The star must have reached the end of its active life many centuries earlier, leaving a slowly spinning core of white-hot metal. Islands of solid iron would have formed in that sea of heat, colliding and gradually coalescing. At last a skin must have congealed around the iron, thickening and cooling. In the process bubbles of air had been trapped, leaving the sphere riddled with caverns and tunnels — and so making it accessible to humans. Finally the oxygen-laden air of the Nebula had worked on the shining iron, coating it with a patina of brown oxide.

The star kernel was probably cold all the way to its center by now, but Rees liked to imagine he could feel a faint glow of heat from the surface, the last ghost of star fire—

The silence was lanced through by a whine, far above him. Something glittering raced down breakthrough the air and hit the rust with a small impact a yard from Rees's chair. It left a fresh crater a half-inch across; a wisp of steam struggled to rise against the star pull.

Now more of the little missiles fizzed through the air; the star rang with impacts.

Rain. Metamorphosed by its fall through a five-gee gravity well into a hail of steaming bullets.

Rees cursed and reached for his control panel. The chair rolled forward, each bump and valley in the landscape jarring the breath from him. He was a few yards still from the nearest entrance to the mine works. How could he have been so careless as to descend to the surface — alone — when there was danger of rain? The shower thickened, slamming into the surface all around him. He cringed, pinned to his chair, waiting for the shower to reach his head and exposed arms.

The mouth of the mine works was a long rectangle cut in the rust. His chair rolled with agonizing slowness down a shallow slope into the depths of the star. At last the roof of the works was sliding over his head; the rain, safely excluded, spanged into the rust.