Rimskaya had recovered with remarkable speed from his "lapse," as he referred to it. He had been acutely embarrassed, and had finally requested—somewhat paradoxically—that people stop being so understanding. "Be as hard on me as I would be on you," he had demanded.

Hoffman had immediately put him in charge of logistics, an area she knew he would handle well. Always put a tough (but very smart) sonofabitch in front of the food and supply lockers. He would coordinate well with the Russians and he would take that load from her back. In his spare time—what little there was of it—he could confer with Gerhardt on their Earth plans. Hoffman had her own unique ways of being hard on people. Rimskaya seemed to flourish under the new and extensive work load.

Her only major worry, for now, was the fate of the tuberider expedition.

With the return of Mirsky, and the disappearance of the three political officers, the Russians were becoming more and more cooperative. There was the problem of a shortage of women—there had been two rapes and several near instances, but that was fewer than she had expected. Many soldiers—NATO and Russian—had donated small arms to the women. They had not had to use them yet.

Hoffman had an appointment to meet with Mirsky in the fourth chamber in an hour. It would be their second meeting since his return, and the agenda up for discussion was long but not riddled with crises.

With Beryl Wallace and two marines, she rode the zero train from the first chamber to the fourth, then transferred to a truck in the NATO compound. The Russian compound had split into three during Mirsky's absence; it now occupied a long stretch of shore and two offshore islands. Two large rafts had been slung together out of logs, and boats were being constructed slowly and painstakingly; there were no facilities for processing lumber yet, though it seemed there might be in a couple of months, and the materials available to the boatbuilders were primitive.

The spinward trip through the forest was pure pleasure for Hoffman. The Russian "mainland" compound was near the ninety train platform, about forty kilometers from the NATO compound. Some of the most rugged terrain and deepest woods surrounded the Stoner-built road. There was even a gentle rain that beaded the truck windows.

Wallace talked about the resumption of science in the sixth and seventh chambers; Hoffman listened and nodded, but found the subject somehow uninteresting. Wallace sensed this after a few minutes and allowed her to sink deeper into her reverie.

The Russian mainland compound resembled an old Western fort. Tall saplings had been stripped of branches and bark and erected to form a secondary wall of defense beyond a high rampart of dirt. Russian soldiers swung wide the gates at their approach, and swung them shut behind.