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group. She raised her eyebrows. He said, “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
    Ell closed her eyes. “You’ve found someone diddling the books?” she sighed.
    “Yeah.”
    She laughed hollowly, “Well , I guess this isn’t as bad as when you called to tell me that a comet was going to wipe all of us out? ”
    “No t quite that bad, no .”
     
    ***
     
    Dex woke in the night to find the fire out. H i e heard snarling and snapping from the direction of the talor’s carcass. When h i e got up , Syrdian’s voice came out of the stygian darkness, “Where are you going?”
    “To restart the fire.” Dex got up and felt around for the firewood . A meteor fireball streaked over , starkly lighting the area for a moment. With the wood and the fire’s locations fixed in hies mind hie quickly found several sticks and stirred through the fire until the motion activated a few coals. The sticks caught and Dex moved some more wood close by. Hie looked out into the darkness and saw the eyes of some nocturnal creature looking back at himr. Hie shivered and lay down, closer to the fire this time. After all h e would have to add wood frequently.
     
    ***
     
    “OK,” Ell said, looking around. “The test ports still functioned after we sterilized them with chlorine dioxide. So each of us need to look over the plans again to be sure there are no cavities inside the TC3 rocket that are closed off, we want the chlorine dioxide to be able to get into every area. Dr. Norris, your ethanol-peroxide rocket engines are working fine. I’m confident that we’ve protected TC3 from Earth microorganisms. I’m still worried about backflow from TC3 to Earth, especially through the attitude jets that we usually just blow gas through. Firing and killing ethanol-peroxide rockets doesn’t happen fast enough to give us the fine control we’re used to for attitude . ”
    Roger said, “I’ve been worrying about that too , and I have a suggestion that I think is doable with port tech?”
    They all turned to him. “ You put a long pipe out in space through a port. I’m talking hundreds of meters. It has a port at one end that we put compressed air into from down here. At the other end you put a series of ports that go to the attitude jets. Then we wrap the Earth end of the pipe with heating elements that we use to keep the 20 meters closest to earth at about 500 0 C. That is far, far beyond the temperature that an y earth spores can survive at. P resumably it would sterilize any TC3 organisms too. So air flows in one end, gets heat sterilized in that first 20 meters, then flows down to the cold end of the pipe where it cools back down. Anything back-flowing through the port at the TC3 end would have to pass through the hot end before it could get back here to earth. You put the pipe into a decaying orbit around the sun so that, after we’re done with it, if it were contaminated with something bad , no one could pick it up and accidentally encounter any TC3 microorganisms.”
    Roger said, “We could ‘black’ the hot end and ‘mirror’ the cold end so that the sun would help us keep one end hot and the other end cool. I’d also suggest that we make it so that we can heat 40 meters when we’re expecting to use the jets and only 10 meters between jet uses. Then we can be sure that nothing from this end might move through the hot section so fast that it doesn’t get killed.”
    They added to the list of instruments they wanted on the rocket and finally included one of Ben Stavos’ mechanical arms and a port behind a glass window that they could shine light through at night or use to fire lasers through, ablating materials for spectroscopic analysis. That port was a double port with the intermediate section on the “space pipe” and filled with toxic gas.
    Wilson Daster suggested that every port to the TC3 rocket have an intermediary on the space pipe , if possible in the hot end .
    Eventually, h appy with the design , they all divided