For all my years in space, I could not escape a terrifying illusion.
The asteroid seemed suspended overhead, a shadowy starlit bulk.
The whirling cable seemed to hang straight down into an insane black pit.
The stars themselves seemed to spin crazily around and around and around me, until I had to fight a giddy nausea.
Northward, the anomaly was near one stationary pole of that whirling universe.
The black funnel of the guarded gateway was larger every time I looked, the yellow neck of the trapped asteroid always brighter in its bottomless throat.
Somewhere southward, Ken Star was maneuvering the capsule under cover of the ice asteroid.
Once or twice I saw the pale blue jet receding into starry distance.
For a time I lost it.
Then I saw it coming back—a faint blue flare with the capsule itself a tiny black point at its heart.
It passed while I clung to that slippery cable.
The blue flare winked out.
A shadow flickered across the whirling stars, just below me.
It went on, rockets dead, invisible.
Twisting anxiously on the cable, I looked after it into the anomaly.
Dizzy and shivering, I watched the rim of the funnel for the flash of a weapon.
I waited for the small new star that would be the capsule, sterilized. The dark universe kept whirling around me. The funnel kept growing. The point of yellow-white light in its throat was suddenly gone as that remote asteroid went through, into Nowhere.
Nothing else happened.
Muscles knotted and quivering, I climbed up through a cruel agony of sick exhaustion.
Though my strength was failing, that savage force decreased as I drew toward the axis of rotation.
Without thrusters, I had to make a reckless leap from that broken wheel to the nearly stationary hub that held the locks.
I caught the edge of the collapsed plastic shaft that lay across the lock and hauled myself along it until at last I could drag myself through the fouled valve and fall inside the lock.
For a time I simply lay there, trembling with exhaustion, until I found strength and purpose to cycle myself through the man-lock and clamber out of the suit and look for Lilith. She was gone from the lock deck.
Calling her name, I got no answer.
A dreadful stillness hung inside the ruined station.
Listening des-perately, I heard only the thudding blood in my own ears.
Cold alarm clutched at me.
Snatching a hand-jet, I soared wildly around the hub, hoarsely shouting her name.
Still she didn’t answer, but a muffled sob drew me to the deck of the next lock, the one from which the mutineers had fled.
I found her there, lying face down on a pile of space gear which the fugitives had left abandoned on the deck.
“Lilith!”
Whimpering and quivering, she didn’t seem to hear.
But I saw a darting, furtive movement, caught a flash of black and red and platinum.
For one dazed instant I thought she was trying her weapon on me.
Then dreadful understanding stunned me.
“Lilith—don’t!”
Scrambling for traction in the nearly null gravity of the slowly turning hub, I launched myself across the deck.
I came down sprawling on her, caught her arm, twisted her hand away from her teeth.
Fighting back with tigerish fury, she nearly won.
I was still reeling from my ordeal in space, and her Legion teachers had trained her well. Feinting, kicking, jabbing with a deadly expertness, she twisted her hand free.
She got it nearly back to her lips.
To stop her mouth, I kissed her.
“Lars?”
She spoke my name with an unbelieving gasp.
Suddenly she was limp, sobbing in my arms. I snatched her hand again, stripped off the poison ring.
Her teeth had not reached that ugly skull.
Its red wink mocked me, deadly still.
“Lilith—” Panting for breath and strength and courage, I fought a wild impulse to throw the ring down the air duct.
“It’s just me!
And the time hasn’t come to—” I couldn’t say it.