The mood remained festive, and the physicists and planetolo-gists wandered the passageways, visiting one another's quarters, hanging out in the operations center, visiting the bridge, pouring drinks in the workout room. When Marcel strolled down to Wendy's project control, he encountered half a dozen of them gathered around a screen, and when they saw him they raised their glasses to him.

It was a pleasant feeling, to be toasted by the creme de la creme. Not bad for a kid who'd resisted schools and books for years. One teacher had taken him aside when he was fourteen and suggested he might as well apply for the dole then. Get in line early, she'd advised.

When they'd finished the Morgan observations, they moved over to Maleiva III and began the process of inserting probes and positioning satellites. The intention, as Chiang Harmon explained it, was to "take the temperature of the victim, and to listen to its heartbeat, throughout its final days." The team wanted to get every possible physical detail on file. They would establish Maleiva Hi's density and record the fluctuations of its albedo. They would watch the shifting tides. They would examine the depth and composition of its core, analyze the atmospheric mix, and record the air pressure. They would chart its hurricanes and its tornadoes, and they would measure the increasing intensity of the quakes that would eventually shatter the planet.

At breakfast during their first full day in orbit around Deepsix, Beekman announced to everyone in the dining room, and by the PA to the rest, that the correlation of hydrogen to helium, 80.6 to 14.1, matched perfectly with that of Morgan's suspected home star. So now they knew with near certainty where it had been born.

Everyone applauded, and somebody suggested in a deliberately slurred voice that the occasion called for another toast. The noise turned to laughter and Beekman passed around the apple juice. They were in fact a sober lot.