I think of the Lilliputians binding Gulliver, looking at all those people on lines. And of baby Krohler's spiders playing at little trial flights around Mom. Said creature is a vaguely arachnidian beast native to New Earth. It nests and nurses its young on its back. It's warmblooded, endoskeletal, and mammalian—a pseudo-marsupial, really—but it has a lot of legs and a magnificently extrudable whip of a tail, so the spider image sticks.

Sparks fly in mayfly swarms as people cut and weld and rivet. Machines pound out a thunderous industrial symphony. Several vessels are so far dismantled that they scarcely resemble ships. One has its belly laid open and half its skin gone. A carcass about ready for the retail butcher. What sort of creature feeds on roasts off the flanks of attack destroyers?

Gnatlike clouds of little gas-jet tugs nudge machinery and hull sections here and there. How the devil do they keep track of what they're doing? Why don't they get mixed up and start shoving destroyer parts into Climbers?

A Climber appears. It looks clean. Very little micrometeor-ite scoring, even. "Doesn't look like there's anything wrong with that one."

"Those are the tricky bastards," the Old Man muses. I assume he'll award me another cautionary tale. Instead, he resumes staring straight ahead, playing the vehicle's controls, leaving the talking to Westhause.

"The critical heat-sensitive stuff gets replaced after every patrol. The laser weaponry, too.

Takes too long to break it down and scan each part. Somebody back down the tube will get ours.

We'll get something that belonged to somebody who's on patrol already."

"Pass them around like the clap," Yanevich says.

The Old Man snorts. He doesn't approve of officers' displaying crudity in public.

Westhause says, "Everything has to be perfect."