Malenfant calculated.

He hadn’t expected a reception committee. This was just a workaday gateway, a portal for unmanned robot worker drones. Maybe the Gaijin themselves were off in the warmth of that complex, crowded inner system.

He reckoned he had around five hours life support left. If he went back — assuming the portal was two-way — he might even make it back to the Perry.

Or he could stay here.

It would be one hell of a message to send on first contact, though, when the inhabitants of the Centauri system came out to see what was going on, and found nothing but his desiccated corpse.

But you’ve come a long way for this, Malenfant. And if you stay, dead or alive, they’ll sure know we are here.

He grinned. Whatever happened, he had achieved his goal. Not a bad deal for an old bastard.

He worked his left hand controller; with a gentle shove, the MMU thrust him forward, toward the drone.

He took his time. He had five hours to reach the drone. And he needed to keep some fuel for maneuvering at the close, if he was still conscious to do it.

But the drone kept working its complex limbs, pursuing its incomprehensible tasks. It made no effort to come out to meet him.

And, as it turned out, his consumables ran out a lot more quickly than he had anticipated.

By the time he reached the drone, his oxygen alarm was chiming, softly, continually, inside his helmet. He stayed conscious long enough to reach out a gloved hand and stroke the drone’s metallic hide.

When he woke again, it was as if from a deep and dreamless sleep.

The first thing he was aware of was an arm laid over his face. It was his own, of course. It must have wriggled free of the loose restraints around his sleeping bag.

Except that his hand was contained in a heavy space suit glove, which was not the way he was accustomed to sleeping.

And his sleeping bag was light-years away.

He snapped fully awake. He was floating in golden light. He was rotating, slowly.

He was still in his EMU — but, Christ, his helmet was gone, the suit compromised. For a couple of seconds he fumbled, flailing, and his heart hammered.

He forced himself to relax. You’re still breathing, Malenfant. Wherever you are, there is air here. If it’s going to poison you, it would have done it already.

He exhaled, then took a deep lungful — filtered through his nose, with his mouth clamped closed. The air was neutral temperature, transparent. He could smell nothing but a faint sourness, and that probably emanated from himself, the cramped confines of a suit he’d worn for too long.

He was stranded in golden light, beyond which he could make out the stars, slightly dimmed, as if by smoke. There was the dazzling bright pairing of Alpha Centauri. He hadn’t come far, then.

Were there walls around him? He could see no edges, no seams, no corners. He stretched out his feet and gloved fingers. His questing fingers hit a soft membrane. Suddenly the wall snapped into focus, just centimeters from his face: a smooth surface, overlaid by what felt like cables the width of his thumb, but welded somehow to the wall. The cables were a little hard to grip, but he clamped his fingers around them.

Anchored, he felt a lot more comfortable.

The wall itself was soft, neither warm nor cold, smooth beyond the discrimination of his touch. It curved tightly around him. Perhaps he was in some kind of inflated bubble; it could be no more than a few meters across. And it wasn’t inflated to maximum tension. When he pushed at the wall it rippled in great languid waves, pulses of golden light that briefly occluded the stars.

He picked at the membrane with one finger. It felt like some kind of plastic. He had no reason to believe it was anything more advanced; the Gaijin had not shown themselves to be technological superbeings. He could have easily taken a scraping of this stuff, analyzed it with a small portable lab. Except he didn’t have a portable lab.

Something bumped against his leg. “Shit,” he said. He whirled, scrabbling at the embedded ropes, until he was backed up against the wall.

It was the helmet from his shuttle EMU.

He picked it up and turned it over in his gloved hands. The helmet had a snap-on metal ring, to fit it to the rest of the suit — or rather, it used to. The attachment had been cut, as if by a laser.

The Gaijin — or their robot drones, here on the edge of the Alpha system — had found him in a shell of gases: air that roughly matched what they must have known, from some equivalent of spectrograph studies, of the composition of Earth’s atmosphere. So they had provided more of the gases in this containment, and broken open his suit — and then, presumably, hoped for the best.

He took off his gloves. He found he was still wearing his lightweight comms headset. He pulled it off and tucked it inside the helmet. There was no sign of his maneuvering unit.

…And now a kind of aftershock cut in. He rested against the slowly rippling wall, lit up by gold-filtered Centauri light, four light years from home. The robots had been smart, he realized with a shiver. After all, the robots, if not the Gaijin themselves, shared nothing like human anatomy. What if they’d decided to see if his whole head was detachable? He felt very old, fragile, and unexpectedly lonely — as he hadn’t during the long months of his Perry flight to the Saddle Point.

What now?

First things first. You need a bio break, Malenfant.

He forced himself to take a leak into the condom he still wore. He felt the warm piss gather in the sac inside his suit. Piss that had been magically transported across four light-years. He probably ought to bottle it; if he ever got back home he could probably sell it, a memento of man’s first journey to the stars.

There was movement, a wash of light beyond the bubble wall. Something immense, bright, cruising by silently.

He swiveled, still pinching hold of the embedded ropes, until he faced outward. He pressed his face against the bubble wall, much as he used to as a kid, staring out of his bedroom window, hoping for snow.

The moving light was a flower-ship.

The Gaijin craft sailed across the darkness, heading for the warm glow at the heart of the Centauri system. The cables and filaments that shaped the maw of its electromagnetic scoops were half furled, and they waved with slow grace as the ship slowly swiveled on its long axis, perhaps intent on some complex course correction. Dodecahedral shapes swarmed over its flanks, reduced by distance to toylike specks, fast-moving, intent, purposeful. They almost looked as if they were rebuilding the ship as it traveled — as perhaps they were; Malenfant imagined a flexible geometry, a ship that could adjust its form to the competing needs of the cold stillness here at the rim of this binary system, and the crowded warmth at its heart.

But still, despite its strangeness, he felt a tug at his heart as the flower-ship receded. Don’t leave me here, drifting in space…

But he wasn’t adrift, he saw now. There were ropes embedded in the outer surface of his shell, ropes that gathered in a loosely plaited tether, as if this bubble of air had been trapped by a spiderweb. The tether, loosely coiled, led across space — not to the flower-ship, but to something hidden by the curve of the bubble.

He pushed himself across the interior of the bubble to look out the other side.

In the dim light of the distant Alpha Suns, he could see only an outline: a rough ball that must have been kilometers across, the glimmer of what looked like frost from crater dimples and low mountains.

From one space suit pocket he dug out a fold-up softscreen, then unpacked it, and plastered it against the wall of the bubble. This screen had been designed as a low-light and telescopic viewer. Soon its enhancement routines were cutting in, and it became a window through which he peered, angling his head to change his view.