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cloud cover parted for a moment.
    There on the hillock, black with lunar highlights, sat something inexplicable. A thousand generations of instincts couldn't identify it. Big. Not man. No ancestor had hunted this thing, none had fled and lived to remember. Her cortex knew what it was not, but could not say what it was.
    Unknown. A threat. It might harm man or man's children. Kill!
    The thing cocked its head sideways and cooed.
    The sounds were disturbing. What had ever sounded like that? Where were the men? Sheena's ears flattened back against her head. This was not a dog's job. There were no men here. Sheena leaped to do battle.
    One moment it was there, and Sheena's teeth were snapping at its neck. Her teeth closed on nothing. It receded like a cloud-shadow beneath the moon, and returned as fast, and now it was on Sheena's back. Its cold, broad feet clamped around her middle with sudden, terrifying strength. Sheena's ribs sagged inward. She snarled her agony and rolled to mash the thing from her back.
    It walked off her while she was rolling and was several feet away. Fast, unfairly fast! Thick fleshy lips pulled back from daggerlike teeth in a grimace of pleasure. Lovingly it cooed to Sheena.
    Sheena was terrified now, but she leaped.
    She was in the air when the creature rolled. Its jaws flashed up and locked on her throat, reducing her death scream to no more than a terrified hiss. It drew back into the shadows before she hit the ground.
    She lay on her side, struggling weakly to breathe, bubbles of air shining blackly in the moonlight as they pulsed from her throat.
    She watched her killer draw close, stared into its eyes, its huge, soft, silver eyes. She whimpered.
    It cooed at her, and when Sheena's flanks ceased trembling, came closer and gently licked at the blood oozing from her throat. The creature was hot, like a stove. It turned its back. Sheena felt blades entering her, and then nothing.

Chapter 3
    FROZEN SLEEP
     
    The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay,
    Sat by the fire, and talked the night away
    Wept o'er his wounds, or tales of sorrow done
    Shouldered his crutch, and show'd how fights were won.
    OLIVER GOLDSMITH, "The Deserted Village"
     
    Geographic was one of the largest mobile objects created by human engineering. Seen from below as the shuttle rose to meet her, the ship looked like a gigantic flashlight with a silver doorknob attached to the end. The aft end was a ring of laser fusion reactors, a flaring section twice the diameter of the trunk. The trunk, over a hundred and fifty meters in length, was the cylinder that housed the life-support systems and cryogenic suspension facilities. Minerva Two was approaching the fore end: the laboratories and the crew quarters, where Cadmann had spent five waking years of his life. The dock was a conical cagework at the end of a protruding arm, barely visible even this close.
    Minerva Two slowed as she rounded the fuel balloon. Bobbi Kanagawa was a cautious pilot. Cadmann's fingers itched and twitched. His touch would have been surer, his approach would have been faster.
    But he wasn't flying Minerva Two.
    Geographic's fuel balloon was shrunken, spent, and half its original size. Only a breath of gas remained of a half-kilometer sphere of deuterium ice. The Colony could not produce deuterium, not yet. We were Homo interstellar, Cadmann thought. We will be again.
    Some of the external paneling had been stripped away from Geographic and shuttled down to Tau Ceti Four for building material. The shuttle maneuvered past a drifting mass. The tightly wrapped cylinder, scores of kilometers of superconducting wire, waited to be loaded in Minerva Two's bay by robot limpet motors. These would become part of the fusion plant. Its completion meant limitless power.
    Eventually the Orion craft would be a skeleton, just an orbiting splinter of light in the sky. Perhaps she might survive in smaller form, with most of the life-support cylinder removed: an interplanetary vehicle,