“That’s dumb in sixty ways,” said Ram Odin. “If we’re not sure that the ship will come with you, why would we want to stay with the ship? I’m hanging on to you for dear life, my boy, though if you want to try your experiment with the mice, I don’t mind. That’s what mice are for.”

Noxon held on to the box of mice.

“Excuse us,” said a mouse, “and I know this will sound self-serving and you’ll interpret it as an attempt to finagle our way out of the box, which it is, but we would feel a lot safer about this change in time direction if we had direct contact with your skin the way Ram Odin does.”

Noxon understood at once and, despite his annoyance with and distrust of them, he opened the box and let the mice crawl up inside his sleeves and pantlegs and down the neck of his shirt. “Thank you,” several of them murmured. Noxon appreciated the politeness, though he also knew that once they got back into forward-time—if they did—he’d wish there were a way to make them get back in the box—which there wasn’t. Short of stripping naked and having the expendable pick them off his body one by one. And who knew how much damage they could cause before he was able to carry out such a plan?

They had served their time in prison, and now they were free again, and he would have to deal with them like the sentient beings they were.

“All right,” said Noxon. “I don’t know how long it will take me to find an appropriate path. Earth is a long way off, hundreds of thousands of kilometers even now. And the nubs of paths are very small even close up. This may take me a while. It may not even be possible.”

“We won’t interrupt you,” said Ram Odin.

The first challenge was to find paths at all—or, rather, the nubs that implied the presence of a path. Noxon began with near-contemporary paths in the construction station itself. He quickly found a few, then a lot of them. He began spotting paths that must be in nearby ships and shuttles, and then in farther ones.

It got harder and harder, the farther they were. And none of them were all that far.

He realized that there was no chance he could spot any individual paths on Earth, especially since they would all be mere nubs anyway.

“I need a second plan,” said Noxon. “I can see the nearby paths in the station and ships but Earth is just too far.”

For a few moments, there was silence.

“Well,” said Ram, “that’s useful information.”

“Can we start up our engines and move away from here, closer to the surface?” asked Noxon.