Marcel took a deep breath. "Gunther, let's turn this around for a minute. Make it your call. What do you want to do?"

"You'd abide by my decision?"

Marcel glanced up at a large framed picture of a young couple eating dinner off the promenade. Through a window, the Crab Nebula was visible. "Yes," he said. "I'll abide by your decision. What do we do? Do we write Kellie off? And the others?"

Beekman looked back at Marcel, followed his gaze to the portrait, stared at it a long time. That's unreasonable," he said at last.

"What is?"

"You know what I'm talking about."

"Sure. Making the call, as opposed to criticizing."

He made a rumbling sound in his throat. "All right," he said. "Do it your way. But somewhere down the road, we're going to pay a price."

The command crew on the bridge of the Star ooohed and aaahed as images of alien inscriptions and crumbling corridors and regally garbed hawks played across their screens. Lori systematically removed the fog and enhanced the pictures. Here was a series of empty cubicles along a broad concourse, there a gently curving passageway lined by doors engraved with symbols from alien alphabets. Marcel wondered whether they designated the kind of activity carried on behind the door, or whether they were the names of individuals.

Individual hawks. What had their lives been like? Did they sit around in the evening and play some sort of poker-equivalent? Did they enjoy conversation over meals? Did they have music?

He would have liked very much to be able to listen in when the decision had been taken to go to the rescue of the medieval world that was entering a dust cloud. It must have required a gigantic engineering effort on the part of a species that apparently didn't even have spike technology. How many had they saved? Where had they gone?

He heard the power levels rise, felt the ship adjusting course once more.

The hexagon was vast. A schematic was taking shape on the main wallscreen. Human-sized cubicles in the east wing, long concourses, sections that might have been waiting or storage areas, upper levels they hadn't even gotten to. Marcel thought he saw objects on a row of shelves on the north side, but he hadn't been present when they'd passed by, had seen only the record. Hutch and Nightingale had either missed the figures or thought too little of them to waste time. He'd avoided bringing the matter up later.

"The place is a treasure trove," said Drummond, watching from his shuttle. "It's a pity there isn't time to get a decent look at it."

They were lucky, Marcel reflected, that they'd seen anything. Scholars, he suspected, would be poring over the visual record for years.

Beekman appeared unexpectedly at his side. He'd been avoiding eye contact with Marcel since their conversation. "You know," he said, trying to pretend nothing had happened between them, "there'll be

some major changes at the top when all this gets back. Gomez will go-"

"You think so?" asked Marcel. Irene Gomez had been the Academy's director for more than ten years.

"She was part of the crowd that made the decision to pull out after the Nightingale fiasco. Now we're looking at this. And it's all going to be lost. This stuff's been going out from that character at Universal, what's his name?"

"Canyon."

"Canyon. Right. They'll get it back home day after tomorrow. The board of governors will call an emergency meeting. I'll bet Gomez is gone by the end of next week. And her department heads with her."

He looked pleased at the prospect. Marcel had no connection with the director and had never even seen her in person. But he knew she did not command the respect or the loyalty of Academy people. Of course, he thought, neither would Beekman if it ever got out he'd wanted to abandon the ground party.

"Invaluable stuff," Beekman said. His tone gave him away: Even if we lose the people, maybe it will have been worth it.

Lori's voice broke in: "Preliminary maneuvers are complete. We are on course."

They found a portrait in one of the cubicles.

It was mounted on a wall, hidden behind a layer of dust, but when Hutch peeled it away and wiped a cloth over it, the images came clear.

Two of the crickets were pictured on either side of a hawk, which must have been three times their size. It was difficult to be sure about scale because the hawk was visible only from the breast up.

The crickets wore the placid expressions of philosophers. They were draped in cowls, one hooded, one bareheaded. The skulls appeared to be hairless, and she saw no indication of eyebrows. Despite the prejudice induced by her knowledge of the technological limitations of their society, Hutch read intelligence in their faces.

The otherwise fearsome appearance of the hawk was diminished by the staff it carried. Its only concession to clothing was a dark ribbon tied around one shoulder. The chest was broad, and it owned a crest that stood proudly erect. It dwarfed its companions. Yet that they were companions was impossible to doubt.

The thing had a predator's eyes and fangs and fur where Hutch might have expected to see feathers. She was struck by the composure manifested by the crickets, who might easily have been gobbled down by such a creature.

There was something else.

"What?" asked Nightingale.

She couldn't make up her mind about the sex of the two crickets. But the hawk? "I think it's a female," she said.

Nightingale sighed. "How can you possibly tell?"

"I don't know, Randy." She tried to analyze her reaction. "Something in its eyes, maybe."

Nightingale reached for the picture and was pleased to see that it lifted from its mount. It was too big to put in his pack, so he simply carried it.

They had by then mapped much of the ground level of the structure. The elevator to the orbiting station had been located on the eastern side, at the juncture of north-south and east-west concourses. The upper levels, judging by their scale, seemed to have been given over to the hawks. It seemed that the crickets used only the ground floor.

It was getting dark when they got to the north side. Here they were cautious because this was the part of the structure that, according to Marcel, jutted out over the edge of the mountain.

They came to a collapsed ramp and looked down into a lobby at another portrait. Hutch used her vine, against his protests, to descend and retrieve it. It was a full-length image of a hawk.

It had no wings.

"That figures," said Nightingale. "It's too big to fly."

"Even if it had big wings?"

Nightingale laughed, but he kept it down. "Really big wings," he said. "Something as massive as we are, like that thing apparently was, would never be able to get off the ground under its own power."

"Maybe it comes from a world where the gravity is light."

They both spoke consistently in hushed voices, as if anything at normal decibels would be inappropriate. To remind them, when either got too loud, the sound echoed back.

"That's possible," Nightingale said. "But the gravity would have to be very light. And if that were the case, I don't think these creatures would have been at all comfortable on Maleiva III. No, I doubt there's anything avian about these things. I'd bet neither they nor their ancestors ever flew. The hawk resemblance simply gets us thinking that way."

Hutch knew that Kellie would want to take a look at all this, and they'd been inside now for a long time. "Time to start back," she said.

Nightingale looked pained. He would have gone on forever, if he'd been permitted. "Why don't we hold up just for a few seconds?" Off the northern concourse, twin ramps led down one level. "Let's take a quick look downstairs, then we can go back."

"Two minutes," she said.

They descended and found another broad passageway whose walls were covered with inscriptions in the six languages. Sometimes, instead of just a few words, there were whole sections of twenty lines or more devoted to each group of symbols. "This would be just what they need," she said. "We translated one of the languages of Quraqua with a lot less than this." It was an exciting prospect, but the wall would have to be cleaned and restored before it would be of much use. She used the microscan to get as much as she could, knowing that they were losing most of it.