In the Thistledown's sixth chamber, four members of Gardner's Korzenowski faction had committed the ultimate crime—they had tampered with the Way machinery. The tampering was minor, but the penalty for even minor offenses was discorporation and complete wiping of all personality records. At this point, Gardner knew, there was no turning back.

The flaw did not need to extend beyond the actual northern boundary of the seventh chamber; its present extension, near the chamber's bore hole, had been purely for convenience during the final stages of the Thistledown's evacuation and the construction of the Axis City. The machinery was now adjusted to reduce the flaw's length by twenty kilometers.

Four teams of three citizens apiece then exited to the exterior of the asteroid, riding elevator shafts undiscovered by the recently arrived visitors. These shafts opened directly onto buried Beckmann drive units.

Using these drives, the rotation of the asteroid was slowed, and then reduced to zero. The result at first was fairly minor in all chambers but the fourth, where wave action in the broad expanses of water forced huge globules into the air. There wasn't time to damp the effects. Gardner was working on a tight schedule.

Radical Geshels, and the moderates who had never actually committed themselves, were given the opportunity to join Gardner's factioners. For many, there was no choice—Gardner's plans had little room for radical neomorphs. Populations were shuffled between the various precincts as quickly as possible, and City Memory was rearranged and sectioned, all in preparation for the next step of Gardner's plan.

The Axis City was partially unstrung from the flaw, the section containing Axis Nader and Central City first. It was Gardner's plan to reverse the city, leaving these precincts for the Geshels who wished to travel down the Way at near light-speed and force out the Jarts. What he needed to complete his plans were the two rotating cylinders of Axes Thoreau and Euclid.

The re-tuning of the gravity gradient between the Thistledown and the Way was extraordinarily delicate. The engineers within the sixth chamber had their hands full, especially when the large mass of Central City and Axis Nader was shunted to one side within the seventh chamber, allowing the remaining precincts to be unstrung.

The entire procedure took five hours. By the time it was done, Axis Nader and Central City had reversed position on the flaw with Axes Thoreau and Euclid. The two pairs of precincts and their related structures were separated by a kilometer, and the pair reserved for the Geshels—Central City and Axis Nader—moved slowly north along the flaw.

The visitors had been informed of their choice. Of the roughly two thousand captives, only four decided not to cast their lot with the group planning a return to Earth.

Among them were Joseph Rimskaya and Beryl Wallace. The other two were Russians: Corporal Rodzhensky and Lieutenant General Pavel Mirsky.