breast, but she dodged him.
“Beauty is what you are, Nadezhda Francine. By these criteria you are queen of Mars.”
“Princess of Mars,” she corrected absently, thinking it over.
“Yes that’s right. Nadezhda Francine Cherneshevsky, the nine-fingered Princess of Mars.”
“You’re not a conventional man.”
“No!” He hooted. “I never claimed to be! Except before certain selection committees of course. A conventional man! Ah, ha ha ha ha ha!—the conventional men get Maya. That is their reward.” And he laughed like a wild man.
One morning they crossed the last broken hills of Cerberus, and floated out over the flat dusty plain of Amazonis Planitia. Arkady brought the dirigible down, to set a windmill in a pass between two final hillocks of old Cerberus. Something went wrong with the clasp on the winch hook, however, and it snapped open when the windmill was only halfway to the ground. The windmill thumped down flat on its base. From the ship it looked okay, but when Nadia suited up and descended in the sling to check it out, she found that the hot plate had cracked away from the base.
And there, behind the plate, was a mass of something. A dull green something with a touch of blue to it, dark inside the box. She reached in with a screwdriver and poked at it carefully. “Shit,” she said.
“What?” Arkady said above.
She ignored him and scraped some of the substance into a bag she used for screws and nuts.
She got into the sling. “Pull me back up,” she ordered.
“What’s wrong?” Arkady asked.
“Just get me up there.”
He closed the bomb bay doors after her, and met her as she was getting out of the sling. “What’s up?”
She took off her helmet. “You know what’s up, you bastard!” She took a swing at him and he leaped back, banging into a wall of windmills. “Ow!” he cried; a vane had caught him in the back. “Hey! What’s the problem! Nadia!”
She took the bag from her walker pocket and waved it before him. “This is the problem! How could you do it? How could you lie to me? You bastard, do you have any idea what kind of trouble this is going to get us in? They’ll come up here and send us all back to Earth!”
Round-eyed, Arkady rubbed his jaw. “I wouldn’t lie to you, Nadia,” he said earnestly. “I don’t lie to my friends. Let me see that.”
She stared at him and he stared back, his arm stretched out for the bag, the whites of his eyes visible all the way round the irises. He shrugged, and she frowned.
“You really don’t know?” she demanded.
“Know what?”
She couldn’t believe he would fake ignorance; it just wasn’t his style. Which suddenly made things very strange. “At least some of our windmills are little algae farms.”
“What?”
“The fucking windmills that we’ve been dropping everywhere,” she said. “They’re stuffed with Vlad’s new algae or lichen or whatever it is. Look.” She put the little bag on the tiny kitchen table, opened it, and used the screwdriver to spoon out a little bit of it. Little knobby chunks of bluish lichen. Like Martian life-forms out of an old pulp novel.
They stared at it.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Arkady said. He leaned over until his eyes were a centimeter from the stuff on the table.
“You swear you didn’t know?” Nadia demanded.
“I swear. I wouldn’t do that to you, Nadia. You know that.”
She heaved a big breath. “Well—our friends would do it to us, apparently.”
He straightened up and nodded. “That’s right.” He was distracted, thinking hard. He went to one of the windmill bases and hefted it away from the others. “Where was it?”
“Behind the heating pad.”
They went to work on it with Nadia’s tools, and got it open. Behind the plate was another colony of Underhill algae. Nadia poked around at the edges of the plate and discovered a pair of small hinges where the top of the plate met the inside of the container wall. “Look, it’s made to open.”
“But who opens it?” Arkady said.
“Radio?”
“Well I’ll be damned.” Arkady stood, walked up and down the narrow corridor. “I mean …”
“How many dirigible trips have been made so far, ten? Twenty? And all of them dropping these things?”
Arkady started to laugh. He tilted his head back, and his huge crazed grin split his red beard in two, and he laughed until he held his sides. “Ah, ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
Nadia, who didn’t think it was funny at all, nevertheless felt her face grinning at the sight of