried to roll over on his side. He almost made it. Good news from all over.