"How much experience have you with ET life-forms?" asked Marcel.

Beekman shook his head. "Not much, really."

"They might be people-eaters."

"That's unlikely. We're talking about something that makes roads." Beekman looked seriously uncomfortable. "I know the lander's small, and we've got only one. But we could take a few. It's what the Academy would want us to do." He was wearing a gray vest, which he pulled tightly about him as if he were cold. "How many does it hold? The Wildside lander?"

Marcel asked Bill. The numbers popped up on the screen. Eleven plus a pilot. "Maybe we should wait until we're confronted by the problem," he said.

Beekman nodded slowly. "I suppose."

"Taking off a handful," pursued Marcel, "might not be a kind act. We'd be rescuing them so they could watch their world die." He shook his head. "It would be dangerous. We'd have no way of knowing what they would do when we walked up and said hello. We wouldn't be able to communicate. And then there's the gene pool."

Beekman heaved himself out of his chair and went over to the wallscreen, whkh looked down on towering cumulus and cold blue seas. "We could probably synthesize the genes. Give them a chance to continue." He stared at Deepsix.

"It's not our call," said Marcel. "The Academy knows what we've found. If they want us to do a rescue operation, let them tell us so."

During the next couple of days, there were other discoveries: a collapsed structure that might have been a storage building along a river in Northern Tempus, a wooden palisade hidden in a forest, an abandoned boat frozen in the ice at Port Umbrage. The boat, lying on its side, was about twelve meters long, and it had masts. But its proportions suggested the mariners had been considerably smaller than humans. "Looks like a galley," said Mira. "You can even see a cabin in the rear."

Chiang Harmon agreed. "It would be small for one of us, but it's there. How old's the ice?"

"Probably been there since the beginning." She was referring to the system's encounter with the Quiveras Cloud. Port Umbrage, they believed, had been frozen solid three thousand years ago, and had never thawed. It was in the far northern latitudes on the east coast of Gloriamundi.

"What else can we conclude about the boat?" Beekman asked.

"Prow looks like a sea serpent," said Chiang. "Little bit of a Viking flavor."

"You know," said Mira, "I hadn't noticed that. But you're right. They have art."

Art was important to Mira. Working on an Academy vessel, she understood that a civilization's art was what defined it. In more personal terms, it was why one lived at all. One worked in order to make the time to enjoy the finer pleasures. She'd confided to Marcel that Beekman's people, with few exceptions, were "quite parochial," and were so consumed chasing down the details of the physical world that most had never learned to enjoy themselves. She considered herself a Sybarite in the highest sense of the word.

She was one of the older persons on board. Mira had, in her own phrase, crashed through middle age and come out the other side. She was nevertheless willowy, attractive, precise. One of those very fortunate women who seem unaffected by passing years.

"They had art," Beekman corrected.

"If we could get a close look at it," said Chiang, "we might be able to figure out what they looked like. What we really need is to see it up close."

Mira nodded. "Next time," she said, "we need to make sure we have a lander with us." She sounded as if she thought somebody had blundered, and she was looking directly at Beekman.

Later, Pete Reshevsky, a mathematician from Oslo, complained that he couldn't see what all the fuss was about. "There's nothing down there except ruins," he said. "And it's pretty obvious that whatever was here, they were pretty primitive. So we don't really have anything to learn from them." Reshevsky was small, sharp-nosed, muscular. A man who spent about half his time in the gym. His smile seldom reached his dark eyes. "We'd be better off," he continued, "if everyone would stick to business and try to keep in mind why we're here."

In the morning Wildside arrived. "Its captain wants to speak with you," Bill told Marcel.

Marcel liked Priscilla Hutchins. He'd worked with her on occasion, and had found her competent and easygoing. She'd become something of a legend twenty years ago when she'd piloted the expedition that discovered the omega clouds.

Marcel had envied her that mission. He'd been working for Kos-mik. Inc., at the time, making the long run out to Quraqua every few months. That had been a spirit-killing experience. The money was good, and he'd been ambitious, looking for promotion into the hierarchy. Hutchins had been little more than a kid when it all happened, but the incident had glamorized piloting for the general public and persuaded Marcel that he'd had enough posting back and forth to nowhere. Within months, he'd resigned from Kosmik and signed on with the Academy.

He was pleased to have Hutch in the neighborhood. It was a curious coincidence that the woman who'd played a major, if indirect, role in shaping his own career, should arrive at this moment. If he was going to be called upon to make decisions regarding the possible existence of aliens, it would be helpful to have her input.

"Put her through," he said.

She was just barely tall enough to have met the minimum standards for a license. She had dark eyes, black hair cut short, animated features that were capable of lighting up a room when she chose. She greeted him with a broad smile. "Marcel," she said, "good to see you again. I understand you've hit the jackpot."

"More or less. Do you think they'll give me a bonus?"

"The usual, I suspect."

"How much do you know?"

"Only that there's evidence of habitation. A tower. Are any of them still alive down there?"

"We haven't seen anybody." He brought her up to date. The cities we know about are here and over here; there've been indications of inhabitants in these half dozen places. He used graphics to specify. "Biggest of the cities is in Southern Tempus." He showed her. It was deep under a glacier. He didn't think she'd be able to cut through to it in the time available.

How much time was available?

"The actual collision will occur around dinnertime, December 9. We expect the planet itself will begin breaking apart about forty hours earlier." It was late Saturday evening, November 25. "But we can't really be certain. You won't want to push your luck."

"What do we know about the natives?"

"Not much. They were small. About the size of five-year-olds, looks like. And we have evidence they were on four of the continents."

"Where do you suggest we set down?"

"The tower's as good as anyplace. It looks as if you can get right in with a minimum of digging. But there is a downside: The area's directly on a fault line."

She hesitated. "You think it'll be all right for a few days?"

"Don't know. Nobody here wants to take responsibility for that kind of guess."

"Show me where it is."

"It's in northern Transitoria-"

"Where?"

Marcel directed Bill to post a chart.

She looked at it, nodded, and asked about the Event. "What precisely is going to happen? And when?"

"All right. Gunther-that's Gunther Beekman, the head of mission-tells me conditions should remain relatively stable until the breakup begins. Once that starts, though, the end will come quickly. So you'll want to get out early. I'd suggest a week early. Don't monkey around with this. Get in, get your artifacts, get out.

"You'll probably experience quakes, major storms, stuff like that, early on. When Deepsix gets inside something called the Turner Horizon, the atmosphere will be ripped off, the oceans torn out, and the crust will turn to oatmeal. All pretty much within a few hours. The core will be all that's left by the time it plunks into the soup. Just a chunk of iron."