The walls of Ritter's workroom displayed a dozen views of the original dragonfly in action, ridden by the Searcher in her black battlesuit. It swooped, hovered—then faded through planes. Each scene was a computer simulation created from data in the vehicle's flight recorder.
On the examination stand in the center of the room rested Ritter's copy, which had done none of those things when Hansen rode it into danger.
Penny appeared on the other side of the examination stand. She was a leggy blond whose breasts, secured by a transparent bandeau, looked too large for her rib cage.
Ritter touched a key. Vertical sections through the original dragonfly and the copy appeared beside one another in front of the engineer, then merged. Colors highlighted the incongruities between the pairs; a sidebar tabulated those differences.
None of the colored masks was farther up the spectrum than bright red. At the sensitivity setting which Ritter had chosen, chips from the same production batch might vary into the green level, and a ten-thousandth's variation in wall diameter would make the image of tubing glow yellow.
Penny's jewel flashed. She became a brunette with broad hips and a small bosom, then a black-haired woman as squat as Ritter himself.
The paired sections slid through the dimensional vehicles from the front backward. The mask stayed within the red level. The engineer balled his fist silently.
Penny walked around the viewing stand. "What are you doing, then?" she asked.
"There's a control problem," Ritter said, still watching the holograms. "The software was copied directly, so that leaves the equipment itself, probably somewhere in the control circuits. But I'm damned if I know where."
"What, ah . . ." Penny said. She leaned against the engineer. Her nipple became erect when it brushed his triceps. "What sort of shape do you particularly like me in, darling?"
"Huh?" said Ritter. He glanced over at her. He put the display on pause reflexively for the moment he looked away from it. "Tall and thin's unusual, I suppose, but I've told you—I don't really care."
The images began to scroll forward again. "And look, Penny," he added. "Time may not mean anything to you, but it does to me. I really don't have time for recreation just now."
The woman's head jerked back as though Ritter had slapped her.
The engineer continued with his painstaking search. He had performed the operation several times already, slicing the vehicles at a different viewing plane for each attempt.
"It'll descend only one level of the Matrix from wherever you start it," the engineer said. "We've tried it from several planes, and it's the same each one. It'll go from here to Four, or Eight to Seven if Hansen lifts it up to his house to begin with. But not down to Six from Eight."
Penny brightened when Ritter first began to speak, but she soon realized that he was using her as a living wall from which to echo his own thoughts. One of the engineer's concubines would have done as well; or a skivvy.
"Now that wouldn't thrill me," Ritter continued. "It means there's something wrong in my set-up . . . but by this time I could live with that, because we can work around it. Hansen can take the vehicle to Plane Two and drop into the Open Lands from there. But the other thing is, the bird won't move within the dimension, and that means it's no good at all."
Penny shivered at mention of Plane Two. She was now a tall red-head, almost skeletally thin. She crossed her arms over small breasts with jewels depending from the nipples. "The Lomeri are too dangerous to interfere with," she said. "Hansen could have killed you when he took you there before."
Multiple images of the Searcher on her dragonfly raced over a battlefield on the walls of the laboratory, framed by conduits and fittings within the room. Below the Searcher, battlesuits shorted incandescently. Delicate antennae on the underside of the vehicle's saddle received and copied men's minds at the moment of their dissolution.
Ritter scowled at Penny in irritation. He resumed running the paired sections.
"We were there longer than we'd expected, that was all," he said. "The fellow who stashed the dragonflies there had set them a millisecond out of phase with the surroun—"
His body grew rigid. His mouth was suddenly dry.
"Ritter?" Penny asked. "Ritter? Are you—"
"Oh my god!" the engineer said.
He turned, seized Penny beneath the elbows, and lifted her tall form another half meter in the air without showing any strain. "That's it! Hansen fetched the unit back by using the override switch, but the software still thinks it's out of synchronous. It won't let any of the in-plane controls operate!"
Penny twisted her legs around the big man's waist and drew her groin tightly against his diaphragm. "You've fixed it, then?" she asked, reflecting his delight like the full moon.
"Well, next best," explained the engineer with a slight frown.
He set the woman down and returned to his keyboard. She barely got her feet beneath her in time to avoid dropping onto the smooth floor.
"There's no way to reprogram the software," Ritter continued, muttering in the direction of his console. "Not from what I have. But the override switch will work, I'm sure, so long as it's detached from the chassis and operated back on Plane Four!"
"Now that you've done that . . . ," Penny said. She knelt to fumble with the engineer's fly.
"Not now, for god's sake!" Ritter snapped. "I need to check this while it's still clear in my mind."
He shifted his groin. When the woman's hands tried to follow, he slapped them away.
Penny sat on the floor beside the console. She drew her knees up to her chin. Her body flickered through a series of forms before settling on a statuesque blond with an hourglass waist and high, firm breasts.
Holographic images, both schematics and solids, shifted in quick succession on Ritter's holographic display. Possible redesigns vanished into limbo or were lifted higher in the air for comparison with other ideas.
The engineer whistled between his teeth as he worked.
Silent tears ran down the cheeks of the woman at his feet.