Now, working in the tunnel with Toni and Chiang, he was embarrassed by his outburst. He had not gotten it right had not come dose to getting it right. But he had, by God, confronted MacAllister, and that at least had relieved part of the burden he'd been carrying all these years.

MacAllister had written an account of the original expedition, titled "Straight and Narrow," as the lead editorial for Premier. It had appeared shortly after Nightingale's return, when the investigation was still going on, and it had laid the blame for failure at his door, had charged him with mismanaging the landings, and had concluded by branding him as a helpless coward because he'd fainted after being wounded. The article in fact made light of his wounds. "Scratches," MacAllister had remonstrated, as though he'd been there.

It had branded him publicly and, in his view, had caused the examining board to render a verdict against him, and to shut down plans for future expeditions. We need to put Maleiva III behind us, one of the commissioner's reps had told him after the commissioner herself had cut off all contact. Didn't want to be seen with him.

"Straight and Narrow" had appeared again, six years ago, in a collection of MacAllister's memoirs. A fresh attack. And the man had pretended not to know him.

"You okay?" asked Chiang.

They were working to clear the chamber where they'd found the blowguns, the area they now called the armory. But he realized he had stopped in the middle of the effort and was staring off somewhere. "Yeah," he said. "I'm fine."

Toni and Chiang were both watching him. They'd asked on the way down what had caused his outburst, and he'd put them off. How could he possibly tell them? But it galled him that MacAllister, glib, irresponsible, that judge of all mankind, had been within reach, and that he had been impotent. What a pathetic creature he must have appeared.

John Drummond had made his reputation within a year of receiving his doctorate by devising the equations named for him, which had provided a major step forward in understanding galactic evolution. But he'd done nothing of note during the decade that had passed since that time. Now, at thirty-five, he was approaching the age at which he could be expected to begin tottering. Physicists and mathematicians traditionally make their mark early on. Genius is limited to the very young.

He'd adjusted to the realities, and had been prepared to spend the balance of his career on the periphery, criticizing the results of his betters. His reputation was secure, and even if he did nothing else notable, he still had the satisfaction of knowing that, during his early twenties, he'd outpaced damned near everybody else on the planet.

Despite that sense of his own contributions, he could not help feeling overawed in the presence of people like Beekman and al-Kabhar, who were known and respected everywhere they went. Drum-mond inevitably detected a note of condescension in his treatment by his peers. He suspected they perceived him as someone who, in the end, had to be regarded as a disappointment, who had not quite lived up to the promise of the early years.

He had consequently become somewhat defensive. His profession had passed him by, and he suspected that his selection to join the Deepsix mission had been a political choice. He had been simply too big a name to leave off the invitation list. It would have been better, he sometimes thought, to have been a mediocrity from the start, to have been perceived as a man of limited promise, than to have raised such hopes in others and in himself, and gone on to disappoint them all.

Like Chiang, he was also attracted to Kellie Collier, although he'd never made any sort of advance. He drank coffee with her when the opportunity permitted, spent what time with her that he could. But he feared rejection, and he detected in her manner that she would not take him seriously as a desirable male.

He was not entirely surprised when Beekman invited him into his office to ask whether he wanted to join the team that would inspect the artifact they'd found orbiting Maleiva HI. It was an offer most of his colleagues would have coveted, and his reputation may have left the project director with little choice. But Drummond wasn't anxious to embrace the honor, because it seemed to mean he would have to leave the ship. And the idea of going outside frankly scared him.

"That's very good of you, Gunther." He loved using the great man's first name.

"Think nothing of it. You deserve the honor."

"But the others-"

"— will understand. You've earned this assignment, John. Congratulations."

Drummond was thinking about the void.

"You do want to participate, don't you?"

"Yes. Of course I do. I just thought that the more senior members should have the privilege." His heart had begun to pound. He knew spacewalking was supposed to be simple. You just wore air tanks and a belt and magnetic shoes. And comfortable clothing. They emphasized comfortable clothing. He didn't like heights, but everything he'd read about work in the vacuum indicated that wasn't a problem either.

Before the offer had come, before he'd thought it out, he'd made the mistake of telling several of his colleagues how he'd like to cross to the assembly, to touch it and walk on it. He knew that if he refused the offer, no matter what reason he gave, it would get out.

"Do you know how to use a cutter?" Beekman asked.

"Of course." Punch the stud and don't point it at your foot.

"Okay. Good. We'll be leaving in two hours. Meet in front of the cargo bay airlock. On C Deck."

"Gunther," he said, "I've never worn an e-suit."

"Neither have I." Beekman laughed. "I suspect we'll be learning together." Then, abruptly, the conversation was over. The office door opened. Beekman had picked up a pen. "Oh, by the way," he said without looking up, "the captain says if you want to eat, you should do it now, and keep it light. Best not to have a fresh meal in your stomach when we go out."

Drummond closed his eyes and wondered whether he could get away with claiming to be ill.

Marcel regretted having allowed Kellie to travel down to the surface. Had she been available, she would have accompanied the inspection team over to the assembly, and he could have held himself in reserve for an emergency. Or for a less arduous afternoon.

He didn't like taking Beekman's people outside. None of them had ever before gone through an airlock in flight. There was in fact little that could go wrong. The Flickinger field was quite safe. But it still made him uncomfortable.

At Beekman's request, Marcel had brought Wendy to the Maleiva HI end of the assembly, the section most distant from the asteroid and closest to the planet. There, they could see quite clearly that it had been detached from a larger construct. The terminal ends of the shafts had latches and connectors.

He matched course, speed, and alignment so they maintained a constant relative position. That was crucial, not only because having the airlock within a couple of meters of the assembly was convenient, but because the sight of the two objects moving in relation to one another would almost certainly sicken his embryo spacewalkers. The only problem was that the two globes currently in the sky, Deepsix and the sun, would be in apparent motion. Enough to make you dizzy if you weren't used to it.

"Don't look at them," he advised his team. "You've got a bona fide alien artifact out there, unlike anything we've ever seen before. Concentrate on that."

Beekman had chosen two people, a man and a woman, to go out with him. Both were young, and both were celebrated members of his science team. The woman, Carla Stepan, had done some pioneering work in light propagation. Appropriate, Marcel thought. She was herself a luminous creature.