So it was hard not to regard the figures unhappily. There were peaks in the readout, four per rotation, indicating the gaps between the four tanks surrounding them; the peaks spiked every few seconds, making a series of neat U's on the graph paper. Total shelter radiation appeared on another screen: 24.658 rems, 27.861, 29.004. "Like an odometer," Boone said calmly. He was gripping a rail with both hands and pulling himself back and forth, as if doing isometric exercises. Frank saw it and said, "John, what the hell are you doing?"

"Dodging," John said. He smiled at Frank's frown. "You know-moving target!"

People laughed at him. With the extent of the danger precisely charted on screens and graphs, they were beginning to feel less helpless. This was illogical, but naming was the power that made every human a scientist of sorts. And these were scientists by profession, with many astronauts among them as well, trained to accept the possibility of such a storm. All those mental habits began channeling their thoughts, and the shock of the event receded a bit. They were coming to terms with it.

Arkady went to a terminal and called up Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, picking it up in the third movement, when the village dance is disrupted by storm. He turned up the volume, and they floated together in the long half-cylinder, listening to the intensity of Beethoven's fierce tempest, which suddenly seemed to enunciate perfectly the lashings of the silent wind pouring through them. It would sound just like that! Strings and woodwinds shrieking in wild gusts, out of control and yet beautifully melodic at the same time-a shiver ran down Maya's spine. She had never listened to the old warhorse this closely before, and she looked with admiration (and a bit of fear) at Arkady, who was beaming ecstatically at the effects of his inspired disk jockeying, and dancing like some red knot of fluff in the wind. When the symphony's storm peaked, it was difficult to believe that the radiation count wasn't rising; and when the musical storm abated, it seemed like theirs should be over too. Thunder muttered, the last gusts whistled through. The French horn sang its serene all-clear.

People began to talk about other things, discussing the various business of the day that had been so rudely interrupted, or taking the opportunity to talk about other things. After a half hour or more, one of those conversations got louder; Maya didn't hear how it began, but suddenly Arkady said, very loudly and in English, "I don't think we should pay any attention to plans made for us back on Earth!"

Other conversations went silent, and people turned to look at him. He had popped up and was floating under the rotating roof of the chamber, where he could survey them all and speak like some mad flying spirit.

"I think we should make new plans," he said. "I think we should be making them now. Everything should be redesigned from beginning, with our own thinking expressed. It should extend everywhere, even to first shelters we build."