In the second chamber, a faint whistle of wind as the atmosphere regained its equilibrium. More windows had broken out, and some buildings—including a mega—had collapsed despite the efforts of the engineers.

In the third chamber, much the same, though no buildings had collapsed. The scattered glows of still-active illusart windows in Thistledown City resembled a swarm of fireflies.

In the fourth chamber, the washed-out forests and unleashed waters had finally made their peace with each other. The compounds formerly occupied by Eastern and Western bloc personnel had been washed away, their debris carried down to the lakes or jammed up against trees near the shorelines.

Those who had died to invade or defend the Stone—the Potato—the Thistledown—still lay in their graves, unseeing, their patterns flown, personalities vanished, Mysteries made even more mysterious.

The fifth chamber: as dark and hollow as a vast cavern in the Earth, with only the eternal sound of waterfalls and rivers.

The sixth chamber, vigilant, the only chamber besides the seventh still illuminated by a plasma tube, although that was uncertain and unreliable.

The plasma tube flickered and was extinguished. No matter. All the preparations had been made, and now only monitors patrolled the Thistledown's vastness.

The seventh chamber. A wind blew gently down from the cap, rustling the copses of scrub forest; it lazed through the abandoned tent with a faint whistle, flapping the canvas. A section of the tent sagged where a pole had drifted loose during the de-rotation. Surprisingly little else had been disturbed.

The detonators waited patiently beside their charges.

The joined precincts of Axes Thoreau and Euclid were too far down the Way to be visible from this point without the aid of a high-powered telescope. The Way seemed empty, infinite, eternal and serene: the greatest thing ever created by human beings.

Outside the Thistledown, black space and stars and Moon and poor battered, burned, winter-besieged Earth, where few if any were even thinking of the asteroid or the possibility of rescue. How could there be rescue from such total misery and death? History had passed them by.

The asteroid's overhauled Beckmann drive engines prepared for their part in the drama, stockpiling reaction mass to be slung out and dematerialized in the combined beams. They would reduce the kick of the separation, and the combined kick and counter-thrust would maneuver the Thistledown into a circular orbit around the Earth, at an altitude of some ten thousand kilometers.

The precincts of Axes Thoreau and Euclid began their acceleration, in an apparent suicide run to smash themselves against the seventh chamber cap. Within, twenty-nine million human beings—corporeal and otherwise—did the various things humans do while waiting to see if they will live or die.