"Then we'll become damn legends. Unless you've a better idea, you useless jetfart. Help me..."

But Bzya didn't need to.

With a thousand tiny explosions all around the frame the flange splintered. Bits of wood rattled across the cabin; they flew into Bzya's face and he batted at them dimly. Then the hatch fell forward, yielding in a moment. Bzya had an instant's impression of a mass of fluid — dense, amber and incompressible — crowding into the breached cabin.

The wood-lamps died, overwhelmed.

Then it was on him.

It washed over his limbs, forced its way into his mouth and throat and eyecups; it was a hard physical invasion, like fists pushing into him. He could not see, hear or taste anything. He panicked, and twisted his head back and forth, trying to spew the vile stuff out of his lungs. But he could not expel it, of course; he was embedded in this dense, unlivable material — in a layer of it ninety centimeters deep.

His lungs expanded, tearing at the material.

...And they found Air. Fragments, splinters of Air which stung as they forced their way out of his lungs and into his capillaries. His chest heaved, dragging at the fluid around him. There was Air here, but with just a trace of its normal fractional density.

Damn it, maybe I can make it out of this...

Then the burning started.

It was all over his body, like a thousand needles. And inside him too — by the Wheel! — scorching into his lungs and stomach; it flooded the capillaries that coursed through his body, turning the network of fine tubes that permeated him into a mass of pain, every threadlike capillary electric-alive with it.

Too dense. Too dense...

In these extremes of density and pressure the tin nuclei at the surfaces of his body were seeking a new stable configuration. The nuclei were breaking apart from each other and crumbling into their component nucleons, which were then swarming into the fire-Air in search of the single, huge nucleus which filled the heart of the Star... Bzya was dissolving.

He kicked at the fluid, driving his legs through it. He felt a dull impact as his head struck something. It must be the wall of the Bell. He felt vaguely surprised to find that there was anything left of the familiar, external universe, beyond this pain-realm of dissolution. But he'd managed to move himself. He'd Waved.

He dragged his hand through the fluid, made a sign of the Wheel against his chest. He couldn't see, but he could breathe, and he could Wave. He was going to get out of here.