"What's the Old Man want?" he said. "I've got two hundred trays of wingbean seedlings to set out."

"Your guess is as good as mine," Jameson said.

Jameson found an empty seat near the back and sat down. The saloon was filling up fast. A couple of minutes later, Maggie MacInnes slid in next to him. A bony hip b.u.mped his. She turned her head and blinked orange eyelashes. "Hi," she said. "We haven't seen much of you these days."

"Li and I pretty well wrapped up the landing exercises a month ago," he said. "I've been working for Captain Boyle. Got to earn my keep while we're getting there."

She brushed a loose strand of red hair from her cheek. "I'm glad you're going to be one of the execs in charge," she said.

"I'm just third officer. By the way, that was a nice set of trajectory parameters you sent up yesterday. I recognized your touch."

She shrugged freckled shoulders. "I want to get to Jupiter in one piece too."

The buzz of conversation around them died down as Captain Boyle came in and took his place on the little raised platform with the folding Moog and the music stands. He smiled and nodded at a couple of people in the front row, then stood in an easy posture, one thumb hooked into his harness, while he waited for everyone's full attention.

Boyle was a big, imposing man with a red face and a thick, powerful neck. His cap of tight curls was thinning, and under the harness straps and the fresh uniform blouse donned for the occasion his wide shoulders and bull-like chest were tending toward bulk, but his waist was as trim as it had been when he commanded the expedition that had begun the work of seeding the Venusian clouds with life. Like many big men, he moved well, and in a way that inspired instant confidence.

"Ladies, gentlemen, and all you others," he began; there was a dutiful laugh. "I won't keep you long. I just want you all to know that, as of a couple of hours ago, our mission is officially go." He drew a length of message strip out of the pocket of his shorts and waved it at them. "I've just received confirmation from Earth of our original target date-" A ragged cheer went up, and in the second row Mike Berry stood up and raised clasped hands in a victory gesture. Captain Boyle motioned for silence and went on.

"I know that there have been times in the last year and a half when some of you thought we'd never make it"-groans from the audience-"but I want to say that I'm proud of you and all your efforts."

His manner became more serious. "At this moment, 'over in the opposite side of the ship, Captain Hsieh is giving essentially the same message to his crew. A great new era in the exploration of s.p.a.ce is about to begin. As representatives of the human race, we are going to"-he cleared his throat and looked a little embarra.s.sed-"to carry the banner of mankind farther from our home planet than we've ever gone before-ten times as far..."

Maggie nudged Jameson. "Some pressec wrote that for him," she whispered.

Jameson frowned her into subsiding. Boyle's awkward words had stirred him more than all the slick panegyrics he'd heard on the holoset in the last couple of years. He didn't think anybody had written them for him.

Boyle was going on more briskly. "We'll be having a joint party with our Chinese crewmates tomorrow night"-there was a rustle of interest; the Chinese had remained correct but aloof during training, and get-togethers where you could socialize with them were rare--"but tonight I'm inviting you all to a party of our own in the bubble lounge at Eurostation. Drinks and eats are on me." Somebody whistled appreciatively; the bubble lounge was expensive.

He waved them into silence again. "We'll be essentially finishing our training sessions in the next week, except for wrap-ups. During the six weeks before countdown, there'll only be routine maintenance while the Earth crews finish up outfitting. I'm-happy to say that there'll be Earth furloughs for all of you on a staggered schedule."

Maggie turned to Jameson, her face shining. "Earth! I've been breathing canned air for six months now!"

Jameson drew a deep breath. It was real now. This was what all the hard work had been for. He realized that until this moment he hadn't really believed in it.

Around them, people had begun to chatter, to move restlessly in their seats. Captain Boyle held up his hand for silence again.

"Before we break this up, there are a couple of people I want you to meet. You'll be seeing a lot of them."

There was a stir of interest. Maggie was leaning to her left to see, a skinny thigh pressed against his.

A sandy-haired fellow with boyish, snub-nosed features and well-muscled shoulders under a sleeveless jersey came in through the door behind Boyle, moving in a catlike crouch that showed he'd spent a lot of time in low gravity. He waved at someone in the audience and took his place beside the captain.

"Most of you know Jack Gifford," Boyle said. "Jack worked right alongside Roy Jenkins as an alternate during the initial training exercises, and SRA's been keeping him up to date right along. I'm sorry to have to tell you that Roy's been scrubbed for medical reasons. We'll all miss him. Jack will take his place as probe tech."

Gifford smiled and nodded and took his place in the audience, squeezing in next to Sue Jarowski. He immediately struck up a conversation with her, something involving huge gestures. A couple of seats away, Dmitri looked unhappy.

Another man had slipped in through the door behind Boyle. He had a seal's head, sleek and shiny, and a triangular face with the kind of sallow complexion that always shows a subsurface smear of blue whiskers. The head seemed too small for the ma.s.sive slope of shoulders and the bunched muscles that stretched the sleeves of his T-shirt. He was wearing a pair of heavy boots with thick gum soles. They struck Jameson as, out of place in s.p.a.ce, where the soles of your feet were among your most important sense organs.

"This is Emmet Klein," Boyle said. "He'll be replacing Ham Bailey in charge of Stores." He cleared his throat. "Bailey will be returning Earthside for rea.s.signment. Our new stores exec is fully qualified-he's had three years at Mars Station and more recently has been working at the shuttle-launch complex at Salt Lake. I'm sure you'll all get along fine with him."

Maggie poked Jameson. "What do you think?"

Jameson frowned. "I don't understand," he said. "If Bailey had to be rea.s.signed, why didn't they replace him with Vitali or Michaels-somebody who's familiar with the mission? Mars and Salt Lake are impressive a.s.signments, but they're ground-based."

People were standing up. A small knot of men and women cl.u.s.tered around Klein and Gifford, all talking at once. Klein looked uncomfortable Jameson felt sorry for him.

"Meeting's over," Maggie said, getting up. "Are you going to be at the party tonight?"

"Wouldn't miss it," Jameson said. "First I've got to go over to China country and talk to Li about closing down the lander and getting it podded."

Captain Boyle was coming down the aisle, heading for the exit. Jameson stepped out and stopped him.

"What's all this about rea.s.signing Ham, Skipper?' he inquired. "He's the best stores exec we've ever had.

He's been checked out for the mission for a year."

Was Boyle avoiding his eyes? "I don't know, Commander," he said brusquely. "I don't make policy.

They do that down at s.p.a.ce Center."

"Nothing medical, I hope?"

"Bailey's fine."

"That's good to know. I'll look forward to helping give him a good send-off at the party."

The captain's red face seemed to get a shade redder. "He won't be at the party," he said. "He'll be leaving on the next shuttle." He looked at his watch. "About ten minutes from now."

Captain Boyle's party was turning into a noisy success. Most of the crew had made some effort to dress up in Earthside clothes for the occasion, and there was a glitter of bright colors and iridescent fabrics. A couple of the younger dancers of both s.e.xes wore little more than sparklepaint and stick.u.mcups, but Beth Oliver, the beautiful and sought-after chemistry chief, was stunning in a full-length kaleidogown that shifted from endlessly flowering geometric patterns that spilled out of scores of focal points to an eye-boggling infinite-depth effect as she twisted in time to the thrumming slipbeat. The dancers took advantage of the low gravity in the bubble lounge to do complicated midair pirouettes, sometimes joined and sometimes in facing pairs.

The bubble lounge, halfway up one of Eurostation's main spokes, had a dreamlike quarter-gravity that went with the imaginative decor: s.p.a.ce itself. The six enormous lobes of clear Lexan, bunched around the central shaft, brought the universe inside-an illusion that the designers had deliberately fostered by using the barest minimum of silvery, deceptively fragile-looking ribs to support the transparent plastic, and by the hologenerated sparks of light that flickered on and off throughout the interior, like stars pa.s.sing through. Directly above, you could see the diminishing spoke and the hub of the station, but everywhere else you saw only stars, drifting by like a million Christmas lights.

Jameson, a lidded drink in his hand, was part of the group gathered around the Moog. Mike Berry was at the keyboards, rapping out a creditable slipbeat. He'd dialed in a seventeen-bar ground that the Moog repeated over and over again, with random computer variations of timbre and ornamentation, and there was some kind of raga, also computer generated, weaving in and out of it. He'd punched in three basic beats that slid through one another with hypnotic insistence, and over the whole framework he was improvising a primitive but energetic melange of chords and runs that contained fragments of some of the more popular recent hits.

"Want to spell me, old chum?" Berry asked Jameson.

"No thanks," Jameson said. "I'd rather enjoy my drink. I'll suffer along with you."

Maggie, leaning over the console, her hand on Berry's shoulder, looked up and said, "Why don't you?

Mike tells me you're good."

Jameson laughed. "I noodle around a little-old music mostly. I'm no good at party stuff. I'd kill the dancing."

"He's right," Berry said. "No sense of rhythm-even with the Moog to help him. He's better off poking around with Bach and Mozart and Farnaby and all those other ancient foot-tappers he likes."

"I don't like committee music," Jameson said good-naturedly. "At least the Chinese leave out the aleatory computer input."

"He has a hyper ear for tone, though, I'll give him that," Berry went on imperturbably. "Did you know that behind that standard face lurks the gift of absolute pitch?"

"Is that true?" Maggie said.

Berry answered for him. "Of course, absolute pitch has nothing to do with musical talent. It's just a freak ability."

"Mike, on the other hand, has talent but a tin ear," Jameson said. "Haven't you noticed that the Moog's out of tune? The last person who used it must have been fooling around with an enharmonic change between F sharp and G flat. I've been wincing for the last half-hour. You better clear the instructions and get it back to equal temperament."

Unabashed, Berry went on playing.

"Can you really tell?" Maggie said.

Jameson's attention was distracted by the sight of Sue Jarowski drifting over, with the new man, Gifford, in tow like a magnetized particle. Sue was wearing an off-the-bosom chlamys with what seemed to be nothing more than a spray-on on the revealed side. "Sure," he said absently. "Won a lot of bets with it when I was a cadet-earned my pocket money that way. Used to bet I could tell a fellow what note his boot was squeaking on, or whether somebody had just belched in B flat or B natural."

"Maggie's an antiquarian too," Berry said. "Collects old things."

"Old physicists, you mean?" Jameson said automatically.

Maggie laughed. "Nothing too really hyper," she said. "Twentieth-century plastic bottles, mostly."

"Expensive hobby," Jameson said.

Sue and Gifford pushed their way through the circle surrounding the Moog. Dmitri was hovering miserably nearby. Sue gave them all a big, earthy smile. Jameson wondered if he could pry Sue away from the party before Gifford did.

Berry lit up a joint and let the Moog do the work while his hands were busy. The dancers didn't seem to notice. With Berry no longer hammering away, the computer reached into its memory and filled in the gap with a standard contrapuntal theme that would go with the raga. It sounded fine.

"Have a gasp," Berry said, pa.s.sing the joint to Gifford. "This is all organic-no synthetic THC added."

"Thanks," Gifford said, taking a drag and pa.s.sing it to Sue. "Too bad about Roy, but his hard luck's my ticket to Jupiter."

"Glad to have you aboard," Jameson said.

"Oh, here's our other new man," Sue said. "Hi."

Jameson looked around and saw Klein standing on the fringes of the group, a plastic-lidded mug in his hand, his eyes roving over the dancers across the way. He turned around and nodded-reluctantly, it seemed to Jameson.

"Hey, you were on Mars," Gifford said. "Do you know Raul Peterson? Stocky guy. Seismologist a.s.signed to Tharsis."

"I was at Syrtis Major," Klein explained. "Excuse me."

He threaded his way through the crowd and walked in his heavy boots over to the circular bar that skirted the center of the lounge. The two barwomen were both busy, so Klein reached across to help himself. As Jameson watched, Klein thumbed his mug open and started to pour himself a cup of coffee.

Just as Jameson was thinking that it was a little odd for Klein to be drinking coffee this early in the party, there was a scream and a little flurry of confusion up at the bar. Klein had managed to spill hot coffee over Beth Oliver, and himself, too. The coffee had streamed right past the rim of the mug and splashed them both. Klein hadn't allowed for the sidewise curving effect, of the Coriolis force when he poured. It seemed an odd lapse for someone who was supposed to be used to s.p.a.ce.

Klein, his sallow face turning livid, was apologizing to Beth, and the United German barmaid was hurrying over with a damp cloth to mop up Beth's kaleidogown. Jameson craned his neck to see above the heads of the crowd, but then Sue, her voice raised against the din, was saying something to him, and he forgot about Klein.

By the time the intruder from Cygnus crossed the orbit of Neptune, its ma.s.s had shrunk to approximately that of the planet Earth. It could be picked up visually now by the 500-inch Sagan reflector on the Moon and the smaller mirror at L-5. With computer-enhancement of the images, its surface features-if you could call them that-could be seen quite plainly.

The Cygnus Object, as the freepie media called it now that its existence no longer could be kept a secret, turned out indeed to be an Earth-size plant, its surface masked by clouds of boiling hydrogen. It even had a moon-a seared, rocky body a couple of thousand miles in diameter-and it also had an inexplicable wobble, as if it were rotating about a common center of gravity with some ma.s.sive object, one that the telescopes could not detect.

It was going to intersect the plane of the solar system at a shallow angle-about seventeen degrees from the ecliptic-and its speed was now low enough, at some fourteen miles per second, to a.s.sure that it would be captured by the Sun.

There was going to be a new planet in the solar system.

There was no hint in any of the stories that the Cygnus Object once had been a dangerous emitter of X-rays whose pa.s.sage might have wiped Earth clean of life. There was no mention of the fact that it had shrunk from near-Jovian size in a matter of six months. Or that, against all natural law, it had unaccountably slowed to its present sedate speed from a velocity approaching that of light.

Fortunately for the authorities, the wandering planet had been obeying the laws of physics ever since it had come close enough to the solar system for Earthbound observatories and hundreds of amateur astronomers throughout the world to notice it, or its effects.

Independent observers were finding it remarkably difficult to get corroborating data from Farside or the Chinese observatory in the Jules Verne crater-though the Chinese claimed to have discovered the Cygnus Object first. Farside had issued a terse pressfax release just in time to prevent the Greater j.a.pan observatory at Vladivostok from establishing a prior claim, and had said little since. Farside's new director, Dr. Horace Mackie, was nowhere near as communicative and cooperative as Dr. Ruiz had been, and the man who had succeeded Mackie at the Sagan dome, a young former resident named Kerry, did nothing but spout officialese and academic doubletalk.

The newsies relied mostly on European and j.a.panese sources. There were enough compulsive talkers with Ph.D.s to give them all the copy and vids they needed about dead planets, torn from their suns, wandering through the void between the stars for millions of years. The story provided a brief circus for the public, and then it began to fade from the news.

Mizz Maybury was the first to notice anything.

She was on duty in the monitoring booth that shift.

For company she had a silent, flat-faced a.s.sistant named Sorg, who she knew worked for the NIB.

There had been a lot of them ever since Dr. Mackie had become director: extra people, new arrivals from Earth or Mare Imbrium who didn't seem to be doing anything much, or who, if, they did, weren't very good at their jobs.

"Set up the board for a visual fix on the visitor," she said, glancing at her worksheet instructions. "I'm supposed to run some spectra tests this shift. You can use the small refractor."

Sullenly, Sorg moved toward the panel. Maybury shuddered as he pa.s.sed her. He was a pale young man, short and stocky. She didn't like the way he kept sneaking glances at her when he thought she wasn't looking.

Unconsciously her hand strayed to the dollar-sized shaved spot on her skull, where she'd been braindipped. The hair was starting to grow back, and it itched. They had told her that removing the tiny sample of cortical tissue for chemical monitoring during questioning-they took less than a cubic millimeter-couldn't possibly harm her. She'd hardly felt the p.r.i.c.k of the dialytrode needle as it penetrated her scalp. But all the same, she hadn't felt the same since her arrest. It was more than a little scary to be locked up in a tiny room for a week while those dreadful men shouted at you and asked you questions and made all sorts of terrible accusations just to see how you'd react. They'd even told her that Dr. Ruiz had confessed that she had helped him sell information about the Cygnus Object to the Chinese!

Sheknew that couldn't be true. And then, when they couldn't shake her, all the questions about who she'd talked to since the sighting. All of them had been checked out, including her ailing grandmother on Earth.

Finally, when they were grudgingly satisfied, all the warnings-threats, really-about not discussing her work withanybody- not even her coworkers at Farside. She hadn't been allowed her six-month Earth furlough; and even a pa.s.s to Mare Imbrium was hardly worth it any more, with the government ha.s.sle.

For once, Sorg had managed to talk to the Farside computer without being asked to repeat himself. The photoplastic plate in front of her came to life with the Cygnus Object's hazy disk. The speck of light off to the side was its moon.

Maybury applied herself to her job. While she was at it, she hooked in the bolometer and took the planet's temperature.

It washot , despite its long sojourn in the chilly depths of interstellar s.p.a.ce. No walking barefoot on its still-unseen surface unless you wanted to burn your feet! That terrifying blast of X-rays as it plowed its way through the interstellar hydrogen must have warmed it up considerably-and warmed it all the way through. The surface temperature hadn't dropped by any noticeable fraction of a degree since the last bolometer reading.

She finished her measurements. Another moment and she would have told Sorg to switch off the image.

But she just happened to be still looking at the plate when it happened.

A first-magnitude star suddenly bloomed between the planet and its moon.

Almost at the same moment, an enormous whirlpool of hydrogen clouds began to form on the side of the planet facing the star.

Maybury blinked, unable to believe her eyes. Meteorological phenomena thousands of miles across just didn't develop in the s.p.a.ce of a few minutes!

She looked across at Sorg and hesitated. She really should call Dr. Mackie at this point. If anything interesting was developing, she'd probably be shooed out of the booth. That's the way things had been going at Farside since Dr. Ruiz had left. Her small jaw tightened stubbornly as professional pride took over. Sorg, lounging against a console, hadn't noticed anything. She punched her queries into her lightpad and thumbed them into the computer.

Data began to dance across the lightpad; she had told the computer not to duplicate the display on any of the data boards. She watched for several minutes, then set the computer to continuously monitor the planet's position against the solar orbit the observatory had plotted.