He kept his mind on only one idea. Take no detours! Every easier path inevitably led downward. It became easy to tell which way was the right one. Pavlos looked for the worst, most miserable path. It was invariably correct.

Mercifully, just as he thought he could endure the smell, the ache, the heat, and the confinement no longer, he reached a patch of open rock. It was not more than one meter by two, but he fell across it and rolled out of his pack with a groan of relief.

With trembling fingers he pulled out one of his canteens. He filled his mouth, swished the water around, then spat onto his hands and rubbed them on his pants to dislodge some of the sap.

Pavlos squinted at the painfully bright, hazy sky.

He wondered if Frank was overhead. If he were using the spy telescope, and happened to have a spare moment to look this way, Frank might see him right now.

Pavlos waved languidly at the sky.

Probably not, he thought. Frank wasn’t going to risk getting in trouble until I called from the top.

There was a small transceiver in his backpack that, Frank promised, would be able to reach the Platform whenever it passed within line of sight. As executive officer of a five-man crew, he would be able to arrange several hours alone with the equipment, while the others slept.

It hurt a little, in a wry fashion, to think of the astronaut whizzing overhead in weightless, air-conditioned comfort, pondering his theories of “accessibility of terrain.” Pavlos knew that inaccessibility was, like the texture of a woman, known only through intimate contact.

Right now he was being intimate with inaccessibility in a manner that made him think of the Anglo-Saxon expletives he had learned over the years.

One hundred meters, that was all the distance remaining. Pavlos crawled with a sense of dogged martyrdom. He was sure two fingers of his left hand had been sprained, if not broken, by a falling stone from a rockslide he’d set off. The other aches were innumerable.