Helmuth thought greyly: Then they’ve already left Callisto.
“It that you, Sweeney? Where’s the Bridge tonight?”
“Dillon’s on duty,” a very distant transmitter said. “Try to raise Helmuth, Sweeney.”
“Helmuth, Helmuth, you gloomy beetle-gooser! Come in, Helmuth!”
“Sure, Bob, come in and dampen us.”
Sluggishly, Helmuth reached out to take the mike, where it lay clipped to one arm of the chair. But the door to his room opened before he had completed the gesture.
Eva came in.
She said, “Bob, I want to tell you something.”
“His voice is changing!” the voice of the Callisto operator said. “Ask him what he’s drinking, Sweeney!”
Helmuth cut the radio out. The girl was freshly dressed in so far as anybody dressed in anything on Jupiter Vand Helmuth wondered why she was prowling the decks at this hour, half-way between her sleep period and her trick. Her hair was hazy against the light from the corridor, and she looked less mannish than usual. She reminded him a little of the way she had looked when they first met.
“All right,” he said. “I owe you a mix, I guess. Citric, su-gar and the other stuff is in the locker… you know where it is. Shot-cans are there, too.”
The girl shut the door and sat down on the bunk, with a free litheness that was almost grace, but with a determination which Helmuth knew meant that she had just decided to do something silly for all the right reasons.
“I don’t need a drink,” she said. “As a matter of fact, lately I’ve been turning my lux-R’s back to the common pool. I suppose you did that for meby showing me what a mind looked like that is hiding from itself.”