Research students to your assigned lifecraft, Salvage Status Four. Crew students to your assigned permanent crew monitors.” The orders were not repeated, giving Molly for the first time in some days a sharp awareness that she was not among human beings. This was reinforced by the absence of chatter among the students in the conning room. A few quick, short sentences from senior team members, establishing who was present and who was not, and a cloud of weirdly shaped forms had pushed away from their stools, chairs, wrapping posts, couches, and other stations and were floating rapidly toward the room’s dozen exits. In the dusky, rubrous light of the place, the Human student was reminded of a picture she had once seen of a stream of bats entering a cave on the home world she had never visited.

She joined one of the streams, her left hand held by Joe’s tendrils. Although accustomed to a gravity over five times as great as his, she had spent fully half her life on spacecraft and was much more adept at weightless maneuvering than he. The Nethneen knew it and allowed her to transport them both; his twenty-one kilograms of mass gave her no problems as long as he accepted responsibility for holding on.

As they approached their chosen corridor, the crowd grew denser; there was no way to avoid personal contact, since very few of the beings were equipped by nature to fly. Courtesy ruled, however, and only gentle pushes, needed for steering, were used. Molly had transferred Joe to her back, below her life-support pack, by this time, and had both hands free; and as they swung into the cavernous space that led for most of the length of the flying schoolhouse she found and grasped the first of a series of handholds along what would have been a ceiling under normal acceleration. The passage was much wider than the door that had led into it, and the crowd proportionally thinner. Also, people were spreading out along the line of travel as their different speeds took effect. Molly did not yet use her full strength.