Soft come the dragons

captain of this team. Send someone else. I'll go."
    "Like hell."
    "A captain—"
    "This isn't a nineteenth-century sailing vessel, Bill. I'm a figurehead captain. You could do my job as well. You know that. Now, can the corn and get me a suit."
    He hurried away, biting his lower lip. Too servile yet. Too many memories of South Africa before liberation. Then I felt rather idiotic for indulging in character analysis when Death lurked in every dark corner.
    Then: "I'm going with you," Shukon said.
    Then: "Mayor, I—"
    And: "It is not a matter of curiosity. This is a diplomatic condition."
    Me: "There are troops on the way—"
    Him: "You are a medical man, remember? Besides, it will take some time for troops to reach here. I know you wish not to delay."
    With a sigh: "I won't desecrate any shrines or—"
    Staunchly: "With me or not at all." His eyes were cool. Very cool. Too damned cool.
    I sighed again. There was my duty as a physician. Shukon, untrained for this sort of search, would hinder me. Hippocratic oath riding my nostrils with stirrups of sanctity, I should have told him to ram it and then gone alone. However, I was also a diplomat here. Diplomacy, one hears, is a science. But it does not have that volume of knowledge upon which to build a base. I felt uneasy with it.
    "With me?" he asked again.
    "With you."
    See me: doctor, diplomat—dramatic actor . . .
    Fifteen minutes later, insulated against Lin Chi's bugs, we stepped onto the tarmac that ringed the ruined complex, stepped over rubble and around turned-over, crushed vehicles. The blast had smashed things like the first of an angry god but had not stopped the bacteria. We checked for radioactivity, found it tolerable, and moved on.
    We stood expectant at the edge of the pit. Rubble lay packed from wall to wall, torn with channels that were sometimes deadends, other times seemed to go down and down and down for eternity. "You had better wait here," I said.
    "With me," he said. His voice was a bit metallic through the suitphone.
    We stepped onto the once-molten slag of the ruins, worming toward a particularly large hole fifty feet out. When we reached it, I shined my flashlight into it. There were many angles, but part of the main drop was always in sight. I thought I detected some glittering blue tile about eighty feet down, but I could not be certain in the confusing webs of shadows and semi-darks. "Follow," I said, "but not so close you could break my neck too if you fell."
    Using arms, legs, shoulders, and buttocks to brace ourselves, we moved down. Now and again, a recognizable piece of rubble jutted from the bubbled, rugged wall. A broken beam, the back of what had once been a lounge chair, a specimen freezer door, an oddly perfect piece of windowglass . . . But for the most part, the blast had fused everything into an amalgam of sameness, relieved only by the varying juxtaposition of slag layer to slag layer.
    Fifty feet down, the way widened to four times its previous expanse, and we had to go to traditional mountain-climbing procedures. I clung to the right wall, working precariously down the rubble, fingers and toes gripped in impossibly small crevices. So, hanging like a nervous spider, I heard the crunch of breakage, and watched as Shukon plunged past, kicking wildly, pulling twenty pounds of slag with him . . .
    Time . . .
    Time was a frozen corpse, mouth open . . .
    There was a scream from below. It was the first sign Shukon had given that he was human. In fear of Death, all mouths form the same.
    I clung to the rocks, desperate as they shivered, jelly-like, with the resettling of the slag. When the earth quieted, there was nothing but silence that clung to the walls like an oil film.
    "Shukon?"
    Silence.
    "Shukon?"
    Walls, walls, darkness . . .
    "Shukon!"
    I felt the blast of my own words, realized I was screaming. No time to get hysterical. And why hysteria over a ratty little mayor? Why over him? Because he was something like my ... I clamped my teeth together, found more handholds, started down.
    Thirty feet farther down, I found him on a ledge, one arm tucked under him, the hand reappearing at an unnatural angle. The Life Systems box on his chest showed him to be in good condition, though unconscious. Still, beneath that heavy, cushioning, germ-impregnable suit, there might be broken bones I couldn't feel. I prepared a hypodermic of stimulants, punched it through the rubberized, self-sealing skin of the suit, straight into (I hoped) a