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Nor was he able to ignore the fact that somewhere in front of him were men whose job it was to cut him off from
Magellan
. Every few seconds he anxiously scanned the sky. His intellect told him that eyeball reconnaissance was less than useless in the vastness of space, but some impulse within made him look anyway.

Mark was engaged in one of his periodic scans of the black sky when he was overcome with a nearly overpowering urge to vomit. Again, he found his heart in his throat as he wildly scanned his instruments.

Whatever was wrong, it was not his suit. All his displays read normal. Gritting his teeth, he forced himself to concentrate on the blackness in front of him although it caused shooting pains at the backs of his eyes.

Something was terribly wrong with the universe! The few stars he could see seemed to be wavering and blinking on and off. What could cause such a phenomenon? Correction. What could distort a
reflection
of the stars that way? Of course! Something had disturbed the mirror and it was distorting his view of the stars.

“You are too close!” his mind screamed as his brain used the new information to recalibrate the size of the mirror before him. He had misjudged, waited too long, and now nothing could prevent a collision! As he felt his heart pounding in his temples, he forgot his resolve about not radiating, and ordered a single ranging pulse from his suit radar.

The answer came back at the speed of light. He was ten kilometers from the mirror and closing at 320

kph. He had cut it too damned fine. In another fifty seconds, it would have been too late.

A clammy chill ran down his spine as he began the maneuvers that would give him enough lateral velocity to miss the mirror - maybe. He twisted the thruster control and was rewarded by a quiet hissing from his backpack accompanied by a gentle hand pushing in the small of his back.

This close to the mirror it was possible to see imperfections in its surface - micrometeoroid punctures and places where the coating had flaked off over the years. The round edge of the mirror was flashing toward him at a frightful speed. Mark flinched as the mammoth wall reached up to swat him?

#

Niles Pendergast was worried. For long minutes, he had been effectively blind. He could see Harlan Frees and his two companions, but not the quarry. The PoleStar reflector had effectively masked him from sight. He was sweeping the vicinity of the reflector with the ship’s ultraviolet laser for the hundredth time when Frees’s excited voice burst forth from the comm speaker.

“Kutzkov, Donner, the son-of-a-bitch just zipped past me! He could not have been more than three hundred meters out when he entered the sunbeam. All I got was the impression of a helmet. He must have his suit coated with something. Where is he, Control?” This last was addressed to Pendergast.

“Three kilometers above you, Harlan,” the young ensign reported, having reacquired the intruder. He reeled off a string of numbers that told Frees the position vector from his location, and then listened as Frees cautioned the other two against damaging the mirror with their jets. A moment later, all three rose slowly away from the reflector on minimum power. A kilometer above the mirror they began accelerating as fast as their backpacks would allow. Even so, it was obvious that they were in for a long chase.

Frees set the laser to automatic and began painting the intruder continuously. He smiled. Whoever this maniac was, if his faceplate did not stop ultraviolet, he was going to have quite a sunburn when he woke up tomorrow. Serve him right!

Pendergast was startled by a voice from close beside him. “Who else have we got out there?”

He turned to discover the captain floating behind his chair, watching the pursuit on the screen.

“Uh, Murphy and Goldstein, Captain. They’re trying to recapture that generator.”

“Order them to secure and join the chase. We’ll trap him between them and Frees.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Pendergast issued the orders and received an acknowledgment from the two affected spacers. By the time they jetted away from the ship, the intruder had closed half the distance to
Magellan

. If he did not begin decelerating soon, he would overshoot.

“Put me on the emergency circuit,” Landon ordered.

“Circuit live, Captain.”

“You there! We have you surrounded. Begin decelerating or else you will be fired upon. I repeat, we are tracking you and will fire if you do not halt.” He made a throat cutting motion and Pendergast killed the circuit.

“Fire on him with what?” Pendergast muttered.

“Hopefully, Ensign, he doesn’t know that starships are unarmed.”

“And if he does know?”

“Obviously, he has at least heard rumors about our guest. Maybe he has also heard that we destroyed that alien ship back at New Eden. If so, that knowledge alone ought to give him pause.”

Long seconds passed without anything happening. Then Pendergast noted that the visible light telescope had recorded several actinic sparks in the location of the intruder. “It looks like that did it, Captain. He is decelerating.”

“Good! Tell Lieutenant Frees where he can pick up his captive.”

Pendergast reached out to activate the comm again then froze. “Damn, Captain, he’s changing course.”

“For where?”

Pendergast glanced at his commanding officer, his mouth agape. “The habitat, sir. He is making directly for the PoleStar Habitat!”

The PoleStar Habitat and
Magellan
were two crescent shapes that mimicked the Earth-Moon system when viewed from outside Earth’s orbit. Had Earth been in the background rather than somewhere behind Mark Rykand’s right shoulder, the station and starship would have presented one of those picture-postcard-from-space shots that first time tourists to orbit are so fond of sending home. As it was, the beauty of the scene was lost on Mark. He was far too busy to pay any attention to scenery.

Mark was still shaking from his close encounter with the PoleStar reflector. He could not get the vision out of his mind of that giant mirror rushing toward him. The only good thing about the near miss had been that it had frightened him into closing his eyes, and thus, he had not been blinded when he passed through the sunbeam. His moment of closest approach had been signaled by sudden brightness behind closed eyelids and then dark again.

Once the mirror lay behind him,
Magellan
had had no problem picking him up again.
“You there! We
have you surrounded. Begin decelerating or else you will be fired upon. I repeat, we are tracking
you and will fire if you do not halt.”

The voice was the sort that people obey instinctively. Mark put down the sudden urge to begin decelerating and turned instead to the problem of this new threat. Did starships really carry space weapons, and if so, would they actually fire on him?

The problem, he soon realized, was academic. Throughout his ordeal, he had constantly scanned space, attempting to locate his pursuers. As he scanned the starship shortly after flashing through the sunbeam, his eyes were drawn to two sparks that could only come from backpack thrusters. The sparks were in front of him and undoubtedly vectoring to cut him off!

Mark’s attention had been focused on
Magellan
ever since it had grown large enough to be visible. The new threat caused him to scan the vicinity of PoleStar, looking for other sparks of radiance. The habitat was larger than the starship and closer. With no intervening atmosphere to soften the details, he had a sharp, clear view of the lighted portion of the station. The lighted half of the hull was a jumble of gas tanks, piping, conduits, heat exchangers, and bowl-shaped communications antennas. Away from the lighted crescent, Mark could see nothing at all of the station save for a few lighted ports.

The station’s messy exterior gave him an idea. Again, he faced the problem that he was hanging in empty space with nowhere to hide from the questing sensors of the starship. With PoleStar between him and
Magellan
, it might be possible to pull the same trick he had with the reflector. If he grounded in the shaded hemisphere and hid among the external machinery, his suit’s non-reflective coating ought to make him invisible. He could use the cover to make his way around to the opposite side of the station. From there, it would be a straight jump for the starship and a short enough trip that it was unlikely anyone would intercept him. If he could make it to one of
Magellan
’s airlocks without interference, then he could put his case to Jani’s commanding officer.

#

Lisa Arden was indulging in her one luxury. She was taking a shower.

She had expected that her workload would be reduced once Sar-Say learned to speak Standard.

Instead, she found herself working harder and longer as her job description evolved to keep pace with Sar-Say’s increasing sophistication. She was less a linguist now and more a teacher/explainer. Despite his surface fluency with the language, there were still many human concepts Sar-Say had difficulty grasping.

Nor did the education flow in only one direction. Even as he learned to speak Standard, the small alien continued to teach Lisa the Broan lingua franca. She was frustrated by her progress and worried that her lack of ability reflected badly on humanity. After all, weren’t humans as smart as Taff?

Nor had her transformation from teacher to student been the only change in her role. Increasingly she was Sar-Say’s interrogator. Instead of spending her entire day answering the alien’s questions, she often asked him questions sent up from Earth. In addition to the scientists aboard PoleStar, the Stellar Survey had established a working group of scientists on Earth to study the alien’s claims. From the number of questions they transmitted each week, it seemed to Lisa that they were taking their jobs entirely too seriously.

All of these new responsibilities had her working sixteen-hour days and left her tired and irritable. Once a week, she would give in to her indolent impulses, seal herself into a shower cylinder, and let the warm water/air mixture run over her until her tension ebbed away. There was nothing quite so sensuous as tilting her face up into the stream and letting water trickle down her flanks. The warm air that accompanied the water had the effect of pulling her down to the open grillwork floor, giving at least the illusion of gravity.

She was startled out of her reverie by a sharp rap on the glass of the cylinder. Opening her eyes and wiping the water from them, she noted the silhouette of Sar-Say’s compact form through the frosted glass. Sighing, she reached out and punched the control that would turn off the water.

“What is it?” she asked, her voice echoing strangely in the enclosed space as the flood reduced to a sprinkle.

“Dieter Pavel is on the screen for you,” the alien said.

“Tell him I am in the shower and will call him back.”

“He says that it is urgent.”

“It never fails,” she muttered. To Sar-Say, she said, “Hand me a towel.”

#

Mark was sweating inside his suit despite the best efforts of the environmental control system to keep him cool. Like every other phase of this foolhardy stunt, he was surprised that he was still alive. He had ordered his suit computer to get him to the PoleStar habitat in minimum time. It had done just that. It had taken all of his willpower not to override the program as he had fallen rapidly toward the very solid looking half-sphere with the lighted ports. At the last minute, the suit had automatically fired its jets, shutting them off just as his boots touched down on PoleStar station.

He had landed on the shadow side of the station, yet his surroundings were not as dark as he had expected. One glance behind him showed him the reason. The Earth was low above the station’s limb and bathed the area in reflected sunlight a hundred times brighter than a full moon. He skimmed low over the various outcroppings that turned the hull into a miniature landscape until the Earth dropped below the horizon. He again grounded on the hull and lost no time in pulling himself into a nearby maze of pipes. He discovered that he could align himself between two pipes and pull himself hand over hand with relative ease. It was, he decided, the space equivalent of crawling through a ditch on one’s belly.

After five minutes of scrambling through a stygian forest of unseen plumbing, he decided that he had moved far enough from his landing point to take a breather. Besides, he was lost and needed to orient himself. He anchored behind the blunt, square shape of a waste heat radiator and gazed skyward. Above him, looking like a wide, shallow cake pan, floated the reflector he had come so close to hitting. A bright spark in the sky just above the mirror drew his attention. He was surprised to see a tiny human figure attached to the spark.

As he watched intently, the vacuum suit grew larger and brighter as the man arrowed toward where Mark had first grounded. Soon the figure disappeared under the short horizon and Mark decided that he had best move along.

It was easy to see his surroundings now that his eyes had adapted to the darkness. His pursuers, on the other hand, were hovering in sunlight and would be unable to penetrate the stygian pit in which he was hiding. Even if their suits were equipped with light amplifiers, he would merely appear to be another diffuse shadow amid a confusing jumble of shadows.

Mark found his way blocked by a massive machine he did not recognize. Casting about for another path, he discovered that he had reached one of the lighted viewports he had seen from space. Turning away before the light streaming forth ruined his vision; he reversed course until he found a wiring conduit headed in the direction he wanted to go.

#

The shower door opened and a brown furry hand slipped through. A large towel was suspended from the six fingers. Lisa thanked Sar-Say and wrapped herself carefully in the towel, making sure it would not ride up in the absence of gravity. Her modesty was not aimed at Sar-Say. She felt no more concern about undressing in front of him than she would in front of a pet dog. What she
was
modest about, however, were the video cameras in their living quarters. She was damned if she was going to give an eyeful to whoever had monitoring duty tonight.