Ever the explorers, the Lunarians ordered their remaining spiders to search immediately for signs of life in this greatest of all known seas. On their pads they saw the readouts of purines and pyrimidines, amino acids and porphyrin molecules drifting through oceans of gasoline, but no hints that these molecules had ever belonged to DNA or cells—which is just as well for us, Lenny told himself, thinking of the Intruders. It was the universe’s ability to sprout life that had gotten him into this mess in the first place. He realized that he was beyond the fear of his enemies now, but he was still determined to escape them. It was a determination, born of a grown child’s anger, that his childhood terrors would never find him again, that they would not learn what was in his mind, as they had done in his nightmares. His was an anger beyond all mortal anger, beyond the anger voiced when Pharaoh cursed God and Moses and the death cloud of Thera. It was an anger that could not even be defeated by his death, because it would remain intact until the very end—and then he would no longer be aware to know that he had been defeated.

As his anger swelled and died, and began to swell again, Sharon and Robyn continued to announce the status of the Bardo cones and the pressures trying to get through them. Sensing Lenny’s anger, Sharon made no tension-building analogies. None were needed, she told herself. The pads showed that at 1000 atmospheres, the very melting points of the chemicals swirling about Gaius were beginning to change.

“Twelve hundred atmospheres … thirteen hundred … fourteen hundred … fifteen hundred …”

Now a blast of relatively warm ethane welled up from the bottom; but Lenny’s sonoscans showed the sea to be bottomless. Straight down, for tens upon tens of kilometers, laser beams and sonar encountered nothing solid, and passed on without reflecting back to the ship. He ordered the external scoops to start circulating, and tons of noncompressible slush began inflating sacks stowed in the ends of Gaius’s system of trailing ropes.

As the ship gained some semblance of buoyancy, it no longer dropped like a stone but drifted down through Neptune. Lenny knew that he could make Gaius float like a blimp if he wanted to, but he did not want to. Safety lay in depth, and it occurred to him that if he could find a supply of ice down there, he would have all the excess oxygen he needed to burn the planet’s gasoline. He and his crew would be able to generate power wastefully, if they wished, without ever having to worry about leaking a neutrino glow.

“Two thousand … two thousand ten … two thousand twenty … Whoa! I’m picking up reflections north and east!”

At first glance, seen only on the sonoscan, it looked like a turbulent boundary layer. Just another peak in the thermocline. Probing straight down, it was possible to scan right through it. But when Sharon swung the scanners east, she saw a crust of solidifying, cracking, and resolidifying magma stretching to the horizon. To the west, her cameras revealed the rubble-strewn rim of a huge volcanic caldera.