The sound had seemed to come from above me, the term "above" referring to thedirection toward the Icarus's top deck, so that was the direction I headed. Itwas slower going than I'd expected, partly because of the awkwardness of mystance and the need for silence, but also because of the unpleasant vertigoeffect of having my head bobbing along just about where the two competinggravity fields mixed at roughly equal strength. The effect became steadilymore pronounced as I passed the mid deck and continued around toward the top of theship, with the angle between the gravity vectors gradually veering from ninetydegrees toward an even more disconcerting 180.

I don't know how long the slow-motion chase went on. Not long, I think, notmore than fifteen or twenty minutes' total. Between my aching knees and swimminghead and the fact that I was alone in a dark space with a man who had alreadykilled once, my time sense wasn't at its best that night. Every thirty seconds or soI paused to listen, stretching out with all my senses over the rumblingbackgroundnoise and vibration of the ship, trying for a new estimate of where he was.

It was on the fifth or sixth such halt that I realized that what had up tillnow been occasional incautious scraping sounds had suddenly become something farmore steady. Steady scraping noises, yet paradoxically quieter than they hadbeen up till then.

My quarry knew I was here.

Earlier, I had come up with the image of being a spider on a wall. Now, suddenly, the image changed from a spider to a fly. A fly pinned by a lightagainst a very white wall. For a dozen heartbeats I squatted theremotionlessly, sweating in the darkness as I strained to listen, trying to determine whetherthe sounds were moving toward or away from me. The latter would mean he wastrying to escape, the former that he had yet another violent accident on hismind. And if there was one thing certain here, it was that I couldn't affordto guess wrong.

For those dozen heartbeats I listened; and then I knew. The sounds weredefinitely moving away, probably downward to my right, though the echo effectmade it difficult to tell for sure.

All the reasons why I shouldn't have come in here after him in the first placeonce again flashed through my mind. Once again, I shoved them aside. I'dalreadylost several rounds to this man, and I was getting damned tired of it. Picking a

vector that would theoretically intersect his, I set off after him.

To this point it had been a slow-motion chase. Now, it became an equallyslow-motion game of hounds and hares. I was stopping ever more frequently tolisten; but my quarry was doing the same, and as often as not I would pauseonlyto find he had changed direction again. Doggedly, I kept at it, my earlierthought about the possibility of ambush spots never straying too far from mymind. So far our saboteur had shown no indication of being armed, but everyoneelse I'd run into on this trip had been and there was no reason to expect thatwhoever had been handing out the guns with such generosity would haveneglectedhis friend here aboard the Icarus.

More than once I also considered banging the butt of my plasmic against theinner hull and trying to rouse the rest of the crew to help in the search. Butby then I was so thoroughly lost that I had no idea whether I was even nearenough to any of the others scattered around the ship for my pounding to doanygood. And whether any of them heard me or not, my playmate in here certainlywould, and at the first sign of an attempted alarm he might well postpone hisescape plan in favor of shutting me up first.

And then, in the distance ahead of me, I saw a faint glow appear, so faintthat I wasn't sure at first whether I was simply imagining it. My first thought wasthat our convoluted intertwined wanderings had brought us back to the vicinityof my cabin and the open inner-hull plate. But even as I realized that thecombined gravity vector was wrong for that, the distant glow vanished, accompanied by a dull, metallic thud. A sound like two pieces of metalclankinghollowly against each other.

The same sound I'd heard from the wraparound after my talk with Nicabar, andhad been trying to track down for nearly two days.

I kept going, but there was clearly no point in hurrying. My quarry had led mearound the barn a couple of times and had now popped back through his rabbithole to the safe anonymity of the Icarus proper. By the time I reached thespotwhere the glow had been, assuming I could pinpoint it at all, he would havethe connectors back in place and it would be just one more of seventeen thousandother inner-hull plates.

A couple of minutes later I reached the vicinity where I estimated the glowhad been. As expected, every one of the hull plates in the area looked exactlyalike, and I still had no idea where exactly I was. Briefly, I thought abouttrying to dig my way through, but a single glance was all it took to see thatthe hull-plate connectors couldn't be removed from this side.

But maybe there was another way to mark my place here.

I played my light across the inner-hull plates over my head, searching amongthe haphazard arrangement of piping and wires until I found what I was lookingfor: the telltale power wires and coax cable of an intercom, their endsdisappearingthrough the inner hull half a meter to the side of my estimated position formyquarry's escape hatch.

I'd left my multitool back on my cabin floor, but the contact edge of myplasmic's power pack was rough enough for my purposes, and it took only a fewminutes of work for me to abrade the insulation on the power wires enough toleave a small section of bare wire on each of them. Putting the plasmic aside, touched the two bare spots together.

There was no spark—the power level was far too low for that—but what theoperation lacked in pyrotechnic dramatics it more than made up in personalsatisfaction. Somewhere in the bowels of the Icarus, I knew, a circuit breakerhad just popped in response to the short circuit I'd created. All I had to dowas find which one, and I'd have my suspect intercom identified. And with it, the saboteur's rabbit hole.

Making sure the bare spots stayed together, I wrapped the wires as best Icould to hold them that way. On most starships the main computer's nursemaid programwould pick this up in a flash and send a maintenance flag to both the bridgeand engine-room status boards. With the Icarus's archaic system, though, I doubtedthat it had such a program. Even if it did, there would be no way to reset thecircuit breaker until the wires were unjinxed.

Which left only the problem of finding my way back to my cabin and hunting upthe appropriate breaker box before my adversary tumbled to what I'd done andfixed the short circuit.

Now that I was no longer engaged in a chase, the navigational task wasstraightforward if a bit tedious. Holding my light loosely by finger andthumb, I held it near the edge of the inner hull and watched which way it tried toturn. That gave me the direction of ship's down, and I headed that way untilfurther measurements with my impromptu pendulum showed I was at the sphere'sSouth Pole. Picking a direction at random, I moved along it for a few meters, then began circling at that latitude until I spotted the glow of my cabinlightfiltering through the opening. Three minutes after that, I was back.

With everything else that had happened, I almost forgot to check my ownintercom's coax cable for tampering, which had, after all, been the originalpurpose of this exercise. Not that I was expecting to find anything else, butfor completeness it seemed the proper thing to do. A cursory examination wasall it took to discover that it had indeed been tapped into.

I climbed back into my cabin, noting as I did so the curious fact that thehull's gravitational field seemed to hold on to me more strongly now that I'dbeen all the way into it than it had before I'd first landed on the outerhull.