“What’s he mumbling about?” Graves asked.

But Darya was crouched down at the side of the Polypheme, taking her first close look at the casing of the drone. All they had been interested in when it reached the Erebus had been the messages it was carrying. The drone itself had seemed irrelevant.

“Dulcimer’s right,” she said. “And so am I!”

She lifted the cylinder and carried it across to Julian Graves. He stared at it blankly. “Well?”

“Look at it. Touch it. When the seedship left the Erebus, all its equipment was clean and in good working order — have Tally run the record, if you don’t believe me. Now look at the antenna and drone casing joints. They’re filthy, and there has been repair work done on them. That’s a replacement cable. And see here? That’s mud. It was vacuum-dried, on its flight back, but before that the whole drone plunged into wet soil. Hans and the others not only found a planet — they landed there.”

“They agreed, before they left, that they would not do that.” Graves shook his bald and bulging head reprovingly, then winced. “Coating material can occur anywhere, even in open space. Anyway, why cover a drone with mud?”

“Because they had no choice. If the drone was battered and muddied like this in landing, the ship must have been damaged.”

“You are constructing a case from nothing.”

“So let me make you one from something. Sterile coating material picked up in space is quite different from planetary mud. I’ll bet if I dig some of this dirt from the drone’s joints and run an analysis, I’ll find microorganisms that don’t exist in any of our data banks. If I do, will you accept that as proof that the seedship landed — and on an unfamiliar world?”

“If. And it is a big if.” But Julian Graves was taking the drone wearily from Darya, and handing it to E.C. Tally.

Darya saw, and understood the significance of that data point. She had won! She moved on at once to the next problem: how to make sure that she was not, for any reason, left behind on the Erebus when others went through the singularities to seek Hans Rebka and his party.

In parallel, Darya’s mind took satisfaction in quite a different thought: She had changed an awful lot in one year. Twelve months before in faculty meetings at the Institute, she would have wasted an hour at that point, presenting more and more evidence to buttress her arguments; and then the subject would have been debated endlessly, on and on, until everyone in the meeting was either at the screaming point or mad with boredom.

Not anymore, though, at least for Darya. Somehow, without ever discussing such things, Hans Rebka and Louis Nenda had taught her a great truth: Once you win, shut up. More talk only makes other people want to argue back.

There was a corollary to that, too: If you save time in an argument, don’t waste it. Start work on the next problem.

Darya admired her own new acuity as she left the control room and headed for the cargo bay that housed the Indulgence. It was time for work. When E.C. Tally returned with an analysis of that soil sample and Graves made up his mind what to do, Darya wanted to be second only to Dulcimer himself in knowledge of the Polypheme’s ship.

Before she even reached the cargo bay, Julian Graves was calling her back. He had already made up his mind. He knew what had to be done: Darya would fly into the nested singularities. E.C. Tally would accompany her, with Dulcimer as pilot of the Indulgence. Julian Graves would remain on the Erebus. Alone.

Baffling. But say it again: Once you win, shut up.

She grabbed Tally and Dulcimer, hustled them onto the Indulgence, and was heading the ship out of the cargo bay of the Erebus — before Julian Graves had a chance to change his mind.

In her eagerness to leave, Darya did not apply another of Hans Rebka’s survival rules: If you win too easy, better ask what’s going on that you don’t know about.

Hans Rebka might have guessed it at once: Julian Graves needed to be alone, for some compelling reason of his own. But Hans was not there to observe Graves, or to warn Darya of something else. He had observed her over the past year, and he would have agreed with her: there had been big changes in Darya Lang. But those changes were incomplete. Darya was too self-confident. Now she knew just enough to be dangerous to herself and to everyone around her.

Rebka would have offered a different corollary to her Great Truth: Don’t waste time solving the wrong problems.

Darya Lang was intellectually very smart, up at genius level. But no one, no matter how intelligent, could make good inferences from bad data. That was where Darya’s troubles began. In Hans’s terms, when she lacked the right data she still did not know how to acquire it.

That was not her fault. Most of Darya’s life had been spent evaluating information collected by other people, of far-off events, times, and places. Data were printouts and articles and tables and images. Success was defined by an ability to digest a huge amount of information from all sources, and then devise a way to impose order and logic on it. Progress was often slow. The path to success might be decades long. No matter. Speed was not an issue. Persistence was far more important.

Hans Rebka was a graduate of a different school of life. Data were events, usually happening in real time and seldom written out for inspection. They could be anything from an odd instrument reading, to a sudden change in the wind, to a scowl that became a smile on a person’s face. Success was measured by survival. The road to success might remain open only for a fraction of a second.

Rebka had noticed the anomaly when Julian Graves first announced who would go down in the seedship to look for Genizee, and who would remain on the Erebus: Graves would not go, although it was Graves who had felt most strongly the need to seek out the Zardalu — Graves who had resigned from the Council, Graves who had organized the expedition, Graves who had bought the ship. And then, with Genizee identified and the Zardalu hidden only by the shroud of singularities, Julian Graves had suddenly declined to pursue them. “I must stay here.”

Now Graves had again refused to leave the Erebus. Unfortunately, Hans Rebka had not been around to warn Darya Lang that his second refusal must be regarded as far more significant.

To penetrate the nested singularities for the first time had been an episode of tension, of cautious probing, of calculated risk. For the Indulgence, following the path of the seedship less than two days later, the journey was routine. The information returned with the drone had provided a description of branch points and local space-time anomalies in such detail that Dulcimer took one look at the list, sniffed, and set the Indulgence to autopilot.

“It’s an insult to my profession,” he said to E.C. Tally. The Chism Polypheme was lounging in his pilot’s chair, a lopsided device arranged so that his spiral tail fitted into it and all his arms had access to the control panel. He was cool again, his skin returned to its dark cucumber green, but as the heat faded from him he became increasingly irritable and haughty. “It’s a slur on my Chismhood.”

Tally nodded, but did not understand. “Why is it an insult and a slur?”

“Because I’m a Polypheme! I need challenges, perils, problems worthy of my talents. There is nothing to this piloting job, no difficult decisions to make, no close calls — a Ditron could do it.”

Tally nodded again. What Dulcimer seemed to be saying was that a Chism Polypheme found work unsatisfying unless there was substantial risk attached to it. It was an illogical attitude, but who was to say that Polyphemes were logical? There was no information about them in Tally’s data bank.