g while, but we
were thorough. Kaby helped Doc check Surgery: since she last made the
Place, she has been stationed in a Field Hospital (it turns out the
Spiders actually are mounting operations from them) and learned a few
nice new wrinkles.

However, Doc put in some honest work on his own, though, of course,
every check was observed by at least three people, not including Bruce
or Lili. When the Maintainer vanished, Doc had pulled out of his
glassy-eyed drunk in a way that would have surprised me if I hadn't seen
it happen to him before, but when we finished Surgery and got on to the
Art Gallery, he had started to putter and I noticed him hold out his
coat and duck his head and whip out a flask and take a swig and by now
he was well on his way toward another peak.

The Art Gallery had taken time too, because there's such a jumble of
strange stuff, and it broke my heart but Kaby took her ax and split a
beautiful blue woodcarving of a Venusian medusa because, although there
wasn't a mark in the paw-polished surface, she claimed it was just big
enough. Doc cried a little and we left him fitting the pieces together
and mooning over the other stuff.

After we'd finished everything else, Mark had insisted on tackling the
floor. Beau and Sid both tried to explain to him how this is a one-sided
Place, that there is nothing, but nothing, under the floor; it just gets
a lot harder than the diamonds crusting it as soon as you get a quarter
inch down--that being the solid equivalent of the Void. But Mark was
knuckle-headed (like all Romans, Sid assured me on the q.t.) and broke
four diamond-plus drills before he was satisfied.

Except for some trick hiding places, that left the Void, and things
don't vanish if you throw them at the Void--they half melt and freeze
forever unless you can fish them out. Back of the Refresher, at about
eye-level, are three Venusian coconuts that a Hittite strongman threw
there during a major brawl. I try not to look at them because they are
so much like witch heads they give me the woolies. The parts of the
Place right up against the Void have strange spatial properties which
one of the gadgets in Surgery makes use of in a way that gives me the
worse woolies, but that's beside the point.

* * * * *

During the hunt, Kaby and Erich had used their Callers as direction
finders to point out the Maintainer, just as they're used in the cosmos
to locate the Door--and so