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“No,” Luke said stubbornly. “There’s something more here.” Turning away, he dropped gracefully through the open entry hatch. Catching a handhold on the hull, he catapulted himself forward, away from the skiff and into the silence and darkness of the interspace.

There, drifting slowly in front of the Qella gallery, Luke extended his senses to the planet below. He found only a great stillness. There was no halo of life energy, no reservoir of the Force. The ice-encased surface had the same profound quiescence as the mass of rock below it.

“What are you looking for?”

“A reason to wait for the thaw,” Luke said.

“So it can finish its journey,” Eckels said. “It meant nothing more than that.”

“Shhh,” Luke said. He had drifted close to the outer skin of the vagabond, and he reached out and drew himself to it. He listened to the complex rhythms of the ship and allowed them to resolve into the deep, fundamental pulse of its being. He listened only to that pulse until he had absorbed it completely, knew it utterly.

Then he extended himself toward the planet once more, this time quieting his own urgency and desire, seeking that most profound state of egoless connection in which everything could be heard without distraction or distortion.

And suddenly there they were, like millions of grains of sand falling slowly to the surface—a collective heartbeat so faint and so languid that the slightest whisper of impatience would obscure it. With an exultant cry, Luke pushed himself away from the wall in a backward somersault.

“What? What is it?” Eckels exclaimed. He jetted across the open space to intercept Luke, catching him just before he reached the gallery.

But Luke twisted away from Eckels’s grasp, turning to trace the lines of a Qella face with both hands. “The bodies you found—the Qella who roamed the ice—those weren’t the survivors,” Luke said. “They were the dissenters.”

“What do you mean?”

“Exactly what I said. We were all wrong. This ship isn’t a museum, or a temple full of treasure, or a lifeboat—or a monument, either. It’s a tool kit, Doctor—a tool kit for rebuilding a destroyed world.”

Turning, Luke grabbed both of Eckels’s hands in a fervent grip. Joy and wonder together animated his smile. “They had time to do more than prepare this ship, Doctor—they had time to prepare themselves. That planet is not dead—there are millions of Qella buried in the ground, awaiting the thaw. And we can give them that.”

As soon as Mud Sloth cleared the opening the vagabond had created for it, Luke gave the thrusters one hard kick, then turned the skiff around so that all could watch the Qella vessel fall away behind them.

“Are you sure you don’t want to cloak us, like you did before?” Eckels said worriedly to Luke. “I’d really rather not contribute personally to the warming of Maltha Obex.”

“The vagabond will not harm us,” Lobot said with quiet assurance.

“Don’t worry, Dr. Eckels,” said Lando. “Lobot here spent so much time in the tubules that he got promoted to honorary egg.”

Luke chuckled. “If you want something to worry about, Doctor, worry that your friends back at the Institute reversed two digits and dropped a decimal.”

“Our very best planetary climatologist personally supervised the modeling of the Qella glacial epoch,” Eckels said with stiff professional pride. “If Lobot communicated his recommendations accurately—”

“It understands,” said Lobot. “The task required the building of a new strand of memory code, but it understands.”

“I’m still surprised at how small an energy input it’s supposed to take,” Luke said. “I thought at first we’d have to bring in half a dozen Star Destroyers and keep them here a month.”

“Small inputs, and time,” said Eckels. “This planet teetered on the edge—it would probably have recovered on its own, as the Qella must have expected it would, but for the orbital wobble caused by the loss of the second moon.”

“Look,” said Lando. “It’s starting.”

The hull of the vagabond had begun to glow, crawling blue snakes of energy snapping along its length