They waited in the almost complete gloom. There was a busy scraping from all around the hull. Farr, peering through the windows, saw Harbor workers adjusting the position of the Corestuff hoops so that they surrounded the sphere evenly, covering the hatchway. Farr glanced from Hosch to Bzya. Bzya returned his stare with a patient acceptance, the darkness softening the lines of his scars. The supervisor glared into space, angry and tense.

There was a humming, strangely regular. The whole craft vibrated with it. It seemed to permeate his very being; he could feel his capillaries contracting. He looked at Bzya, but the Fisherman had closed his good eye, his face set; his damaged eyecup was a tunnel to infinity.

...And something changed. Something was taken away from Farr, lifted for the first time in his life. The only time he had felt anything remotely like this was during that last, fateful hunt with the Human Beings, when he had experienced that disorienting fear of falling. What was happening to him? He felt his grasp of the support pole loosen, his fingers slip from the wood. He cried out, drifting backward.

Bzya's strong hand grasped his hair-tubes and hauled him back to the pole; Farr wrapped his arms and legs around the solidity of the wood.

Hosch was laughing, his voice grating.

Somebody rapped on the Bell with a heavy fist. Now there was a sensation of movement — jerking, swaying; Farr could hear cables rattle against the Bell and against each other.

So it had begun. In brisk, bewildering silence, they were descending toward the underMantle.

"The boy hasn't been prepared for any of this, Hosch." There was no trace of anger in Bzya's voice. "I told you. How can he function if his ignorance leaves him paralyzed by fear?"

"Talk to the upfluxer if you want." The supervisor turned his thin, creased, self-absorbed face away.

"What's happening to me, Bzya? I feel strange. Is it just because we're descending, following the Spine?"

"No." Bzya shook his head. "We are descending, but it's more than that. Listen carefully, Farr; it's important that you understand what's happening to you. Maybe it will keep you alive."

These words, simply spoken, evoked more fear in the boy than all of Hosch's ranting. "Tell me."

"As we descend, the Air gets thicker. You understand that, don't you?..."

Farr understood. In the deadly depths of the underMantle, pressures and densities were so great that nuclei were crammed together, forced into each other. It was impossible for the structures of bonded nuclei which composed human bodies — and all the material which comprised Farr's world — to remain stable. The nuclei dissolved into the neutron superfluid that was the Air; and protons freed from the nuclei formed a superconducting fluid in the neutron mix.

At last, from the Quantum Sea inward, the Star was like a single, immense nucleus; no nuclear-based life could persist.

"How can this Bell of wood protect us? Won't the wood just dissolve?"