Embarking on the venturesome journey into the Neutral Zone but it was quickly replaced with the thought that was to become a refrain for him in the next few days: Who would want a Vulcan deflector array? Chapter Six CAPTAIN K'VADA.

If with you as it is with me If under your slipping words that easily flow About you as a garment easily Your violent heart beats to and fro! Long have I waited never once confessed Even to myself how bitter the separation; Now. diflucan Amusing; it made him look like a skydiver sans parachute or some lunatic balanced on the wing of a plane. He finally attached the safety line-but the impression of free-fall remained. I was surprised that Munroe was so enthusiastic about what looked to me like just one more bonding-through-bravery ritual one more initiation-by-ordeal. Even if there was no real pressure to take part and even if the dangers were minimal . . . so much for the island of radical nonconformists. Someone started the winch unwinding. Rajendra's friends standing-and then kneeling-on the lip of the well reached out and patted his shoulders as he descended cheering him on; he grinned nervously as he disappeared from sight. I squeezed forward myself and leaned over with the notepad to maintain line-of-sight communication. The button camera's memory would probably be more than enough but it was impossible to resist the lure of real-time. I wasn't alone; people jostled to get a view of the screen. Munroe called out from behind the crush "So much for authenticity. You realize you're changing the experience for everyone?" "Not for the diver. " 126 "Oh right that's all that matters. Capture the last glimpse of the real thing-before destroying it forever. You ethnovandal. " He added half seriously "Anyway you're wrong. It changes things for the diver too. " The tunnel was about two meters wide the walls about as cylindrical as the surface rock was flat-too good to be the product of any geological process but too rough to have been machined. The morphogenesis of Stateless was a complex process which I'd never investigated in detail but I did know that explicit human intervention had been required for many of the fine points. Still whether this tunnel had formed unbidden at the intersection of certain levels of marker-chemical gradients because lithophilic bacteria had noticed the cue and switched on all the right genes-or whether they'd had to be told more forcefully by a person tipping a bucketload of primer onto the surface-it beat attacking the rock for a month or two with a diamond-coated drill. I watched the twin reflections of the lantern beams slowly shrinking into the darkness and the point-of-view image of pebbled gray-green rock sliding by. There were more hints of ancestral coral and fleeting glimpses of the bones of fish trapped in the compacting of the reefs-and again I felt an eerie sense of the compressed time scale of the island. The idea that subterranean depths belonged to inconceivably remote eons was so ingrained that it required a constant effort to remain prepared for soft drink bottles or car.