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tubes under one arm. Bronwyn wandered unhindered over to the capsule. A short wooden ladder had been placed against the inwardly sloping surface, its top reaching the larger manhole; she mounted it and poked her head into the space vessel’s interior. It was garishly illuminated by an electric light, which revealed a confused welter of open gridworks, structural members, festoons of wire, cables and piping, interim wooden planking and almost nothing that made much sense to her.
    The life compartment’s propulsion unit was more interesting and appeared to be virtually complete. It was an hexagonal box about fifteen feet tall standing on spidery-looking tubular legs that unfolded from each of the six corners. These, she knew, would be collapsed against the sides of the spacecraft during the launch and flight through space and would not be deployed until needed for the landing on the moon. Since the legs raised the propulsion unit off the floor by several feet she was able to look beneath it. Visible were the 1,050 circular openings of the medium and small rockets that would enable the space flyers to cancel their enormous velocity and descend safely onto the lunar surface. Above these, she knew, was the bank of 600 small rockets necessary to escape the moon’s lesser gravity for the return to the earth. It made her skin crawl when she realized that the rocket tubes were in place and that the slightest provocation might be sufficient to ignite them, incinerating her as efficiently and completely as a bug under a blowtorch.
    As she stood erect she appreciated with a kind of unexpected certainty how close to realization the project actually was; its abstraction evaporated suddenly, leaving her chilled and uncertain of her mood. Wittenoom’s really going to do it! she thought, feeling as though someone had just plucked her spine, twanging it like the string of a violin . . . pretty much as Rykkla was almost simultaneously experiencing the same unpleasant phenomenon.
    As soon as the life compartment is completed, he’ll leave! she realized or, rather, admitted. No, as soon as the life compartment is completed, we leave! She corrected herself because when she had first arrived in Toth and rejoined Professor Wittenoom at the Academy, and he had explained his ambitions to her fully, she had immediately, in a kind of fit of enthusiasm and solidarity, volunteered to join him, an offer the scientist had seen no reason to refuse.

CHAPTER THREE
    OUT OF THE FRYING PAN
    Rykkla’s prison was as squalid as she had anticipated it would be, which at least was something about which not to be disappointed . . . the only good thing about the situation that she could discover. She had been securely locked in a windowless cubicle attached to the back of the inn. Its six hundred cubic feet sounded voluminous until that number was back-calculated into a cramped ten by ten by six. Rykkla’s head brushed the dust and cobwebs from the undersurface of the ceiling, making her look decades older, she would have taken little comfort in the truth that it made her look corpse--like. The chamber had evidently been used as an animal pen altogether too recently. Rykkla reasonably concluded that there were no animals in it at the moment because they had all died, decomposed and eventually but inefficiently absorbed into the dirt floor, a supposition encouraged by the ripely sweet odor of recent decay. Then again, perhaps it had been used to house other unfortunate prisoners, who had been abandoned to the same fate of inevitable corporeal dissolution. She considered digging through the adobe walls, which would not have presented any particular difficulty (or so she thought; she was sadly underestimating the strength of two-foot-thick clay walls that had been fusing for generations under a desert sun); except that she had nowhere to go other than to disappear into the surrounding desert, which she would do like a krill absorbed into the indifferent maw of the