Icehenge

“We’ll stay behind Hilda for a day or so,” Davydov said. “Then back to work.” He heaved out a breath, gri

When the relieved celebration was over, and I had calmed down, I went into my room and fell into a deep sleep. Just before I woke up, I had a vivid dream:

I was a child, on Mars, and we were playing hide-and-seek, as we often did. We were at the station on Syrtis Major, on one of those broad desert plains that are strewn with boulders — boulders from the size of basketballs up to the size of a small room, all scattered across the plain in a regular pattern that used to baffle our elders. “There’s no way such even distribution could be natural,” my father would say, sitting on one of the rocks and staring out at the nearby horizon. “It looks like a stage set.”

But to us children it was perfectly natural. And in the late afternoons, after di

But I couldn’t come in. There was another it, something I didn’t recognize, a tall dark thing like one of the long black shadows come alive. It was nearly sunset, the ruby sun was touching the old crater wall to the west. I was hiding in earnest. I could just dare to put one eye over the rock, to see the dark shape move around, looking behind one rock after the other. Where was home base? The radio transmitter hissed. No one called. The dark thing that was it was moving toward my hiding place, checking boulder after boulder. The shadow of the crater wall was stretching across the plain, blacking out everywhere…

I shifted against the bed, half woke for a moment. Then my father had me by the hand. We were free of suits, under the dome. I was younger, about seven. We were walking across the baseball diamond. Dad had our gloves and the ball, one of the kids’ softballs that wouldn’t go very far when you hit it. “When I was your age and played baseball,” Dad told me, “the field was about the same size as this one.”

“This one’s little.”

“On Mars it is. But on Earth even the grown-up balls wouldn’t go very far when you hit them.”

“Because of gravity.” Whatever that meant.

“Right. The Earth pulls harder.” He gave me my glove and I stood behind home plate. He stood on the pitcher’s mound and we threw the ball back and forth. “That pitcher really got you yesterday.”

“Yeah. Right on my kneecap.”

Dad gri

“I don’t know.”

“You were out by a mile.” He fielded a low one. “And Sandy had just bunted and got out to get you to second. And once you’re on second you’re in scoring position.”

“I know,” I said. “I just took off when I got a good lead.”

“You sure did.” Dad was gri

And then I was ru

Nadezhda and Marie-A

They began working incessantly to complete the starship. Nadezhda and Marie-A

“…Degree of closure of any substance is established by its rate of consumption in the system, E, and the rate of flow in incomplete closure, e,” Nadezhda would mutter, as if praying, glancing balefully at me as I refused to work with them for more than several hours a day. The lights focused on the little desk, Marie-A

And closure for the whole system was a complex compilation of the degrees of closure for all the substances being recycled. But they could not get that master coefficient high enough, do what they might. I tried hard to figure out something myself. But perfect closure is not natural, it does not exist anywhere, except perhaps in the universe as a whole. Even there, no doubt each big bang is a little bit smaller… In the starship, the leaks would be in waste recycling. They couldn’t deal with the accumulation of chlorides, or the accumulation of humic matter in the algal reactors. And they wouldn’t be able to completely recycle corpses, neither animal nor human. Certain minerals… if only they could be re-introduced into the system, made useful to something which would transform them into something back in the mainstream of the cycle… So we worked, for hours and hours, mutating and testing bacteria, juggling the physiochemical processes, trying to make a tail-in-mouth snake that would roll across the galaxy.

One night when they were gone I typed out the full program and filled in estimated figures of my own, to find the point where the accumulations would imbalance the system enough to break it down. I got about seventy years.

It was an impressive achievement, given what they were given, but the universe is a big place, and they needed to do better.

One day while thinking about this problem of closure, a week or more after the fly-by, Andrew Duggins, Al Nordhoff, and Valenski stopped me in the hall. Duggins looked fat and unhealthy, as if the situation were taking its toll on him.

“We hear that you helped the mutineers evade a Committee police fleet that came near here,” he accused.

“Who told you that?” I said.

“It’s the talk of the ship,” he said angrily.

“Among whom?” I asked.

“That doesn’t matter,” Valenski said in his clipped, accented English. “The question is, did Committee police pass us by while we three were incarcerated last Friday?”

“Yes, they did.”

“And you were instrumental in making the plans to hide from them?”

I considered it. Well, I had done it. And I wanted to be known for what I was. I stared Valenski in the eye. “You could say that, yes.” A strange feeling, to be in the open-