Chapter 5 — FIGHT FOR LIFE

Belatedly I remembered that capsules were color-coded in an obvious manner, as it could be exceedingly awkward to open them in a vacuum to check their contents. Glaring orange was the code for explosives.

Explosives are normally used for excavation work. It is not feasible to light fuses or whatever in a vacuum—oh, yes, they do have a fuse that burns in empty space, with its own oxygen built in—but it takes special equipment to start it going. So most small explosives are contact-detonated.

The effect of this one did not seem great, but of course this was a mini-charge, and the debris settled out almost instantly, because there was no air to buoy it. Had that bomb struck our transporter, those of us who were not directly injured would have died from suit destruction. Even a little bomb is devastating when it detonates in your face! My father had caught on and swerved just in time; we had struck no craterlet.

The saucer swerved to get above us again. I saw its pincers, holding another bomb. There was now no doubt about its hostile intent! But, though the immediacy of the threat somehow abated the fear I should naturally have felt, my curiosity remained undimmed. Who was trying to do this to us, and why?

My father swerved again and braked, and the second bomb missed us to the left front. This time all of us were hanging on firmly, so neither the swerving nor the jolt of the ground from the explosion dislodged us. The forward bumper took the brunt of the flying debris, and we all ducked low so the rest passed harmlessly overhead. This was nervous business, though. Sand is sharp, and while space suits are tough, they aren't that tough.

Still the saucer pursued. It was more maneuverable than we were, and faster; I knew we could not escape it long. I didn't know how many bombs it had, but all it needed was one score on our vehicle. Each cylinder was small, and the saucer's hold could contain hundreds of them. Weight wouldn't make much difference, with the gravity shielding; a full hold weighed about the same as an empty one.

The pincers carefully lowered each bomb below the shield before releasing it, as I mentioned; otherwise, instead of dropping, the cylinder would remain in the chamber until it banged, into something there, and—

That gave me a notion. If I could somehow jam a bomb back into the hold, or set it off before it dropped—

I got out my laser and took a shot, but the two vehicles were jogging about so violently relative to each other—I'm sure it was mostly us, but it seemed at the time like the saucer, which is a useful exercise in perspective—that I couldn't aim well, and I missed. I wasn't at all sure the laser beam would detonate the bomb anyway. Light and heat were one thing; abrupt collision was another. In any event, if the bomb did explode above us, shrapnel could rain down on us and wipe us out. Even if it also took out the saucer, what good would it do us then? Maybe it was best that I had failed. I had no business depleting the charge in the weapon uselessly.

The third bomb missed behind us as my father accelerated, once more outsmarting the saucer pilot. Actually, it is very hard to align with an erratic target; pure chance gave us the advantage, if you consider having a chance to survive such a threat an advantage. The saucer was in no danger; it was the aggressor. These misses were too close; I knew they couldn't go on much longer.

Then Spirit jammed her helmet against mine. "Look!" she yelled. "The ice caves!"

She meant the excavations made by the city of Maraud to mine clean ice. A community of a hundred thousand people needed a lot of water, and the recyclers were always breaking down and it was too expensive to replace them with new and reliable ones, so it was simpler just to quarry the water out of the ground. If there is one thing Callisto has in abundance, it is ice! The bedrock ice is very close to the surface in some places, and here there was a combination strip-and-tunnel mine. The top ice at this site was blended with minerals, but the deep ice was as clean as nature had formed it four billion years ago. Huge chunks of it were blasted free with bombs similar to those being used against us now, and gravity shields were used to float the icebergs to the dome, where smaller pieces were cut and taken inside for melting and using. There was always an iceberg perched near the dome, our guarantee that one thing we would never suffer was thirst.

I leaned over to touch helmets with my father, who was intent on his pedaling, steering, and the saucer. He was really working hard, but he kept his helmet still for me. "The ice caves!" I shouted. "We can hide in them!"

"Get rope!" he yelled back, and I realized he had been angling for this all along. I didn't know what good rope would do, but I scrambled out of my seat and across Faith in the back, delving for the flexible cable every outside vehicle had for towing and such.

In a moment I found it, as the vehicle swerved in crazy patterns, preventing the saucer from getting a good line on us. I realized the saucer was floating too high, so my father could see when the capsules were being released, and could dodge out of the way before they arrived. Things didn't fall very rapidly out here in quarter-gee. Faster than they would in atmosphere, of course, as the prompt settling of the dust showed; but any distance made the slower pattern of natural acceleration evident. Human reactions, geared for Earth-type acceleration, were quite ready to cope with Callisto acceleration.

The saucer, however, was catching on. First it angled toward the ice mine as if to block us off from it; then, realizing that this ploy was ineffective because we could zigzag toward the mine anyway, the saucer floated lower, so as to cut the fall time and prevent us from dodging effectively.

My father made a throw-gesture with a free arm, and I caught on. I could use the rope against the saucer! It had been floating too high for the rope to reach, before, but now it was coming down close enough. My father was still outthinking it.

I made a lasso noose as I eyed the saucer. If I could loop that extended pincers, I could put it and the saucer out of commission. The lower the saucer got, the more in reach it got.

I flung the loop, but missed. I wasn't experienced at this; I didn't know how to lasso a moving object in low-gee. The dynamics were all wrong. In addition, that hovering bomb made me excruciatingly nervous. If it dropped now, could I catch it—and do so gently enough to prevent it from detonating? I doubted it.

Spirit climbed back to join me, moving lithely. She always had been an active type, able to fling herself about like a little monkey. She put her helmet against mine. "Dad says jump!" she cried.

"And desert the family?" I retorted. "No."

"With the rope, dummy! Here, I'll do it." She reached for the lasso.

Then I understood. In low-gee we could jump much higher than normal. It wasn't as simple as jumping four times as high in one-quarter gee; it depended on technique and the center of body mass. I hadn't had much practice at this either, but I had a general notion.

As the saucer swooped low, lower and closer than before, I launched myself upward, carrying the loop of rope in both hands. I imagined myself a rocket, jetting from a planetary berth with an important payload. It felt like straight up, but of course it was at an angle, with the inertia of the vehicle's forward motion slanting me. There was no atmospheric drag to slow me; I shot straight for the saucer. I was amazed, though I shouldn't have been; the power of my leap should have taken me up a meter within the dome, which translated to somewhere in the vicinity of four meters here, allowing for the uncertainties of the situation. That was how high the saucer now floated.

I came right up under the bomb, and with my two hands looped the rope around the extended pincers. Then I fell away to the side, slowly—and saw to my horror that I had dislodged the bomb, or at least failed to prevent it from being released.

I grabbed for it, but that was futile. I was already out of reach, and it was falling at the same rate I was. It was traveling right toward the transporter.

I watched helplessly as that terrible cylinder descended. Time dilated for me; everything was in slow motion. My family faced destruction—and I could only watch.

Then Spirit jumped up and caught the bright capsule in her hands. Still aloft, she flung it from her, behind the vehicle. She had been alert, bless her, and had done what I could not. Once again she had backstopped me, and perhaps saved us all.

The bomb exploded as Spirit and I landed on either side of the transporter. Both of us managed to get turned to face forward and hit the ground running, for we still had that forward inertia. It was rough, but I managed to keep my balance, and so did she. We jogged to clumsy stops well behind the transporter.

The rope was tied to the saucer pincers at one end, and anchored to the land vehicle at the other. The two machines were tied together.

The three oldest Hubrises were in the transporter—and who was in the saucer?

Spirit rejoined me, touching helmets. "Sierra," she said.

"What?" My mind was distracted by more important things than her chance remarks.

"The scion on the saucer!"

Suddenly it came clear! The one we had humiliated! Naturally he was out to get revenge, and he had not been satisfied with our departure from the dome of Maraud. Out here at night he could destroy us and get away with it! We had fled the dome of our own volition, leaving the protection of its law, such as it was; we had become fair targets. There wouldn't even be any inquiries.

Sierra must have been keeping track of us, unsatisfied without the taste of blood. The arrogance of scions was almost beyond belief; a personal humiliation by a peasant was justification for murder, in this person's view. But not open murder, for then it would be known that he had acted in a cowardly manner, bombing a pedal-powered vehicle from a saucer. The nature of his humiliation might also become known. So his revenge had to be private and complete. Yes, it made sense at last.

The saucer wrenched upward as its pilot realized that something was wrong—and it skewed crazily as it snapped on the end of its tether. The rope provided with out-dome vehicles is tough, for it has to stand up to the abrasion of sharp rocks and the stress of hauling a vehicle out of a mine cave-in. That saucer could not break free!

With a gravity lens, a saucer can lift any amount that will fit in its hold, because the load has no weight—provided the lens is between the load and the planet. But the rope anchored the saucer to the transporter below the lens, with its full quarter-gee weight. This was too much to lift. The propulsive rockets (no propeller out here in vacuum, of course) weren't designed for significant lifting, only forward thrust. What a lovely trap!

With its pincers unit immobilized, the saucer couldn't drop any more bombs. We had muzzled it as well as tethering it. Because the pilot was sealed inside, he couldn't go to the airless cargo hold to untie or cut the rope. Not unless he had a space suit—which was unlikely. Trying to scramble into one of those bulky things in the confines of a cockpit was so awkward as to be something a scion would not consider, anyway.

On the other hand, we couldn't let the saucer go without being in trouble again. It was similar to the way I had grabbed the scion's foot, really incapacitating us both. Only then he'd drawn the laser—

Oops! If he had a laser now—

No, that seemed unlikely. No laser cannon was mounted on the saucer itself, as lasers weren't very useful for cutting this ice of the mine. It simply melted, flowed, and refroze in an instant, absorbing an enormous amount of energy in the process. It takes as much energy for a laser to do its work as it does to do the work any other way; there is no such thing as free power, other than what we draw from the sunlight. So the ice had to be cut physically, without wasteful heating.

Anyway, if the scion had had a laser, he would have used it instead of the clumsy blasting cylinders. So it seemed we really had evened the odds.

Then my mind, which never knows when to stop, brought up another thought: The scion could have a laser in the cockpit, but not have used it because that would have holed up our suits and killed us without destroying the evidence of the murder. A person or a family could run afoul of blasting cylinders by error, perhaps, but there had to be another party to fire a laser at five separate people. So I could not afford any complacency on that score.

The transporter reached the ice mine, hauling the saucer along on its tether. On the shallow-crater region of the planet the saucer had the advantage, when it was loose, for there was no place for a vehicle to hide or avoid it. But the mine was deep, convoluted, and jagged, not having had the necessary billion years or so to melt into anonymity. This terrain was no picnic for a ground vehicle, but it was downright dangerous for a low-flying saucer on a tether. If we let the scion go here, he would probably just have to float home.

But if we did that, and the saucer did not go home, we would be trapped in the mine, unable to proceed to our rendezvous with the bubble. Safety in the mine was no good when we had a time limit for crossing the landscape. The saucer could hover indefinitely, outwaiting us. We had no great supplies of food or water, and in any event had to reach the bootleg bubble before it departed without us. So we had to hang onto the saucer. But could we haul it all the way to the bubble? That was unlikely—and if we did, the operator of the bubble might decide to take off before we arrived, fearful that the saucer represented the authority of an official. Our predicament had changed its nature, but not its urgency.

My father was no expert driver, since few peasants ever got much practice with vehicles of any type, and his legs had to be tired from all that pedaling, but he was strongly motivated. Spirit and I came to the brink of the mine and watched the action. There were roads winding around and down past tiers of blank ice walls, and the whole cavity was like a giant inverted dome, with high ridges of ice-rock projecting between many of the levels and spires rising where there were turnarounds. Any of these could smash up the saucer pretty badly, if it happened to be unlucky enough to collide with them. The gravity lens made the saucer light, but it could not change its mass; a crack-up would be just as devastating as one in full gravity.

The winding roads were designed for exactly the kind of vehicle my father was driving, by no coincidence, so now he had the advantage of the terrain. He wheeled around the spires, dragging the saucer along, trying to snag it on a projection. He knew it was not safe to let the saucer go, and he was not a forgiving man. The scion had tried to kill him; he would now try to put away the scion. I felt a certain horrified elation of battle, and pride for my father. He was normally a reasonable man, but the time for reason had passed. Spirit and I had humiliated Sierra before; my father was out to finish him.

But the saucer followed, skillfully maneuvering around the obstructions, keeping the rope slack. Scions had plenty of leisure to learn to master their craft; this one floated with precision. I saw that this tactic wasn't going to be enough. There were too many open spaces in the mine, and the moment the saucer had the chance to get clear, as it might by snagging the rope on a sharp edge of ice-rock so that it would saw through the rope, or if there were any alternate way to drop a bomb—

My eye was distracted by Spirit's motion. There were whole piles of ice-rock fragments that had been bulldozed clear of the roads, and she was checking through one. She was always curious about things. How could I blame her? I had the same attitude.

She saw me watching and made a throwing motion, empty-handed. Then I caught on. These rocks were weapons!

We started in with a will, hurling head-sized rocks at the saucer. The quarter-gravity and irregular edges made it easier to grasp and throw large pieces, but they didn't go very fast and our aim wasn't very good. Again we faced the problem of mass: Weight is only one element of substance, one of its many dimensions, and it was as hard to accelerate a large chunk here as it would have been in full gee. Maybe harder, for the weight we did heft caused our muscles to assume that this was the amount of mass we had to throw, so we constantly misjudged it. Soon we shifted to smaller chunks and schooled ourselves to overthrow, and then we got the range and power and began scoring on the saucer as it trailed the transporter in a diminishing spiral down into the center of the mine. Those rocks might be light and slow, but they were as ornery in their stopping as in their starting, and solid enough to dent the saucer's metal hide and shake the whole mass of it as they struck.

A bomb exploded below the saucer, and we knew one of our rocks had jogged it out of the hold. Those capsules were only lightly anchored, so that the pincers could take them without risk of setting them off; now they were being shaken loose, and that could mean a whole lot of trouble for the pilot!

Still, it wasn't good enough. The saucer was getting too far away from us, so our rocks were losing accuracy and effect. We had to keep up the distraction, or it would get above the transporter and shake loose a bomb. This would be difficult and risky with its pincers incapacitated, but if any bombs were floating free in its hold the scion needed to get rid of them anyway. Certainly it was too much of a risk for us to tolerate. That wasn't just a transporter down there; that was our family!

We jumped down the slopes, bounding from level to level, as each was separated from the next by only two or three meters. Soon we were back in range, because we were going straight in, while the vehicles were traveling in spirals. A straight line really is the shortest distance between two points!

Then I saw that they were approaching a major staging area, where the various vehicles normally operating in the mine could load and turn around. Here the saucer would have plenty of maneuvering room. I'm sure my father would have avoided this region, but he lacked our vantage and probably could not see it coming, and in any event his road was curving right to it without any turnoff. We had to resume our barrage, keeping the saucer occupied.

But as they entered the clear area, while Spirit and I desperately hurled more ice-rocks, the saucer dropped almost to the floor of the mine. Had its gravity lens malfunctioned? I doubted it, because those units were very stable and reliable. They resembled, in a fashion, permanent magnets, and lasted almost indefinitely once activated, requiring no external source of power. That was part of what made them so useful. A gravity lens is like a sail on an ancient Earth ship, a tool to utilize the forces around it. A sail taps the immense power of moving air; a lens does the same with the ubiquitous gravity in the universe. Neither sail nor lens is likely to break down if properly used.

A beam speared out from the saucer. Oh, no! My mental reservation had been correct. The scion did have another hand laser, and now he was firing through the transparent forward port. This was not the most effective way to use a laser, because of the dispersion caused by the glass, but even a weakened beam could readily hole a suit. Presumably the exigency of the moment forced the scion to get out of this trap any way he could; maybe if he killed my father with the laser, he would then have leisure to shake loose a bomb and cover up the evidence. The threat was immediate.

Spirit touched her helmet to mine. "I'll foul the glass!" she cried.

"You can't go down there!" I protested.

I should have known better. She was already taking off, carrying an ice stone. Spirit seldom let the voice of reason stand in the way of direct action. I leaped after her, knowing this was folly; the scion's laser would spear her before she ever got close to the glass. But she had a lead on me, and she was an athletic elf and I couldn't catch her. We both Went tumble-running down almost on top of the saucer, carrying our rocks.

Spirit took a final leap and landed on the low saucer. She had excellent spacial judgment that way. I did not. I missed.

Naturally she was affected by the gravity lens when she touched the saucer's surface. The typical lens makes an onion-shaped distortion in the gravity-wave pattern, into which the saucer or other object using the lens nestles. Above, that distortion narrows and winks out as the gravity pattern reasserts itself. Gravity is powerful, ornery stuff, despite its reputation as the weakest of the four universal forces; it can never be actually abolished, it can only be channeled slightly. If this were not so, true gravity shields would disrupt the natural order horribly. Imagine the havoc that could be wrought in an atmosphere, for example; the gas above the shield would be literally blown out of its world by the pressure of the surrounding gas. Perhaps a monstrous whirlpool or tornado would form around that dreadful leak, funneling the atmosphere out into space until it all was gone, leaving the planet denuded and as naked as was Callisto. Lenses would be terrible weapons, with the potential to suffocate whole inhabited worlds. An enemy could simply drop a lens from space and let it wreak its havoc as it descended, since it itself would be subject to natural gravity and not be thrown clear of the planet. Well, maybe it would have to be tied down, to prevent being sucked up by the tornado it caused. A minor detail. And of course the first huge, crude lenses had caused considerable mischief, since their onion-tops had projected so high that there was some of that tornado effect. But fortunately the modern lenses were crafted to wink out at their tops fairly expeditiously, just a few meters from their lenses, and very little atmosphere was affected. Here on an airless world that didn't matter, of course, but it remained, to my mind, a significant matter. The Colossus Jupiter would hardly allow lenses to be used on the moons that had the potential to disrupt Jupiter's own atmosphere if dumped there accidentally or otherwise. There is obviously much politics in physics.

At any rate, Spirit lost her weight and had trouble staying on the saucer. Then she caught hold of the ladder-dents that were there for workers, and was secure. The dents actually curved inside the skin of the saucer, so that fingerholds were convenient. Sometimes it was necessary for a person in a suit to ride a saucer outside, as when helping to load it, so that was facilitated. A weightless person could normally support himself by one finger; even the slightest anchorage was all that was necessary.

I came to the foot of the slope and tried to be inconspicuous. I didn't know what to do at the moment, but had to be ready to do whatever offered, when it offered. I couldn't throw rocks for fear of hitting my sister, yet if I didn't, that laser might get her. I was terrified for Spirit, but was helpless.

I should clarify that the telling of this requires much more time than the action did. Obviously the saucer was not sitting there quiescently for ten minutes while we set up to smudge its window. It may have been as little as thirty seconds, while the scion was trying to get into better position for a killing shot at my father.

Spirit squirmed across the saucer roof, awkward in her suit. Then she reached down to the front vision port and smeared her ice-rock across it. The glass was super tough and scratch-resistant, but some of the dust in the ice smeared. Maybe enough heat from the cabin radiated through the glass to cause the surface of the ice to melt a little.

It took the scion inside a moment to realize what was happening. Maybe he had felt the impact of Spirit's landing and assumed it was another big rock. The saucer was now so low that I could see his shape behind the glass. Then, furious, he aimed his hand laser at Spirit.

I don't remember digging out my own laser again, the one I had, ironically, acquired from him after our first encounter and tried to use to detonate one of the bombs. I had had it fastened in a compartment in my suit belt; now it was in my hand, as if possessed of its own volition. I pointed it at the glass, steadied my hand, and squeezed off a ray.

I don't think my beam could have had any deadly effect. I had only a mini-laser, with a little power, and the angle wasn't good, and the glass was dirty thanks to Spirit's continuing effort. But the ray could have splayed as it passed through the glass and temporarily blinded the scion inside. At any rate, he didn't fire again, and Spirit was able to finish her smearing job without getting her suit holed, no thanks to her impetuosity.

I scrambled across and pulled her off the saucer at last, not wanting her to take any more such chances. "We have to get away from here before he radios for help!" I yelled as we touched helmets.

She nodded, understanding. We moved to the transporter, where my father was unloading. He knew we couldn't get that vehicle out of danger in time, uphill around and around the spiral roads of the mine. We had to abandon ship, as it were. We all got our belongings into our packs and strapped the packs on. Then my father started the transporter, fixing its steering wheel, and sent it rolling down a slope toward a dropoff. As the brink neared, he disengaged from the pedals and jumped free, letting the vehicle's inertia carry it and the trailing saucer over the edge, down the steep embankment beyond the staging area. With luck, both it and the saucer would wreck, and any pursuers would assume we all were dead—at least until it was too late to matter.

But the wrench did not drag the saucer down. The rope broke. Maybe it had been frayed in the course of the descent into the mine. The saucer drifted free at last, dangling a meter of rope, its pincers twisted crooked. It could not drop bombs, but once its occupant recovered, that saucer could be dangerous again. Too bad, I thought ungraciously.

My father led the way through the mine. He had been here before; in his youth he had worked here, before he got the more pleasant and safer job in the coffee dome. I realized that age could be an advantage; it provided time for broader experience. The particular configurations of the mine would have changed considerably in the intervening years, but not its basic nature.

We saw two lights coming over the mine's horizon. There were the scion's allies! Probably other spoiled, rich, arrogant youths like him. I jogged my father's arm and pointed.

He looked and broke into a run. We followed, though running is not fun in space suits; it's not the weight but the clumsiness, since they are not as flexible as human bodies and one must run spraddle-legged. But we had to get to cover in a hurry.

Soon we came to a sort of crevice in the ice wall, broad enough for a man to enter. We plunged in, getting out of view of the saucers, and worked our way along it until we were safe from any discovery from above. We were lost in the deep shadow of the crack in the ice.

This was just as well, for through the crack I could see one of the saucers casting about. They were looking for us, certainly!

The crevice closed in tighter, so that we had to squeeze along in single file. I began to get claustrophobic; I was somehow afraid the separation in the ice would close up again, crushing everything within it. Of course I knew better; Callisto is a dead world, as these things go, with no volcanism or plate tectonics; even a tiny crack could remain undisturbed for a billion years if man did not interfere. Such fears are not rational, but the perception of their irrationality does not necessarily make them depart. I willed myself to react sensibly; the planet presented no danger, but the saucers did.

That ice, as we slid along the walls, was extremely solid and cold; I felt its chill through my suit, psychologically. The space suits were insulated and heated, charged for forty-eight hours of continuous use—which was more than enough, since we had only twenty hours to reach the bubble, to be sure of catching it before takeoff.

And there, more than likely, was the real source of my chill: We had used up two hours—and lost our vehicle. Here we were, stuck in an ice crevice; how could we ever reach the escape bubble in time?

Then we squeezed into a regular tunnel. The workmen had reamed out this section of the crevice, preparatory to the next blast. It was much easier to break off an iceberg along natural lines of cleavage, cracking it away largely without heat, but the charges had to be correctly placed, or the whole thing would break up into clumsy fragments. I understand there is a whole science of ice blasting that it takes many years to master, as with any really specialized discipline. The acquisition of water is too important to be entrusted to amateurs.

The tunnel cut deep into the bedrock ice, then stair-stepped up to the surface. There was no sign of the saucers. They had evidently given up the unpromising pursuit, uncertain after all whether we survived the demise of our vehicle and satisfied to get the scion back to the city before he got into any more trouble. That was our good fortune.

We had precious little other fortune, though. We would have an awful time crossing the surface of the barren planet afoot within our time limit.

My father pointed the direction to the center of the Valhalla Crater. He had a good sense of direction, but it really wasn't difficult to fathom what we needed. All we had to do was proceed at right angles to the low rills that circled it. Of course, we weren't going all the way to the center—far from it!—but this direction would take us to the smaller crater where the bubble was. Kilroy Crater.

We started off, making great low-gee bounds. We had a long way to go, and not enough time. Maybe.

At first it was easy enough. We covered many meters between landings despite the clumsiness of our suits. We sailed over the rolling ridges and down through shallow troughs. There is a technique to moving rapidly in low gee, and we were necessarily acquiring it. There is also a certain exhilaration to such velocity, a sensation of power; I thought of myself as some alien creature who existed naturally in these barrens, leaping from site to site searching out some completely inexplicable-in-human-terms item.

But anything becomes tedious or tiring in time. My pack became heavier, my suit started chafing in awkward places, the burns I had received from the scion's laser in the dome chose this time to make themselves felt more insistently, and I wished I could stop, but of course I couldn't. The alien creature I had imagined had more freedom and fewer pains; it deserted me the moment it tired of this quest and went to some more interesting site. I think it used instantaneous matter transmission to jump to another galaxy, a technology mankind has not yet developed and probably never will. That's the problem with alien creatures; they make us look inadequate.

Our pace slowed, not because of me but because of my mother. She was not used to sustaining such high exertion. If I found this travel uncomfortable, how much worse it must be for her! I went to help her, but she shrugged me off. It wasn't foolish pride on her part—there has never been anything foolish about Charity Hubris—so much as awkwardness; two could not jump as freely as one. Then Spirit came and took her right elbow and I the left, and after a few stumbles we were able to move together and boost her along fairly expeditiously.

Still, we had 160 kilometers to go in less than a day. We were traveling a good ten kilometers per hour, so theoretically we had time—but we did need to rest, eat, and even sleep, some time, and that cut us down. It was foolish to reckon without the fatigue factor, I now realized. We had been busy all day, getting ready to travel, and would ordinarily have been sleeping now.

After three hours, we had indeed covered over thirty kilometers, by my reckoning—but that was the first flush of energy. I was no longer sure I could make the full distance at all, let alone in the time remaining. Certainly my mother could not.

That damned scion in the saucer had succeeded after all in wiping us out. That must have been why there was no further pursuit; he knew we could not make it afoot. My brain seethed with impotent rage. If we missed the bubble because of him, if the foul scion won after all—

Then what? We would have nowhere to go, and no way to get there. We could not return to Maraud? and no other dome was within our range. We would die in the barrens of Valhalla.

I smiled with my private gallows humor. Our Ragnarok was at Valhalla!

We sat on a rock, resting. Eating was complicated in the suits, and so was elimination. We knew how to do both, but the whole business did take attention and time, and wasn't much fun.

We started off again, at a slower pace because of my mother. I didn't know whether to be glad for the relief it gave me or sad, because it made it ever less likely that we would reach the bubble in time. We were locked into our situation; what would be would be.

It was doom that we contemplated, but I found myself too busy just keeping moving to suffer proper gloom. In literature I had learned that work was supposed to be an answer to doubt, and this seemed to be the case. It takes effort to doubt, and I did not have effort to spare for such a nonessential. Still, some of it did leak through to my consciousness.

We traveled another three hours. By this time it was obvious to us all that we would not make it. We stopped again, weary, and my father beckoned Spirit and me to him for a helmet conference while Faith and my mother helped each other.

"We'll camp here," my father said. "The two of you will stand watch while the women sleep."

"Watch?" Spirit demanded. "What for?"

"Other refugees," my father said succinctly.

Spirit and I exchanged glances through our helmets. I suffered another surge of admiration for the foresight of my father. Of course there would be other people traveling to the bubble, from Maraud and other domes; it would hardly fill its load with just the five of us, assuming it even knew we were coming! We were now far enough along so that those other families should be converging on our route. If any of them had good-sized vehicles, and certainly some should—

Spirit and I, abruptly recharged, got on it with a will. We were not dead yet!

We not only watched, we ranged out in an expanding circle, she going one way, I the other. We leaped as high as we could from the surrounding ridges, though these weren't really very high, trying to spot any moving thing.

I must say this about Spirit: She was twelve, a child, but she was always great to work with. She had enthusiasm and competence, and enough savvy to operate effectively. I liked doing things with her; such shared tasks always seemed to have more meaning than those I did with other people, or alone. Maybe she was just trying to live up to her name as she interpreted it; if so, she succeeded admirably. She was a child, but I hardly knew her like among children or adults. I fancied her dark hair flinging out as she bounded, though of course there could be no such effect out here in the vacuum or in the space suit; it was just the way I saw her in my mind. I realize it is not fashionable to remark about one's little sister in this manner, but I decline to let fashion interfere with truth.

We spied nothing. More hours went by, and the glare of Jupiter seemed to turn baleful, and our enthusiasm was slowly replaced by dread. We came in to report—and discovered that Faith's suit had sprung another leak. Actually, it was the same leak; the patch wasn't holding quite tight. It was intended for temporary use, to hold an hour or two until the suit could be brought in for permanent repair, and now it was giving out. She had her hand on it, holding it closed, but that only slowed the leakage, and it was obvious she would not be able to travel well. We couldn't even return safely to Maraud, now, even if it happened to be politically feasible, which it didn't; that patch simply would not make it that far. We did have other patches, but it is bad business trying to patch a leaky patch, and the effort tends to be wasted.

Spirit and I went out again. We had to find transportation to the bubble!

She spied it first, with her sharp eyes and intense juvenile attention for detail: a shape floating over a distant ridge. She waved frantically, attracting my attention, and then I saw it. At first I felt dread: was it the scion's saucer, coming to finish us off?

No, it was too large. Anyway, even if it had been the scion's saucer or that of one of his companions, we still would have had to approach it. We would perish out here alone, so we simply had to take the chance. We bounded after the shape.

We caught it, for it was traveling slantwise past us so that we were able to intercept its path without matching its velocity. It slowed and hovered in place, waiting for us. What a lovely sight!

I stood bathed in the light of its headlamp and pointed the direction of the rest of my family. The floater moved in that direction. It was a large vehicle, a supply transport, presumably bringing food and water and fuel to the bootleg bubble. In that case, we were really in luck!

My guess turned out to be correct, but our luck was imperfect. The pilot held up a sign with a figure printed on it: the payment they demanded for the service of transporting us to the bubble. Truly has it been said: There is no free lunch!

We had to pay; we had no choice. But it left us no margin, after allowing for the thousand-dollar entry fee to the bubble itself. We were now, essentially, all the way broke.

Yet the ride itself was fun, and not merely because it represented our salvation from death in the vacuum. They didn't let us inside; we clung to handholds atop the vehicle and floated in its onion-field of null-gee over the terrain. In three more hours we were there.

Could we have made it on our own? I like to think we could have—but I really am uncertain. What counts is that we did get there.