"Oh, dear," said Madame Minchenko. "Perhaps we ought to go back and . . . do something. Surely they'll have the sense to stay with their car and wait for help, though, and not try to walk off into the desert. The company safety vids always emphasize that. 'Stay with your vehicle and wait for Search and Rescue.' "

"Aren't they supposed to be Search and Rescue?" Silver studied the tiny images in the monitor. "Not much vehicle left. But they all three seem to be staying there. Well . . ." She shook her head. "It's too dangerous for us to try and pick them up. But when Ti and the doctor get back with Tony, maybe the security guards could have your land rover to go home in. If, um, nobody else gets here first."

"Oh," said Madame Minchenko, "that's true. Good idea. I feel much better." She peered reflectively into the monitor. "Poor fellows."

*      *      *

Ice.

Leo watched from the sealed control booth overlooking the Habitat freight bay as four work-suited quaddies eased the intact vortex mirror taken from the D-620's second Necklin rod through the hatch from Outside. The mirror was an awkward object to handle, in effect an enormous shallow titanium funnel, three meters in diameter and a centimeter thick at its broad lip, mathematically curved and thickening to about two centimeters at the central, closed dip. A lovely curve, but definitely nonstandard, a fact Leo's refabrication ploy must needs cope with.

The undamaged mirror was jockeyed into place, nested into a squiggle of freezer coils. The space-suited quaddies exited. From the control booth, Leo sealed the Outside hatch and set the air to pump back into the loading bay. In his anxiety Leo literally popped out of the control booth, with a whoosh of air from the remaining pressure differential, and had to work his jaw to clear his ears.

The only freezer coils big enough to be adequate to the task had been found by Bobbi in a moment of inspiration, once more in Nutrition. The quaddie girl running the department had moaned when she saw Leo and his work gang approach again. They had ruthlessly ripped the guts out of her biggest freezer compartment and carried them off to their work space, in the largest available docking module now installed as part of the D-620. Less than a quarter of the final Habitat reassembly was left to go, Leo estimated, despite the fact that he'd pulled a dozen of the best workers onto this project.

In a few minutes three of his quaddies joined Leo in the freight bay. Leo checked them over. They were bundled up in extra T-shirts and shorts and long-sleeved coveralls left by the evicted downsiders, with the legs wrapped tight to their lower arms and secured by elastic bands. They had scrounged enough gloves to go around, good; Leo had been worried about frostbite with all those exposed fingers. His breath smoked in the chilled air.