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from Benel’s back, throwing him and his apparatus to the ground.
    “You knew my father?” she whispered in wonder.
     
    B enel Kran was no better at making tea than at making machines. But the tea was better than none at all, and it served for their interview.
    There was no real furniture in Kran’s lab; but Visid, with a little effort, was able to assemble two short benches with a third in the center as a sort of table.
    “Where do you eat? Where do you … relax?” she asked Benel.
    “I eat when I get hungry, wherever I am,” Benel answered, in a tone that said it was a silly question. “And I don’t relax. I sleep.”
    He pointed to a horribly uncomfortable-looking bed, a flat board covered with ragged sheets and an olive-colored blanket with one remarkably large hole in it.
    Visid shook her head. “I can’t believe you get anything done at all.”
    Benel was looking at her, his head cocked slightly to favor his good eye. “So you’re really Jean Sneaden’s daughter?”
    Ignoring his question for the moment, she studied his bad eye. “We can fix that, I think. With the tools the Machine Master gave me and a little scrounging for parts—”
    Benel’s eyes, both of them, widened. “The Machine Master? Of Mars?”
    “Of course. I worked for him.”
    “Amazing. He’s a remarkable craftsman.”
    “More than that. And yes, he certainly knows how to build things. Unlike some people…”
    Benel shrugged. “That job is for engineers. I’m a physicist. It always amazed me how the engineers could make things look so …”
    “Useful?”
    “Elegant. It’s an art.”
    “It’s something that needs to be done. Otherwise all the bright ideas in the world would look like … that.” She pointed with scorn at the box with its vacuum hose, piled near the door.
    “Your father was good at getting things done,” Benel Kran said. “He worked for Targon Ramir, you know.”
    Visid looked as if she were searching her memory. “I … remember him, I think. He was at our house, once. A tall man, strong-looking. It was a long time ago.”
    “Not so long. But you were young then, I’d think.”
    Visid lifted her teacup, sipped. “Nine, when the war came.”
    “They say Carter Frolich turned all of them over to Prime Cornelian. Your father, and Targon Ramir …”
    “And Carter Frolich …”
    “He’s alive, you know. Blind, up in his Eagle’s Nest on Sacajawea Patera. I visited him there once. He thought I was Targon Ramir.”
    “Carter Frolich is alive?”
    “And quite mad. I doubt he could hurt or help anyone at this point. Even the light soldiers at the feeder plants leave him alone when he wanders down from his perch.”
    “Light soldiers ?’
    “Yes, and they’re our immediate concern. For the last two years, the only plasma soldiers on the planet have been the ones guarding the feeder stations. But lately they’ve been showing up again.”
    “And you’ve been neutralizing them with your box of junk.”
    “You needn’t sound so scornful. You could do better with it?” His tone held a hint of hope.
    “I should think so. And after I get this place organized …” She was studying the room, every corner, each bench, each overflowing box of parts.
    “Why,” Benel Kran said, brightening, daring to hope that his most fervent wish had come true, “this is marvelous!”
     
    A nd marvelous it proved to be. Within a week, during which the lab’s alarm registered two more light soldier incursions (but, thankfully, no attacks; both plasma soldiers wandered away from the compound, which was fortunate indeed, since, during the second incursion, Benel Kran’s weapon lay in a thousand parts on a workbench while Visid studied it minutely), Visid Sneaden had totally reorganized the lab. By the time she had finished, it looked like a Venusian version of the Machine Master’s dungeon.
    The following weeks were spent scrounging for parts and moving Visid’s own laboratory equipment into the recreation