Swinging my arms with relief, I looked around. There was a double sun directly overhead, two white ovals like mismatched eggs. The sky was pinkish, washed-out. On the horizon a range of ancient hills made a splash of gray...

And in the center of the purple plain before me was the ruin of a Xeelee spacecraft. It looked like the blackened skeleton of a whale.

We moved tentatively towards it; Ballantine scampered ahead. Small fists clenched, he peered up at ribs that arched high over him. Then he dropped to his hands and knees and brushed excitedly at the dust.

Krupp came carrying Ballantine's data desk, a big trunk-sized unit that he'd propped on one wide shoulder. Captain Bayliss shook her head in disgust. "Always got to show off, haven't you, Krupp? You know that's a two-man job."

Krupp grinned, a little strain showing in his rocky face. "Aye, well, Ballantine normally does it. I just thought he deserved a break." There was a ripple of appreciative laughter. Krupp dumped the desk hard in the middle of the wreck.

Ballantine came storming up to him. "You bloody fool! You could smash something--"

Krupp considered him thoughtfully, like a biologist about to perform a dissection.

The Captain came strolling over, sending Krupp away with a simple glance. She poked one suited toe through the wreck's crumbling skin. "Seems to me there's not a lot left to smash, Mr. Ballantine," she said smoothly.

"No," Ballantine said, his breath shaking. "The Xeelee guard their technology like gold dust. When a Xeelee ship crashes, self-destruct mechanisms burn up anything that survives. But they aren't perfect. The base of this ship is intact, and there's some sort of control box down there." He pointed. "A two-way switch..."

We collected probes from the data desk and were soon crawling like muscle-bound crabs over the ship's bones. We all had our assigned tasks; with gloved fingers I poked tentatively at my Berry phase monitor, wishing I knew what it was for.

The Captain yelped in alarm. I dropped the instrument and whirled around.

Over the center of the wreck, a disc of dust as wide as a room had drifted up into the air. At its heart the data desk tumbled like an angular balloon. Captain Bayliss stood there staring, her mouth slack.

Evidently Ballantine had turned his two-way switch.

We gathered round eagerly. A working Xeelee artifact! The company paid good bounty for such things. Ballantine reached down to his switch -- it was a button set in a tiny box -- and turned it back again. The data desk fell to earth with a surprisingly hard thump; Ballantine watched thoughtfully.

The Captain cleared her throat, taking short, determined paces. "Well?"

"It's a gravity nullifier," the xenotechnologist said excitedly. He peered into instrument displays. "Above this bit of floor there was about one percent gee."