“Still as death,” said a mouse.

“Yes,” said Noxon.

“And how do you come back from that?” asked a mouse.

Such a good question. Not sarcastic at all. Well, a little sarcastic, as if a human could hardly be expected to come up with such an important question on his own.

“The way I got out of that moment was to attach to one of the paths. The one going the wrong way.”

“Answering the mice?” asked Ram.

The expendable explained, ending with, “So there’s a good chance that if Noxon can slow down enough to see the paths, it’ll be impossible for him to come out of it without attaching.”

“But I don’t know if I even can get to that point myself,” said Noxon. “Remember that I got there by following Ram Odin’s path backward—the path of the Ram from Ramfold. I could never have slowed myself down that much.”

“So if you have to be completely stopped,” said the expendable, “then there can be no experimentation. You have to do it holding on to the mice, to Ram Odin, and to the ship and all its contents, and you have to do it at the time when it’s most convenient to make the jump, and you have to attach to exactly the right path so we jump into the past, long before spaceships.”

“Except that I have no idea if I can slow down enough to get to that condition.”

“So the alternative,” said the expendable, “is that you will start to detect the backward path of outbound Ram—the individual nubs of each instant—before you get to a complete stop in time. If you can slow down to such a degree, but not lose the ability to snap yourself back to this timeflow, then we’ll know that this venture is possible.”

“Might be possible.”

“But if you can’t slow down enough to see his path,” said the expendable, “then we’ll know that’s an approach that doesn’t work.”

“And then I’d have to figure out how to get myself to a complete stop.”

“Death,” suggested one of the helpful mice. “Works every time.”

“From your expression,” said Ram, “a mouse said something you didn’t like.”

“It was very funny,” said Noxon. “To anybody who didn’t actually have to do this.”

“So are you going to do the experiment?” asked Ram.

“I’m going to try,” said Noxon. “The trouble is that speeding up is easy, now that I learned how from Param. Slowing down—I always do that by sort of watching the paths and doing whatever I do that makes them visible. It was really hard to learn. It’s the thing Umbo does naturally.”

“So follow my path. Here in the ship. Or your own.”