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studying as Blake ducked into the hut. He peered shrewdly at Blake and knew the news was good. “Success, I assume.”
    Blake’s expression sagged only slightly; he wished Forster wouldn’t assume so easily. Finding and leasing a working ice mole, and keeping the search reasonably confidential, was not so straightforward that success could be assumed in advance.
    But Blake had been successful, after all, and Forster—who looked only a few years older than Blake, but who had actually been at this game for decades—was accustomed to compromise and improvisation and had probably developed a sixth sense for the problems that were really hard and the ones that only seemed that way. “Lim’s machine will do the job,” Blake acknowledged.
“Any particular problems?”
     
“Lim tried to cheat me. . . .”
     
Forster frowned, affronted.
     
“So I asked him to be our agent.”
     
“You did what?” One of Forster’s bushy brows shot up.
    Good, that got a rise out of him. Blake smiled—mild enough revenge for Forster’s assumptions. “We played a lit-tle game of bargaining. He played by the rules, so I decided to trust him to help us locate the other machine. He’s got unique contacts in the community. My problem is that, even though I can pass, nobody knows who I am. That’s what’s taken me so long to get this far.”
    “Sorry if I’ve been presumptuous.” Forster had finally heard some of his young colleague’s hitherto unstated frus-tration. “You’ve been carrying a heavy load. As soon as it’s safe for the rest of us to show our faces, we’ll be able to relieve you.”
“I won’t count on any help until the day we blast off, then,” Blake said, smiling wryly. “According to my informants, guess who’s about to descend on us from Helios .”
     
Forster’s cheerful expression folded into gloom. “Oh dear.” “ ’Fraid so. Sir Randolph-Call-Me-Arnold-Toynbee-Mays.”

V
    After weeks in space, planetfall. The great fusion-powered passenger liner Helios , all its portholes and glassy prome-nades ablaze, was inserting itself by the gentlest of nudges into parking orbit around Ganymede.
    And in the Centrifugal Lounge, a celebration: passengers chattering at each other, drinking from tall flutes of golden champagne, some of them dancing tipsily to the music of the ship’s orchestra. Randolph Mays was there, although he firmly believed no one recognized him or even knew he’d been among them, for it suited him to travel incognito—as he had been since before Helios had left Earth—thus to see but not be seen. He was one of those men who liked to watch.
    And to listen. The curve of the Centrifugal Lounge’s floor-walls, designed to maintain a comfortable half-g of artificial gravity for the comfort of the passengers, also made a good, quasi-parabolic reflector of sound waves. Peo-ple standing opposite each other in the cylindrical room—thus upside down with respect to each other—could hear one another’s conversations with perfect clarity.
    Randolph Mays craned his neck back and peered upward at a striking young woman, Marianne Mitchell, who stood momentarily alone directly over his head. A few meters away a young man, Bill Hawkins, was trying to work up his nerve to approach her.
    She was certainly the prettiest woman on the ship, slen-der, dark-haired, green-eyed, her full lips glossy with bold red lipstick. For his part, Hawkins too was passably attrac-tive, tall and broad-shouldered, with thick blond hair slicked straight back—but he lacked confidence. He’d managed no more than a few inconsequential conversations with Mar-ianne in weeks of opportunity. Now his time was short—he would be leaving Helios at Ganymede—and he seemed to be trying to make up his mind to have one last go at it.
    Through one of the thick curving windows that formed the floor, Marianne watched as, far below, the Ganymede spaceport swung into view on the icy plains of the Shoreless Ocean. Beneath her feet