"What?" asked Silver as Madame Minchenko trailed off.

"Hm? Oh. I was just having a mental picture of a quaddie in free fall with a twelve-string guitar. If you weren't squashed into a chair as you are now you could bring that lower hand up . . ."

It was a trick of the light, perhaps, of Rodeo's westering sun sinking toward the sawtoothed horizon and sending its red beams through the cabin windows, but Madame Minchenko's eyes seemed to gleam. "Now arch your fingers, so . . ."

*      *      *

Fire.

The first problem had been to find enough pure scrap titanium around the Habitat to add to the mass of the ruined vortex mirror to allow for the inevitable losses during refabrication. A forty-percent-extra mass margin would have been enough for Leo to feel comfortable with.

There ought to have been titanium storage tanks for nasty corrosive liquids—a single, say, hundred-liter tank would have done the trick—conduits, valves, something. For the first desperate hour of scrounging Leo was convinced his plan would come to grief right there in Step One. Then he found it in, of all places, Nutrition; a cooler full of titanium storage canisters massing a good half-kilo apiece. Their varied contents were hastily dumped into every substitute container Leo and his quaddie raiders could find. "Cleanup," Leo had called guiltily over his shoulder to the appalled quaddie girl now running Nutrition, "is left as an exercise for the student."

The second problem had been to find a place to work. Pramod had pointed out one of the abandoned Habitat modules, a cylinder some four meters in diameter. It was the work of another two hours to tear holes in the side for entry and pack one end of it with all the conductive scrap metal mass they could find. The mass was then surfaced with more abandoned Habitat module skin, pounded out and rendered as nearly glass-smooth as they could make it in a shallow concave bowl of carefully calculated arc that spanned the diameter of the module.

Now their mass of scrap titanium hung weightless in the center of the module. The broken-up pieces of the vortex mirror and the flattened-out food canisters were all bound together by a spool of pure titanium wire some brilliant quaddie child had produced for them out of Stores. The dense gray metal glittered and glowed in their work lights and the reflection from a shaft of hard-edged sunlight falling through one of their entry holes.

Leo glanced around the chamber one last time. Four work-suited quaddies each manned a laser unit braced around the walls, bracketing the titanium mass. Leo's measuring instruments floated tethered to his belt, ready to his pressure-gloved hands. It was time. Leo touched his helmet control, darkening his faceplate.

"Commence firing," said Leo into his suit com.