The flitter shuddered gently. They were close to the throat of the wormhole itself now. Poole could see the electric-blue struts of exotic matter which threaded the hole's length, its negative energy density generating the repulsive field which kept the throat open. The walls of the hole flashed in sheets and sparkles: gravitational stresses resolving themselves into streams of exotic particles.

Poole peered at the pictures again, holding them up to the cabin light. "What am I looking at, here?"

Dzik made his hands into a sphere. "You know what Baked Alaska is: a ball a hundred miles across -- half friable rock, half water-ice, traces of hydrogen, helium and a few hydrocarbons. Like a huge comet nucleus. It's in the Kuiper Belt, just beyond the orbit of Pluto, along with an uncounted number of similar companions. And with the Sun just an averagely bright star in the sky, it's so cold that helium condenses on the surface -- superfluid pools, sliding over a water-ice crust.

"When we arrived at Alaska we didn't inspect it too carefully." Dzik shrugged. "We knew that as soon as we started work we'd be wrecking the surface features anyway..."

The construction team had swamped the blind little worldlet with an explosion of heat and light. It was a home from home; even its rotation period roughly matched an Earth day. People had moved out from the randomly chosen landing point, exploring, testing, playing, building, preparing for the Port Sol of the future. Structures of ice and liquid helium which had persisted in the lightless depths of the outer System for billions of years crumbled, evaporated.

"Then someone brought in this."

Dzik leafed through the glossies, picked one out. It showed a hummock on the ice, like the hub of a rimless wheel with eight evenly spaced spokes. "A kid took this snap as a souvenir. A novelty. She thought the regularity was some kind of crystal effect -- like a snowflake. So did we all, at first. But then we found more of the damned things."

Dzik spread the glossies over his briefcase. Poole saw that the structures in the photos shared the eight-fold symmetry of the first. Dzik went on, "All about the same mass and size -- the span of those rootlike proboscides is about twelve feet; the height of the central trunk is six feet. They cover Alaska's surface -- particularly ridges which catch the sunlight. Or they did, until we started messing around." He looked at Poole defensively. "Mike, as soon as I figured out what we have here, I stopped operations and pulled everyone back to the GUTship. We did a lot of damage, but -- Mike, we weren't to know. We're an engineering crew, not biologists."

Biologists?

"We managed to lase one of the things open. It's riddled with fine, hairlike channels. Capillaries. We think the capillaries are for conducting liquid helium. Superfluid." He searched Poole's face, unsure. "Do you get it, Mike? The damn things sit on their ridges, half in shade, half out. The sunlight sets up a temperature differential -- tiny, but enough to get superfluid helium pumping up through the roots."