No longer hungry, or very interested in playing with the quarters, the three women sat before a continuous documentary of what was happening in the asteroid and the precincts.

The images were almost too real. After a few minutes, Cunningham turned away from the display and began giggling uncontrollably. "This is ridiculous," she said, clutching her cheeks and rolling back on the apparent Oriental-pattern carpet. "It's terrifying." Blakely caught the bug next.

"We're hysterical," she said, and that sent them both into fresh paroxysms. "We don't have any idea what's going on."

"Oh, I do," Hoffman said solemnly, feeling left out.

"What?" Cunningham asked, trying to be serious.

Hoffman rolled one hand into a near-cylinder. She peered through it at them. "Blow one end off—the end no one ever tried to drill through. The north pole."

"Jesus," Cunningham said, her giggles gone as quickly as they had started. "What would have happened it we had tried to drill through it? Where would the drillers have ended up?"

"Blow the north pole off," Hoffman resumed, ignoring the unanswerable question, "and knock the Stone off the corridor. And after that—"

"What?" Ann asked, owlish now and also very serious.

"This half of the city leaves the corridor. We become a space station."

"And the Stone?" Cunningham asked.

"Another moon."

"And we go back to Earth?" Blakely asked.

Hoffman nodded.

"Damn," Blakely said. "It's a. . . I don't know what it is. A fairy tale. Maybe it's the day of resurrection. What did they call it? Rapture. Dead people flying up through the freeways. People leaving their cars right through the roofs." Embarrassed, Blakely turned back to the projected display. "That doesn't make any sense, does it? No freeways, no cars. Only angels coming from the sky."

Hoffman made a deep, shuddering sigh. "You're right," she said. "It's a fairy tale." Then, abruptly, she broke into laughter, and couldn't stop until her lungs ached and her face was wet with tears.

An hour before the scheduled breakout, Corprep Rosen Gardner picted a personal message to Hoffman requesting that he be allowed to visit. A few minutes later, he arrived at the apartment door in person—"incarnate," Hoffman reminded herself. She invited him in. By that time, they had all regained some semblance of control.

Gardner's political work on behalf of the divided Hexamon and the Naderites was no longer necessary, he explained; he had volunteered to act as Corprep in the New Nexus for the Earth people, and chose Hoffman as the most logical person to speak with. He offered to keep her informed by linking her with his private memory and information service.

Her vacation was over, she thought, not without some regrets. She was on call again.