Noxon’s job was to find an appropriate opportunity, after the ship returned to Earth, and take the whole ship with him back into regular time, so that he could learn what motivated the people of Earth to wipe out life on Garden, and prevent it if he could.

For now, though, his only job was to stay alive through the seven-year voyage.

If the expendable knew that there were jewels aboard, he showed nothing. Noxon could not hear the words they were saying, because he was slicing time so sound could not reach him in any intelligible form. But there was only the frustration of realizing that they were the loser in the lottery of ships, that they were the one that would never found a colony, the one that would never reach any destination at all.

Ram Odin was a man so young, so childlike compared to the old man Noxon had known. He and the expendable conversed. Ram got up and talked. The expendable talked. They walked here and there. They did inexplicable things that didn’t matter to Noxon at all.

All that Noxon cared about was the place where he could use the jewels to take control of the ship. Of course, it was possible that the ship would not let him take control, since Ram Odin was the commander.

But it was also possible that once Noxon had allowed the ship to upload the contents of the jewels, the ship’s computers would realize that Noxon was the commander of the only mission that mattered now, and that Noxon was the only person who could possibly bring the ship back into forward-time.

After the huge gamble he had already taken, wouldn’t it be ironic if the ship refused to pay off on this small bet.

It took Noxon more than a day of ship’s time to cross the small room to the jewel station. Then he kept sidling left and right, waiting for Ram to leave the room again.

At last he did.

Instantly Noxon stopped slicing time. His hand was already poised over the reader. He dropped all the jewels at once out of the bag.

They did not bounce off the surface because they were immediately locked in place, held in an invisible field that kept them all moving relative to each other. Noxon remembered the dialogue he had used before, the words he was supposed to say. But the ship’s computer did not speak to him.

Instead, it spoke to the mice.

Noxon could hear the high-pitched, rapid words, because the facemask allowed him to. It meant that the ship’s computer knew that with the facemask Noxon could understand this language, and therefore the computer used it so Ram Odin could not hear what it was saying. Or it meant that the ship’s computer, having reached its own conclusions from whatever was on the jewels, wished only to deal with the mice.