"Our savior?"

"I presume."

Hoffman had said this young woman was important, and the Advisor's word was one of the few things Lanier felt he could count on. In the four years since that night at the party, he had learned a great deal about politics in and out of world capitals, and how nations handled crises. He had come to realize how truly extraordinary Hoffman was. Capable, and with uncanny intuition.

But at that party, she had been dead wrong about one thing. The Stone's appearance did not signal the arrival of aliens, not in the strict sense of the word.

He picked up two slates and a processor. "Anything else?" he asked, standing by Blakely's desk.

"In and out," she said and handed him a cube of messages.

There was always a mild, cool breeze flowing down the almost vertical slope of the cap. Sometimes snow fell, piling up in drifts against the nickel-iron wall. The elevator entrance, a perfect semicircular arch, had been blasted out of asteroid material, as had all the tunnels, serviceways and bore holes of the Stone, by a fusion torch of extremely high power and efficiency. The sides of the short hall had been polished smooth and etched with acid by the Stoners to reveal the beautiful triangular Widmanstätten patterns, veined with rocky troilite intrusions.

The elevator was cylindrical, ten meters in diameter and five meters high, and was used for both personnel and freight. There were handgrips along the perimeter and tie-downs dimpled the floor. It followed a sloping tunnel to the staging areas surrounding the external bore hole. As the elevator climbed, its angular velocity declined, weakening the centrifugal force of the Stone's rotation. By the time it reached the vicinity of the bore hole, the spin produced only one-tenth of one percent g.

The trip took ten minutes. The elevator decelerated smoothly and stopped, its opposite hatch flush with a pressurized tunnel leading to the staging areas.

Taking an electric miner's cart, one of the two dozen or so brought up from Earth, Lanier rose most of the remaining distance along a magnetic rail.

The cart whined to a stop and Lanier drifted the rest of the way, pulling himself along guide ropes.

The first landings in the bore hole had been tricky. There had been no power to the rotating docks at that time, and very little illumination. The OTV pilots had proved their skill again and again. The first spacesuited explorers had shown great courage in leaving their craft and approaching the bore-hole walls, which rotated at about three-quarters of a meter per second. Now that the dock and staging area equipment had been refurbished and brought back into operation, the transfer process was much easier.

The three docks were simple, massive and efficient. Cylinders within the hole rotated to compensate for the Stone's spin, each accelerated like the rotor in a giant electric motor. One engineer in a booth below the prime dock controlled all of the docks, opening and closing hatches, coordinating cargo and passenger unloading.