"Matter of minutes," Joe corrected absently as he seated himself on the bench in the rear segment of the truck.

Other life-forms squeezed in with Joe and Mali, and then the truck engine came noisily to life.

"What kind of turbine is that?" Joe said, annoyed by the noise it made.

A kindly looking bivalve beside him groaned, "It's internal combustion. Bang bang bang all the way."

"The frontier," Joe said, and felt an aching joy, all at once. Yes, he thought, this is the frontier; we are back with Abraham Lincoln in a log cabin, and Daniel Boone, all of them. The oldtime pioneers.

One by one the trucks pulled away from the curb, their lights yellow in the night, like the orbs of luminous, foreign moths.

"Glimmung will be waiting for us," Mali said. "When we get there." She sounded tired. "He's capable of reflex relocation, based on autonomic pulsations emanating from within his own neurological substructure. For all intents and purposes he can move from one locus to another without time-lapse." She rubbed her eyes and sighed.

The helpful bivalve spoke up once more. "The creature beside you, Mr. Fernwright, is truthful." It extended a pseudopodium to Mali. "Miss Yojez, I am Nurb K'ohl Daq from Sirius three. We have all been waiting anxiously for your party to arrive, because we understood that once you reached the Hotel Olympia all of us who have been waiting a long time can begin. As it seems to be so. But in addition I am glad to become known to you and have you know me, in that I for my part will search out and locate the coral encrusted objects which will then be brought out of Mare Nostrum and brought to you at your shop."

"I am the engineer in charge of discreet artifacts and the transporting thereof on Mr. Nurb K'ohl Daq's request to your shop," a quasiarachnid, brightly black in its chitinous exoskeleton, said.

"You haven't done any preliminary work?" Mali asked it. "While you waited?"

"Glimmung kept us in our rooms," the bivalve explained. "We did two things. One. We read all pertinent documents relating to the history of Heldscalla. Two. We watched on a video monitor as robot sensors scanned the sunken cathedral time and again. On our screens we have seen Heldscalla countless times. But now we will be allowed to touch it."

"I wish I could go to sleep," Mali said. She rested her close-cropped head on Joe's shoulder and slumped against him. "Wake me up when we get there."

The quasiarachnid said to Joe and the bivalve, "This total Undertaking... it reminds me of an Earth saga, parts of which we were required to memorize during our educational years. It made a deep impression on me."

"He means the Faust theme," the bivalve told Joe. "Faustian man, striving upward, never satisfied. Glimmung is like Faust in certain respects, unlike him in others."

Rustling its antennae in agitation the quasiarachnid said, "Glimmung resembles Faust in all respects. The Faust, at least, of Goethe, which is the version I adhere to."

Eerie, Joe thought. A chitinous multilegged quasiarachnid and a large bivalve with pseudopodia arguing about Goethe's Faust. A book which I've never read—and it originated on my planet, is the product of a human being.

"Part of the difficulty," the quasiarachnid was saying, "lies in the translation; it was written in a language which has died out."

"German," Joe said. He knew that much, at least.

"I have," the quasiarachnid muttered, "made a—" It groped in a plastic utility pouch slung over its shoulder; four of its manual extremities busily sorted through the pouch. "Damn thing," it muttered. "Everything sinks to the bottom. Here it is." It brought out a much-folded sheet of paper, which it proceeded to unfold carefully. "I have made my own translation into modern-day Terran, formerly called ‘English.' I will read you the crucial scene from the second part, the moment at last when Faust pauses in contemplation of what he has done, and is content. May, can—whatever the expression is. All right, Mr. Fernwright, sir?"

"Sure," Joe said, as the truck rumbled along, over potholes and rocks, shaking and swaying the creatures within it. Mali, now, seemed to have totally fallen asleep. She had certainly been right about the driving skill of the werj; the truck rattled through the darkness at a great rate.

"'A swamp surrounds the mountains,' "the quasiarachnid read from its carefully preserved sheet of paper." ‘Poisoning everything already reclaimed. To drain the foul marsh—this must be done; this would be the highest conquest possible. I'll open room for many millions: not in any sense safe, but daily freed, in which to live. Green the meadow, and fruitful; men and herds almost already on the most new earth, settled on the rim of which has been pushed up by bold peoples' efforts. Within here a paradise land, that keeps outside the flood, and as it eats away, trying to enter and take over, a group will hurries to cut it off. Yes! This—‘"

The bivalve interrupted the quasiarachnid's earnest recitation. "Your translation is not idiomatic. ‘Men and herds almost already on the most new earth.' Grammatically it is correct, but no Terran talks like that." The bivalve waved a pseudopodium toward Joe, seeking his support. "Isn't that so, Mr. Fernwright?"

Joe thought, "Men and herds almost already on the most new earth." The bivalve was right, of course; but--.

"I like it," Joe said.

Highly pleased, the quasiarachnid yelped, "And see how much it resembles us and Glimmung, the Undertaking! ‘Within here a paradise land, that keeps outside the flood.' The flood is a symbol for everything that eats away structures which living creatures have erected. The water which has covered Heldscalla; the flood won out many centuries ago, but now Glimmung is going to push it back. ‘A group will' which hurries to cut it off—that is all of us. Perhaps Goethe was a precog; perhaps he foresaw the raising of Heldscalla."

The truck slowed. "We're there," the werj driver informed them. He applied his brakes, and the truck came to a squeaking halt, causing everyone aboard to pitch violently. Mali stirred, opened her eyes; she glanced around in each direction, panic shaping her face—obviously she could not orient herself immediately.

"We're there," Joe said to her, and hugged her against him. And now it begins, he reflected. For better or worse. For richer; for poorer. Until—death, he thought. Do us part. Odd that he should think of that, the litany of the marriage vows. Yet it seemed to fit. Death, in some indistinct form, seemed to hover close by.

Stiffly, he rose, helped Mali up; they and the others began creakily to get down from the back of the truck. The night air with its smell of the sea... he took a deep breath. It is really close now, he realized. The sea. The cathedral. And Glimmung trying to separate them, the sea pushed back from Heldscalla. Like God did, he thought. Separating the dark from the light, or however it goes. And the water from the land.

To the quasiarachnid he said, "God, in Genesis, was very Faustian."

Mali moaned. "Good lord; theology in the middle of the night." In the damp, cold air she shivered, peering around her. "I don't see a damn thing. We're in the center of noplace.

Against the dim nocturnal sky Joe made out what appeared to be a geodesic dome. There it is, he said to himself.

The other trucks had arrived by now; all had stopped and from each of them the throng of life-forms emerged, each in its own peculiar fashion. Some helped others; the reddish jelly, for example, had a difficult time until a spiny apparition resembling a hostile bowling ball helped it down.

A hovercraft, illuminated and large, manifested itself above them, gradually descending until at last it had parked itself in the midst of their group. "Hello," it said. "I am your conveyance to your work-areas. Board me carefully and I will take you there, if you would, please. Hello, hello."