“Well, my friend,” I said aloud, “it looks like you’re getting tired and you need to get cleaned.” I looked up Tom’s maintenance record. His service was due tonight. “All right, we should be able to last until tonight, what do you think?”
Tom didn’t object. For a while, I watched them work, then, I turned the screen off; the iceberg, the fog over the swamp, the dark cliffs… I wanted to be away from it all.
I did send in a report nevertheless and immediately called ER-6. Vadim responded immediately, as if he was waiting for me to call.
“So what have you got going?” we asked each other simultaneously.
“We’ve got nothing,” I replied.
“Our lizards died out,” Vadim told me.
“Well,” I said, “Komov, the favorite student of Dr. Mboga, warned you; don’t rush the reptiles.”
“Who was rus
