Well, there is Andy, she thought, but it didn't seem like the right time to bring him up. And for that matter, Dykstra's assessment was right.

His voice trailed off and he took steps from her and turned away again. Then he continued softly. "Knoedler might not even question you anyway. He's different, very clever. He had a ship out at Fort Conger Station waiting for the Hyperlight, ready to stop it. He might have succeeded, too, except that they left early so he wasn't in position. He hasn't come to see me about that, yet. But he's no fool. He's too sly to be second-guessed. And he commands a lot more power than his rank would lead you to believe."

"Is that why you're brooding up here?" Sammi asked. "Are you afraid of Colonel Knoedler? Is that why you snapped at me?" Lots of different feelings were coursing through her over that.

"I'm sorry about that, Sammi. Uncharacteristic, wasn't it? I haven't snapped at a friend like that since Jenny passed away."

"Your biographer friend Jenny?"

"Yes. I guess it makes sense. You remind me of her so much. I've told you that before. But actually, I'm not afraid of Knoedler. I'm probably more just worried about our friends. What did I send them into?"

"I've got a load of guilt about that, too. At least with Bob. I was really cold to him before he left, Chris. I acted like he was just going off on something trivial. I could have at least given him a hug. A stranger could have done that given the risk he's taking."

"Why didn't you?" Dykstra asked softly.

"I think because I felt like I'd be betraying Steve. Like if I let myself show any affection to someone else, then I'm somehow letting him go, like I'm getting over him. I don't ever want to get over him, Chris. Never." She did her best to keep from crying, and the fact that she was successful was itself disconcerting, more evidence that she was "getting on with her life."

"I know what that's like," Dykstra said. "There was a time when telling you that you remind me of Jenny would have felt like I was betraying her memory, too. But I'm not. You begin to get a better sense of perspective as time goes by, Sammi. When I compare you to her, I'm both complimenting you and celebrating her memory."

"I've always wondered. Did you love Jenny, Chris? Why didn't you ever marry her?"

"I certainly loved her, Sammi. But it was as a dear friend. She, on the other hand, very much wanted more at one time. But then my friend Jamie won her over and she married him instead. After he disappeared-we never did find out what happened to him-she decided that her place was beside me, as friends, and things stayed that way for the rest of her life. I sometimes wondered what would have happened, but then, I don't have any memories that I want to give up to find out."

"I'm still surprised you never married her."

"Do you recall that scene in my biography when she, Jamie, and I met the first Protestant saint, St. Paul McAndrew?"

"Of course. He shook your hand and said, 'Through you, God will give Man the stars.' "

"That is correct, Sammi. But what Jenny did not record, couldn't bring herself to even though years had gone by since Jamie had disappeared by the time she wrote the book, was what the Saint had said to Jamie."

"Which was?"

"Right after he told me what God would do through me, he turned to Jamie and said, 'Which is as nothing compared to your destiny.' " Dykstra turned back to the sky. "Till the day Jenny died, we wondered if he'd ever come back. Considering recent events, I can't help but wonder about the Saint's prophecy again."

Sammi moved up alongside the old scientist and put her arm around his waist. He put his arm around her shoulder, and they watched the stars together for a time.

VI.

The lights of the power suit were adequate to illuminate the sides of the shaft as Pops and Rick continued their descent. The hole remained twelve meters in diameter, more or less, as far down as they could see, and the walls were rough-hewn out of the cometary ices.

They had only gone down five meters when they encountered the first side tunnel. By the time they had gone down a hundred meters, they had seen dozens, going off in all directions, ranging in size from three meters across to less than one.

The two hovered in front of one cross-tunnel and Pops directed a spotlight inside.

"I think that's a door," Rick said. There was a hinge mechanism visible on the side.

"It's probably the outer door to an airlock," Pops said. "Since there isn't an interior door to go along with the one laying on the surface, that means that this tunnel had to be open to vacuum when the outer door was opened. So unless these critters are really off the wall, they must have airlocks in each of these cross-tunnels. We do that ourselves in asteroid installations, but it's for emergencies. We always have one big one at the top of the tunnel. I wonder why they don't?"

The two continued down. More than 150 meters below the surface they came to a cross-tunnel much wider than the shaft they'd come down in, and set down on a closed door much like the one on the surface.

"Well, we can go in deeper by opening this door, or we can see where this big corridor leads," Pops said.

"Open the door? How?" Rick asked. "It's probably locked and the mechanism isn't powered."

"No, but my suit is," Pops replied.

"Oh."

"But I don't see any reason for going deeper. We're ignorant of the damn comet so we might just as well try the easy route. So-this way or that way?" he asked, pointing to their two options.

"To the right," Rick said.

It was easier for Pops to use his suit jets and carry Rick than to walk in the trivial gravity with gripfields. They had just started off when they got a call from the ship.

"What are you guys doing?" Bob asked. "I gather you haven't seen any Phinons."

"Not yet," Rick said. "These tunnels give me the feeling that I'm in some kind of abandoned mine."

"Reminds me of looking through a microcamera while it threads through an ant colony," Pops added. "A

dead ant colony, though. I don't think anyone's been living here in a good long time."

As they proceeded through the big tunnel, they noted that the sides were dotted with many doors,

identical except for diameter. They were ready to pick one at random when the tunnel ended in a hemisphere, also dotted with doors, all of them closed except for one, standing open like an invitation.

Without comment, they went through.

Just inside was a second door, opened inward. "Told you they were airlocks," Pops said.

The door led into a large chamber, one side roughly a hemisphere, and the other flattened, but entirely

covered with peculiar shallow depressions, clearly paired, each pair outlining an elongated figure eight.

"What do you make of that, Rick?" Pops asked.

"Beats me," Rick said. "But have you noticed that since we've entered the comet, other than the doors,

we haven't seen anything like what you'd find in, say, an abandoned human asteroid colony?"

"Like what?"

"Like the Phinon equivalent of walnut paneling on the walls, or cheap carpeting, or broken furniture in

the corner not worth salvaging. We might just as well be in that ant hill you mentioned."

"There are light fixtures on the ceiling," Pops said. "At least, that's what I assume those tubes are for."

Rick looked in the direction Pops was pointing.

"Okay, an ant hill with electric light," Rick said.

At the end of the chamber was a single door. It was closed. Like with all the doors they'd seen, on one

side was a triangular knob. Pops turned it clockwise and it wouldn't budge. A counterclockwise twist and slight tug and the door opened. Unlike the entry to the chamber, this door was not part of an airlock. They went through, on foot this time since the door was too narrow to fly through together, and Pops shone the searchlight around.

"Ah. Technology," he said.

"Judas Priest," Rick whispered softly.

As Pops moved the beam around, now and then a brilliant reflection of blue or green or diamond white would come back from the huge and baffling array of oddly twisted and contorted instrument panels. "Indicator lights," Rick surmised about the reflections.

To the two humans, it was all a confused mess.

"Lieutenant?" Pops said, calling the ship. There was no answer. "Lieutenant? Where are you, Bob?"

"Bob?" Rick called himself.

"Right here," came back, and Rick found that he'd been holding his breath. "Sorry. I was in back running

a statistical package on the structure of the tunnels. I'm up in the bubble again," Bob said.

"Just wanted to make sure you're recording this on the ship, too," Pops said. "We've found something interesting."

"Flash me what you're seeing through your cameras."

"Okay," Pops said. "I'm panning around this room. Now, you're our expert on Phinon technology, Rick.

What do you make of all this crap?" "I'd guess it's some kind of control center. But God only knows what it's supposed to control. Zoom in on one of the panels." Pops complied, and Rick continued. "That's pretty typical. Indicator lights, always circular, dials and knobs, but nothing ever calibrated. Or at least not in any way that we could figure out. I guess whichever Phinons operate these panels are just supposed to know how much to turn the knobs given whatever situation. And none of the lights are red. We think the Phinons might see in a spectrum that extends farther into the UV than ours, but not as low into the red. But that's just speculation."

"But every single control uncalibrated?" Pops asked. "Ye gods, there're millions of them in here. Bob,

I'm going to pan around this room and get it all recorded. Hey, there's a table over there with some, uh, things on it." Pops went to the table. "Any ideas on this stuff, Rick?"

"None of it looks familiar. Looks like plumber's cultch," Rick told him.

" 'Cultch'?" Pops repeated, the question obvious.

" 'Good junk,' " Rick translated.

"We'll take some of these pieces with us on our way back out," Pops said. "I'm done recording by the

way. There's another door at the end of this room, Bob. Closed, but maybe not locked."

The door came open with no trouble at all, and Pops and Rick found themselves in another long tunnel, openings without doors lining its length, oriented in all possible directions. The tunnel curved away at the limit of their searchlight. They went down the tunnel and stuck their heads into each room. All the rooms were small chambers, empty, roughly of sixty cubic meters' volume, though the actual linear dimensions differed for each.

"What do you make of this tunnel, Pops?" Rick asked.

"Storage areas? Phinon apartments? Beats the hell out of me. But we seem to be heading in a less and less interesting direction."

Pops turned his searchlight directly ahead again and now they'd come far enough to see the end. "Another door," he said. "Let's try that one, and if it turns out to be a loser, we'll try another direction."

"Okay."

Pops opened the door, they went through, and stood there in stunned silence, just looking around. Finally, Pops said, "Well, we wanted interesting. This fits the bill."

"I saw a picture like this once," Rick said. "It was of the dead they found in the Nazi death camps after the Second World War. Bodies stacked like cordwood. Of course, they weren't Phinon bodies."

Stacked all around them in nearly every possible place were bound bundles of dead Phinons. The bodies were entirely desiccated, but it was unclear to them whether or not they had gotten that way from their exposure to vacuum, or if they'd been dried out before being stacked and strapped together.

"So, you've found the Phinon graveyard." It was Bob. Pops and Rick had almost forgotten that he was watching through the video link. "I'd love to try to figure out what their views are of the afterlife from this display."

"You'd think you'd get a creepier feeling from looking at something like this," Rick said. "But, hell, Phinons use hydraulics. If you didn't know they'd been alive you'd think you were looking at bundles of used parts from an earth-moving-machine junkyard. It's all knobs on the ends of steel struts and pistons and tubes."