“I have,” Dillon said, unruffled. “But we’re agreed that you may not feel the same after you’ve talked to Wagoner. He’s in the ship, of course. I’ve put out a suit for you at the lock.”
Charity put the helmet over his head, effectively cutting himself off from further conversation, or from any further consciousness of Helmuth at all.
Helmuth stood looking at him a moment. Then, with a convulsive shrug, he went down the cleats.
Three minutes later, he was plodding in a spacesuit across the surface of Jupiter V, with the vivid bulk of Jupiter splashing his shoulders with colour.
A courteous Marine let him through the ship’s air lock and deftly peeled him out of the suit. Despite a grim determination to be uninterested in the new antigravity and any possible consequence of it, he looked curiously about as he was conducted up towards the bow.
But the ship was like the ones that had brought him from Chicago to Jupiter Vit was like any spaceship: there was nothing in it to see but corridor walls and stairwells, until you arrived at the cabin where you were needed.
Senator Wagoner was a surprise. He was a young man, no more than sixty-five at most, not at all portly, and he had the keenest pair of blue eyes that Helmuth had ever seen.
He received Helmuth alone, in his own cabina comfortable cabin as spaceship accommodations go, but neither roomy nor luxurious. He was hard to match up with the stories Helmuth had been hearing about the current Senate, which had been involved in scandal after scandal of more than Roman proportions.