“Damnation!” Louis sat through a long, waiting silence. Finally he heard a giggle from the darkness next to him.

“Back in the hiatus! Oh, dear. Not my night, Louis. And not your night either, it seems.” Glenna lowered her voice, changing its sad overtone to a more intimate one. “But you know, this could be our night.”

It didn’t need an augment to pick up the message of her pheromones. He heard a rustle of fabric falling to the floor. A warm bare foot rubbed along his calf, and he stood up abruptly.

“You’re not leaving, are you?” She had felt him jerk to his feet.

Leaving. He certainly was.

Wasn’t he?

Nenda made a sudden decision. The hell with it. In the middle of a hiatus, what else should he be doing?

“No, I’m not leaving. Definitely not leaving. I just thought it might be nice to make sure the door was closed. Tight.”

Atvar H’sial was an alien without the slightest interest in human sex. All the same, Louis didn’t want snide pheromonal comments as an accompaniment to what he was going to do. He didn’t have much faith in his skills as a lover in the best of circumstances.

It was a side benefit of staying, he decided, as he groped his way back toward Glenna. She was a very experienced woman. She would be used to sophistication. One night together, and chances were she would never come near him again.

Chapter Twenty

The Builders had made things to last. The exteriors of their free-space structures might bear minor pitting from meteor collisions, and the interiors always collected dust, but the overall artifacts remained as hard and indestructible as the day they were fabricated.

Hans Rebka knew all this. So it was absolutely astonishing to tug open a wall cabinet as he was examining the chamber’s food supplies, and feel the cabinet itself move a fraction as he did so.

He braced himself, gripped the sides of the cabinet, and pulled harder. The whole cupboard ripped away from the wall. Hans went rolling away across the chamber, holding on to a cabinet without a back. Not only that — when he returned to look at the wall, he found that part of it contained a big crack.

That started a whole new train of thought. He could not travel outward, toward the surface of Paradox, because of the one-way field. He could not travel directly toward the center, because the inner wall of the chamber was smooth and impenetrable. But maybe he could break through a side wall, and so progress around the circumference of the torus. Even if he found no way to escape, at least he could look for E.C. Tally.

Smashing through walls might be possible, but it surely wouldn’t be easy. Before he began, Rebka went once more to the opening through which he had originally entered. A brief experiment told him that the one-way field was still in operation. Also, unless his suit’s instruments were not working correctly inside Paradox, the outer boundary of the artifact had moved much closer. For as long as humans had known of its existence, the radius of the artifact had always been measured as twenty-five kilometers; now the boundary was no more than five kilometers away. Paradox was shrinking. More evidence of profound artifact changes.

Rebka returned to the inside of the chamber. At the back of his mind he couldn’t help wondering how small Paradox might become — and what would happen to the central region and its contents if the outer boundary came all the way in to meet it.

Well, he’d either discover a way to escape, or find out the hard way the consequence of the final shrinkage. Meanwhile…

He went across to the wall and wondered about the best way to attack it. His suit tools contained fine needle drills, but nothing intended for major demolition work. One way might be to pull a massive cabinet free, and propel it with his suit thrustors at the weak point of the wall.

Rebka went across to the damaged section from which he had pulled the food cabinet and thumped it experimentally with his gloved fist. He was hoping to gauge its thickness. He was astonished when his fist went right in, the whole surface crumbling away to flakes under the blow.

He moved in close and examined the material. The wall was about four inches thick, but impossibly weak, so soft and friable that he could powder it between his thumb and forefinger. It had not been like this when he first entered the room. Just to be sure, he went back to the exact place where he had hit the side wall earlier. One punch now, and his hand went completely through.

He leaned forward and found that he could see into the next chamber. From a superficial inspection, it was no different from the one he was in. There was no sign of E.C. Tally.

Hans Rebka enlarged the hole until it was big enough for him to pass through it, and headed for the far side of the new room. This time he did not pause to select any special place. He drove feet-first at a space on the wall between two gas supply lines, and was not much surprised when it disintegrated under the impact.

He went through and stared around him. Another empty chamber. At this rate he was going to destroy every room in the torus looking for E.C. Tally. Unless the whole place crumbled to dust by itself, with no help from him. It seemed to be heading that way, weaker by the minute.

One more time. Rebka launched himself forward. Again the wall collapsed beneath his impact. Again he drove on through, and found himself in still another room.

But here, at last, was something different. Radically different. He emerged amid a cloud of powder and wall chips, and ran straight into something solid.

He heard a startled grunt, and felt a sudden grip on his arms. Right in front of his face and staring into his visor was a thin, fair-haired woman. She was not wearing a suit, and her face and hair were covered with chalky dust.

She sneezed violently, then glared at the wall behind him in disbelief. “I’ve bashed that wall a hundred times in the past week, and never made even a dent in it. Who are you, some kind of superman?”

“No, indeed.” A familiar voice spoke from behind Hans. “This is not a superman. Permit me to perform the introductions. This is Captain Hans Rebka, from the planet Teufel, and lately of Sentinel Gate.”

The three women were sisters, from the salt world of Darby’s Lick. Rebka had never been there, but he knew its reputation and location, in the no-man’s-zone of dwarf stars between the Phemus Circle and the Fourth Alliance.

“So you’re from Teufel,” said Maddy Treel, the oldest, shortest, and darkest of the three. “We’ve all heard of that. ‘What sins must a man commit, in how many past lives, to be born on Teufel?’ ”

Those words threw Hans back at once to his childhood. He was on water duty again, a terrified seven-year-old, waiting for the night predators to retreat to their caves; five and a half more minutes, and the Remouleur, the dreaded Grinder, would arrive. Margin of error on water duty: seven seconds. If you are caught outside when the Remouleur dawn wind hits, you are dead…

Maddy Treel went on, jerking Hans back to the present: “But I believe Darby’s Lick can give Teufel a run for its money, at least if you’re a woman. I guess I don’t have to tell you why we came to Paradox. We wanted a better choice than the ones women have, salt-mining or breeding. When they asked for volunteers, we jumped at it.”

They were sitting around the makeshift table. Hans Rebka had been persuaded to remove his suit, but only after he had been back to the hole through which he had entered and examined it. He remained mystified. There was an atmosphere on the other side, but it was pure helium. Something was able to keep gases contained within each chamber, even when the wall between them had been partly destroyed. Impossible. But no more impossible than the diamond-shaped entrance to the chamber, which somehow did the same thing. Air within did not escape to the vacuum outside.