“Wait a second.” After a moment’s silence, he shouted back. “The damn thing’s not working. I hit the fence face first. But if—”

Before he could finish, another ball of light began to form behind them. Tarbush turned, and saw every building of the Malacostracan encampment glowing with its own halo of electrical discharge. The area around the buildings was — thank God — deserted. While the globe was extending toward earth and sky, he turned back to Chrissie and realized what she was doing. Pinned in place by the wind, she had taken a short length of the monofilament thread and was stretching out to slice through the fence wires that she could reach. As she cut further, the section she lay against began to sag under her weight. In half a minute the left-hand side gaped open.

“Go on.” She inclined her head. “Through.”

“What about you?”

“Go!”

Tarbush obeyed her cry. As he passed through the hole in the fence he grabbed at the cut edge. It opened farther under his weight.

“You now!” he shouted, but she was already through and sailing past him. The bright circlet of the monofilament ring glittered with green light and spun away from her hand. He made an instinctive grab and missed. Good thing, too. The invisible thread could easily have severed his forearm. Forget it. Deb surely had more, and the little ring would be hard to find even in calm conditions.

As the wind caught him from behind and the green light vanished he ducked his head forward and followed Chrissie. He had little choice. Although it was no longer raining, trying to walk on the slick surface was like skating on ice. He managed to keep his feet, but he went wherever the wind pushed him.

Toward the forest, or away across many bare kilometers of rock? He could not tell where he was going, until something grabbed him at knee-level and tipped him over. He sprawled headlong forward into a tangle of tight-knit bushes. His visor was still open, and thorny twigs scratched his nose and mouth.

“Chrissie?” He shouted as loudly as he could.

“Right here.”

He could see nothing. He closed his helmet and began to crawl blindly in the direction of her voice. The suit protected his body, but the vegetation resisted his progress like something alive. While he was still struggling forward a faint light shone ahead. The lamp in Chrissie’s helmet? She had managed to get it working; but it was moving away from him.

“Stay there! I’m coming.”

“I can’t. I have to keep going. Follow me.”

As he came closer he understood why. Chrissie had been blown into a thin stand of stalky reeds, and they were not close-grown enough to provide shelter from the wind. She was tunneling on, deeper into a denser thicket. He flattened as low to the ground as he could and butted his way along until he was at her heels. He grabbed her legs and inched forward until his head was next to hers.

“What now?” For the first time since they left the building he didn’t have to shout.

“We have to find our way back to the camp. I’m sure Deb and Danny are wondering what happened to us.”

“We can’t go anywhere while this storm lasts. But neither can they. We’re all stuck until the wind dies down.”

“What about the Malacostracans?”

Tarbush sat up for a moment, felt the thresh of the wind across the top of the plants, and lay back down. “If they can move around and find us on such a bad night, they’re entitled to do what they like with us.”

Chrissie opened her visor. “At least it’s not raining. If we can’t go anywhere I’m going to try to sleep. I didn’t get any sleep earlier — not like some people.”

She was looking for a response, maybe an argument. But he said only, “You do that. You need your rest. I won’t talk any more, but I’ll stay awake and keep watch.”

Tarbush settled in at her side, one arm around Chrissie and his face close to hers. Within ten minutes she knew from his steady breathing that he was asleep. It was tempting to nudge him, but she didn’t.

She lay, listening to the wind. Was it her imagination, or had it eased, just a little? The canopy of plants above her head became faintly visible. Another ball of lightning must be drifting through the atmosphere of Limbo. This one was far off, and Chrissie watched and waited until the moment of its sudden extinction.

She closed her eyes. If Tarbush could sleep, why couldn’t she? She deliberately turned her mind back two months, to a time when the embargo against stellar travel seemed permanent, with no chance of ever meeting again the members of the old team; to the time when she and Tarbush had toured with her bag of magic tricks and his animal-talking act, to amaze the colonists of the wide-scattered mini-worlds of the Oort Cloud; to the time — God, why didn’t a person know when she was well off? — the time when a “bad night” meant only a poor audience for the second performance of your magic act, and not being pursued by malevolent aliens across the scarred surface of a lost world in an alternate universe.

Chrissie felt herself being shaken, and tried to curl into a ball.

“Sorry, love, but we can’t have that.” It was Tarbush, shaking her again. “The early bird catches the worm, and we don’t want the early Malacostracan catching us.”

Chrissie yawned, stretched, and sat up. Light, pale and yellow, streamed in horizontally through the leafy roof above her head. The broad fronds were moving, but gently. She heard no sound of wind.

“About half an hour after dawn,” Tarbush said. “The wind died down about the same time. I would have let you sleep, but I think we have to get moving. So far as I can tell from looking at the layout of the Malacostracan buildings, our camp lies in that direction.” He pointed through the undergrowth. “We have to get to it. Question is, do we go back to the edge of the cleared area, where travel is easy, but we risk being seen; or do we try to tunnel straight through the plants? We know from yesterday that we might come across various sorts of nasties.”

Chrissie was finally awake. “I don’t like either option. Which way is the sea?”

“If I’m right about where our camp is, and I remember correctly what we did yesterday, I’d say it’s that way.” He swiveled his body through forty-five degrees.

“I think that’s the way we ought to go. Once we reach the shore we can follow our own trail inland. I can’t imagine any reason why Deb and Danny would move the camp, but if they did they’d surely find a way to tell us where they were going. And if that doesn’t work, we can simply close our suits, go into the sea, and walk back to the Hero’s Return the way we came.”

Tarbush started crawling without another word. He went first and didn’t complain, but Chrissie could tell from their miserable rate of progress that he was having problems. It took half an hour to cut and slash and scramble less than thirty meters. She was ready to suggest that they turn around and try a different route when he paused and said, “There’s something funny ahead, a sort of long crack in the ground. Stay well back while I take a look at it.”

He fought his way slowly forward another few meters, then abruptly vanished. Chrissie waited nervously, until suddenly just his head popped into view.

“Good news.” He gestured to her to join him. “It’s a streambed, almost dry but with a trickle of water in it. All we have to do is follow the direction of flow and we’ll reach the sea.”

Chrissie eased herself down the steep bank to join him at the bottom. The bed of the stream was a mixture of mud and gravel, dry enough to provide a firm walking surface. The plants on the stream banks grew right across, so that the channel would be invisible to any overhead surveillance, and they were high enough to allow even Tarbush to stand almost upright.