My vision is blurred. I draw my knees into a protective crouch. I'm cold. Thirsty. Never - even in my most savage hangovers - have I been this thirsty.

I'm bound to something large and I jerk and struggle to get free. When the moisture clears from my eyes, I see Charles - beautiful Charles - floating centimeters away, arms bound loosely around my waist, mine about his. He's limp and motionless, and I nearly panic before I see his soft breathing.

Normal pulse. I push open an eyelid and a brown eye stares out. Asleep. I twist around slowly - my head hurts - and see Max and Andra floating in a corner, similarly roped together.

We've blown it! Oh shit. The goddamned caps didn't work. I begin to cry. It was so hard to get to the necessary state of mind to die. Now we'll have to do it again.

Then I'm taken with guilt. Did Max and I actually ...

Yes. While they watched! How could we?

And Charles and Andra?

He did! the bastard. And loved it. He fucked her brains out, and she grunted her silly head off, practically turning herself inside out on him.

How stupid of us. How could I allow myself to - Was it was the junk we took? We were high.

Memories flood back.

It was beyond control, beyond the desire to control. Not only did I not want to stop, I did not want to want to stop. I loved it! Loved slavish sex with Max while my husband and Andra looked on, and I derived equal pleasure from watching them. It was a dance - a dance of love and a dance of the glands, neither separable from the other, and we loved it. The junk? No! I'd do it again!

But afterwards - our clothes. How could we have left things like this - such a mess - when we knew they'd eventually come for us.

I disentangle from Charles. All three - Charles, Andra, Max - are in deep sleep, probably still under the drug; it didn't kill but -

Blood! On all of us. Dried spots on Andra's face, around the vagina and anus. The same for me and even a few crusty drops from my nipples. The men are in similar shape. We've been oozing; leaking blood from every orifice.

I find my watch drifting against the wall and strain to read it through eyes that won't focus. Only two hours? Can't be right. Must be twenty-six. We've been out a whole day. How can that be? Max set a timer to de pressurize the module. We should be swimming in hard vacuum.

Look again. Not two hours. Not twenty-six. It's ten DAYS and two hours. Why haven't we drowned in carbon dioxide?

I'm trembling. It shouldn't be so cold, even without power. Even without power, we should be soaking up enough energy from the sun to -

POWER!

When we were dying - trying to kill ourselves - the station was on batteries. They couldn't have lasted this long. I glance at the remote monitor. The green pimple of light in the upper left corner tells me that the main power is on. I force myself to be quiet and calm. My mind churns while I zip into my flight suit.

Ten days - far too short for a rescue. Had there been a Japanese ship nearby? Russian? Unlikely. We would have known. And yet - what else could it be? Help must have arrived. There must be somebody here.

My face is a mess. I rub away the worst of the dried blood with saliva wetted fingers and the sleeve of my suit. Hair? Smooth it with my hand. I need a band.

There must be somebody here -

But first, water. I attack the playroom drinking spigot. It's ice cold, about twice as cold as it should be. I'm conscious of my own desperate gulping and deliberately slow down.

Finally, I'm presentable. I slide open the hatch into the storm cellar and go in.

It's nauseating. Most of the food packets have exploded. There are shreds of plastic all over the volume of the cabin, a blizzard of hundreds of disrupted packets. They completely plaster and clog up the exhaust vents, and the rest float randomly in the stagnant air. They start moving toward the hatch, following the new circulation, so I close it behind me to keep them in. Well, maybe it's not too surprising that this happened, considering how they were popping off before we - killed ourselves.

Maybe that's not too surprising, but what is surprising is that there's a blown out hole in the two-hundred kilogram emergency water container, and it looks like everything has leaked out. There's a slimy ooze on every surface in the room, an emulsion of food and water.

But that's still nothing compared with the shock when I check out the big mass of whatever it is that's drifting and rotating slowly in the opposite corner of the cabin. At first I think it's the web netting we'd used to constrain the food, wrapped around the soggy remainder of the contents of the exploded packets.

Well, maybe it started out that way, but that's not what it is any more. My God! It's an obscene assemblage, an organic collage like nothing I ever saw in medical school or anywhere else. Looks like freshly jelled vomit, stuck together in green, yellow, red bits, filled with scum, phlegm, pus-like stuff. Sluggish, maggoty stuff. Maggots, my ass - if I were a fly, I wouldn't go near that thing.

It's big. A couple of meters long, ellipsoidal; prolate; except that it's ruptured lengthwise, and inside the split is red, loose material, like afterbirth. I get a little closer to have a better look, and suddenly I feel a little radiance against my face, and -

- And the goddamned thing is warm! I feel the heat from a meter away.

Suddenly, I'm scared. Real scared. What the hell came out of this? Something is aboard this station. I get out of there fast.

I should wait for the others, but I leave them sleeping. I move slowly through the storm cellar, keeping an eye on that drifting mass, left hand trailing the most formidable weapon I could scrounge - a meter length of aluminum conduit from Charles's miscellaneous equipment locker in the end-cone. A knife is zippered loosely in the right leg pocket of my flight suit. This is the first time I've regretted our decision not to bring along a weapon of any kind. I remember the debate about bringing a rifle or pistol - I was relieved when we unanimously decided we didn't need it. Goddamn fools.

I don't free-float across the storm cellar. Instead, it's hand-grip to hand-grip along the wall. Don't want to be caught in mid-flight without something to push off from. The conduit is awkward. I have to be aware how I carry it so it doesn't rattle the wall. My arms tremble - maybe from the cold, but more likely the fear.

OPS-2 is next. I wait at the hatch, suppressing my breathing, listening for any sound. Finally I slide it open a few centimeters and peek in. Nothing. I can see through OPS-2, through the open hatch into the node, and it looks empty too. Didn't we leave the node hatches closed? That's the policy.

I move slowly into the node, stretching to look around the sixty degree angle into OPS-1, when I hear a tiny sound. Maybe it's the conduit touching the wall.

No! I panic because it seems like it's behind me. I swap ends and scan OPS-2 before finally convincing myself my ears are playing tricks. Audio illusion. Whatever it is, it didn't come from behind - it's still ahead.

Listen. Now there's quietness. Now the faintest hint of something shifting. Or is it in my mind?

OPS-1 is empty. Now I'm no longer cold - I'm sweating. It's the stinking sweat of fear; fear of what might appear at the opposite hatch, the one to the bedroom hallway. It's cracked open slightly, and I have to approach it totally exposed.

I have a strong urge to go back as I get to the grip beside the hatch, but instead, I pull along it, body nearly flattened against the bulkhead, until my eye is nearly at the opening.

Move your head slowly to the opening, a millimeter at a time, until you see through into the passageway.

I can see right through to the opposite hatch, which is open, and into the lighted galley. There, at the dining platform, five meters away -

A MAN! NOT the slime mold from hell.

We've been rescued. I'm so relieved, I want to scream, but I wait a moment and watch.

His back is toward me, but I see a little of the face. Wrinkled skin and glasses - an old man. A benevolent looking old man. I ease open the hatch a little at a time.

Holding my breath, I move into the passageway and along the handholds until I'm a meter from the open hatch. He's about a meter beyond that, loosely strapped into a seat at the platform, attention on a clipboard in his left hand. A pen is in the other hand. As I watch, he mumbles and writes on the clipboard. I crane to see over his shoulder.

A crossword puzzle. An old-fashioned crossword puzzle on paper. I'm startled, and I probably make a noise because he puts the pen down on the platform as if expecting it to stay there and swivels slowly around.

"Hello," he says.

The voice is like gravel. He fixes me with a stare through his glasses; a gruff, not unfriendly expression on his face. The pen floats slowly from the platform into the air behind his head.

We scrutinize each other without speaking. The slightest trace of a smile curls the edges of his lips and he chuckles; amused, I guess, with the open mouthed look of surprise on my face.

I've never met this man before, but there is an incredible rush of deja vu as I look into those blue-gray eyes. My eyes. I know his face. But I can't be seeing what I'm seeing.

Panic, again. The mental shock is like physical disorientation. He must sense my discomfort, because his face broadens into an assuring smile. He laughs, and his voice comes out like grit in a tin can, modulated with reason and sensibility. There's a slight southern accent - just like I remember it from the recordings.

"Hello, sweetie," he says gently, talking to a child. "I'm Logan Styles," he says, in an incredibly disarming and friendly voice. "Do you know me? I'm your great grandfather. My, but what a pretty girl you are. I'm a very lucky grandfather."

I'm crying. I turn away and cover my face and weep, shuddering. I'm lost. He's been dead, long before I was born, almost sixty years. And yet he's here, alive, and even though I have never met him, I know him. He is my family, a link with my past, a chain, and at this moment an overpowering paternal presence; a solid, secure protection.

A gentle hand is on my shoulder, and I turn and burrow between his arms to his chest, throwing my arms around him, bawling. I'm a little girl who has banged her knee, and he soothes, comforts, caresses - with tenderness and patience - and makes the hurt go away.