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“I liked those leaves,” said Umbo. “Way more comfortable than any we used in the woods.”
“I’ll make it a point to find out what tree they come from and pull one along behind us in a big pot on wheels.”
Rigg spread out his blanket, folded it double thick, and then covered himself with two more while Umbo did the same. The light of the Ring came through the high window, which had apparently been angled for just that purpose. There were no branches above them to block it out.
“The leaves outside made for softer sleeping,” said Rigg.
“But there are no stones jabbing me,” said Umbo. “And no bugs or snakes or other vermin crawling all over me.”
“So far,” said Rigg.
He waited for Umbo’s retort—something like “If I don’t see them, I don’t care”—but Umbo said nothing at all.
Can you believe it? thought Rigg. Umbo’s already asleep. And in that moment, so was Rigg.
CHAPTER 6
Leaky and Loaf
It was still two days before the jump into the fold when Ram suddenly found himself strapped into his chair. The expendable was kneeling in front of him, looking up into his eyes.
“Was I asleep?” asked Ram.
“We jumped the fold, Ram,” said the expendable.
“On schedule and I simply don’t remember the past two days? Or early?”
“We generated the seventh cross-grain field,” said the expendable, “and the fold came into existence four steps earlier than predicted.”
“Was it the fold or merely a fold?” asked Ram.
“It was the fold we wanted. We’re exactly where we were supposed to be.”
“What a convenient error,” said Ram. “We inadvertently trigger fold creation four steps early, and yet it still takes us to our destination.”
“All the folds, all the cross-graining of fields, everything we did was polarized, so to speak: It always pointed us exactly where we wanted to go.”
“So spacetime, naughty as it was, suddenly got the idea and leapt ahead of us?”
“We got ourselves caught in the midst of a stutter,” said the expendable. “We were trying to avoid that because we didn’t know what would happen to us in a stutter—most of the computers predicted the ship would be sectioned or obliterated.”
Ram had been scanning all the reports from every part of the ship. “But neither happened. We’re still intact.”
“More than intact,” said the expendable.
“How can you be more than intact?” asked Ram.
• • •
The floor was hard and the room was cold, but Rigg awoke feeling more comfortable than he had in many days, and he burrowed down into the blankets to see if he could sleep a little longer.
“They took our clothes,” said Umbo.
Rigg opened one eye. Umbo, wrapped in a blanket, was sitting on a chair looking glum in the dim light eking its way down through the shutterblind.
“Probably having somebody wash them,” said Rigg.
Then he realized that if their clothes were gone, it meant someone had come into the room without waking them. They could have taken anything. Rigg bounded up from his blankets and searched for his pack. It was right where he had left it, and the money was where he had tucked it when he undressed.
