"How's the salvage planning going?" asked Van Atta after a while.

"Almost complete."

"Oh, really?" Van Atta brightened. "Well, that's something, at least."

"You'll be amazed at how totally the Habitat can be recycled," Leo promised with perfect truth. "So will the company brass."

"And fast?"

"Just as soon as we get the go-ahead. I've got it laid out like a war game." He closed his teeth on further double entendres. "You still planning the grand announcement to the rest of the staff at thirteen-hundred tomorrow?" Leo inquired casually. "In the main lecture module? I really want to be in on that. I have a few visual aids to present when you're done."

"Naw," said Van Atta.

"What?" Leo gulped. He missed a step, and the springs slammed him painfully down on one knee on the treadmill, padded against just such clumsiness. He struggled back to his feet.

"Did you hurt yourself?" said Van Atta. "You look funny. . . ."

"I'll be all right in a minute," He stood, leg muscles straining against the elastic pull, regaining his breath and equilibrium in the face of pain and panic. "I thought—that was how you were going to drop the shoe. Get everybody together, just go over the facts once."

"After Minchenko, I'm tired of arguing about it," said Van Atta. "I've told Yei to do it. She can call them into her office in small groups, and hand out the individual and department evacuation schedules at the same time. Much more efficient."

And so Leo and Silver's beautiful scheme for peacefully detaching the downsiders, hammered out through four secret planning sessions, was blown away on a breath. Wasted was the flattery, the oblique suggestion, that had gone into convincing Van Atta that it was his idea to gather, unusually, the entire Habitat downsider staff at once and make his announcement in a speech persuading them all they were being commended, not condemned. . . .

The shaped charges to cut the lecture module away from the Habitat at the touch of a button were all in place. The emergency breath masks to supply the nearly three hundred bodies with oxygen for the few hours necessary to push the module around the planet to the transfer station were carefully hidden within. The two pusher crews were drilled, their pushers fueled and ready.

Fool he had been, to lay plans that depended on Van Atta following through on anything. . . . Leo felt suddenly sick.

It was going to have to be the second-choice plan, then, the emergency one they'd discussed and discarded as too risky, too potentially uncontrolled in its results. Numbly, he detached his springs and harness and hooked them back in their slots on the treadmill frame.

"That wasn't an hour," said Van Atta.

"I think I did something to my knee," lied Leo.

"I'm not surprised. Think I didn't know you've been skipping exercise sessions? Just don't try to sue GalacTech, 'cause we can prove personal neglect." Van Atta grinned and marched on virtuously.