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He shook the sweat out of his eyes. It floated in tiny droplets inside the helmet, distracting him. “Coolant failure of some kind. I was worried about getting dinner; now it looks like I’m going to be din—”

“Oh, shut up! You relax and lie still. I’ll pull you out of here. Your little five-armed friend and Officer Fybot are at the downside lock right now, waiting for us.”

“Not the bird, he’s accident prone!”

“You should talk!”

Lando was approaching unconsciousness when they cycled through the lock. Vuffi Raa practically tore the helmet off his master—and his ears with it. The resultant blast of fresh air in Lando’s face was like an arctic gale.

“Well, another small adventure,” the gambler observed as the three of them stripped him down to his underwear and handed him a plastic bag of water, “when what I really needed was a few days in a sensory-deprivation tank. That’s the universe for you. Anybody think of slapping something in the food-fixer?”

Bassi Vobah huffed and stomped her way out of the lock area, not an easy thing to do in the absence of gravity. “You’re welcome!” she said over her shoulder.

The alien officer followed her, limping awkwardly on his splinted and bandaged legs.

Vuffi Raa looked up at Lando from where he was minutely examining the vacuum suit. “Master,” he said cautiously, and in a very quiet voice, “did you remove this suit between the time you were working down below and when you went topside?”

Lando floated on his back beside the airlock hatch, thinking—but only thinking—about getting up and going forward. The cold metal felt extremely good to him at the moment.

“Had to,” he replied, hoping the robot wasn’t headed where he thought he was headed. “Call of nature.”

“So that’s when it was done. Master, somebody—”

“Sabotaged the suit when I wasn’t looking, is that it?”

“I’m afraid so. They crossprogrammed the communicator with the cooling system. Oddly enough, if you’d continued trying to call me on the radio, it would have saved you from being roasted.”

Lando shook his head, grabbed a stanchion, and sat up stiffly. “That’s a little obscure, even as practical jokes go. Which one of them do you suppose it is?”

“Bassi Vobah helped to save your life.”

“When she couldn’t avoid it. Come on, I want a smoke. Do you suppose I could roll a cigarette out of one of those crushed cigars in the safe?”

“Why would you want to, Master?”

“Because it’s there.”

The next order of business—after getting something to eat—was figuring out where they were. Lando’s running battle with the fighter squadron had taken him through many turns and twists, and across what distances he couldn’t guess. He and Vuffi Raa spent a good deal of time pondering all that over the navigational computer.

“The device is useless, Master. The radiation’s finished it off. That gives me an eerie feeling, I must confess. However, the catalog has some information: this asteroid is uninhabited, but it isn’t uncharted.”

In the seat beside the robot in the cockpit, Lando’s shoulders jerked in surprise. “What? You mean you know where we are?”

“I know the catalog number and some other characteristics of the asteroid we’re on—or in, if you prefer. Its configuration is unique, and has been noticed in the past. On the other hand, I can’t say precisely where the asteroid is at the moment. I have its orbital elements, but everything in this system is subject to everything else, gravitywise—”

“ ‘Gravitywise?’ ”

“Yes, Master, and predicting where anything will be at any given moment amounts to a billion-body geometry problem. At any other time than Flamewind, there are continuous long-range sensor inventories, and the system’s databanks are updated hourly, but you see—”

“I see.” Lando turned a knob, activating the deck plates at their lowest intensity so he’d have just enough gravity to roll a cigarette. He lit it, kicked them off again, and reclined in his chair, mind working furiously.

“Once we get out in that mess again, we won’t be able to navigate,” he said, more to himself than to the robot.

Vuffi Raa agreed, adding, “However,