“Where’s our college boy?” Pancho asked, looking around.
“That would be me, I suppose,” said a reedy voice from behind them.
Turning, Dan saw a husky-looking young man gripping the edges of the open hatch with both hands. He was a shade shorter than Dan, but broad in the shoulders, with a thick barrel chest. The build of a wrestler. His face was broad, too: a heavy jaw with wide, thin lips and small, deepset eyes. His hair was cropped so close to his skull that Dan couldn’t be sure of its true color. He wore a small glittering stone in his left ear-lobe, diamond or zircon or glass, Dan could not tell.
“I heard you enter. I was in the sensor bay, checking on the equipment,” he said in a flat midwestern American accent, pronounced so precisely that he had to have learned it in a foreign school.
“Oh,” said Pancho.
“I am Lars Fuchs,” he said, extending his hand to Dan. “You must be Mr. Randolph.”
“Pleased to meet you, Dr. Fuchs.” Fuchs’s hand engulfed his own. The young man’s grip was strong, firm. “This is Pancho Lane,” Dan went on. “She’ll be our pilot on the flight.”
Fuchs dipped his chin slightly. “Ms. Lane. And, sir, I am not Dr. Fuchs. Not yet.”
“That’s okay. Zack Freiberg recommends you highly.”
“I am very grateful to Doctor Professor Freiberg. He has been very helpful to me.”
“And my name is Dan. If you call me Mr. Randolph it’ll make me feel like an old man.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to offend you, sir!” Fuchs said, genuinely alarmed.
“Just call me Dan.”
“Yes, sir, of course. And you must call me Lars.” Turning to Pancho, he added, “Both of you.”
“That’s a deal, Lars,” said Pancho, sticking out her hand.
Fuchs took it gingerly, as if not quite sure what to do. “Pancho is a woman’s name in America?”
She laughed. “It’s this woman’s name, Lars old buddy.”
Smiling uneasily, Fuchs said, “Pancho,” as if testing out the name.
“You handle weightlessness very well,” Dan said. “From what Zack told me, this is your first time off-Earth.”
Fuchs said. “Thank you, sir… Dan. I came up last night so I could adapt myself to microgravity before you arrived here.”
Pancho smiled sympathetically. “Spent the night makin’ love to the toilet, huh?”
Looking flustered, Fuchs said, “I did retch a few times, yes.”
“Ever’body does, Lars,” she said. “Nothin’ to be ashamed of.”
“I am not ashamed,” he said, his chin rising a notch.
Dan moved between them. “Have you picked out which cabin you want for yourself? Since you were first aboard you get first pick.”
“Hey,” Pancho griped, “I’ve been aboard this buggy before, you know. So has Amanda.”
“The privacy compartments are all exactly alike,” Fuchs said. “It doesn’t matter which one I get.”
“I’ll take the last one on the left,” Dan said, peering down the passageway that ran the length of the module. “It’s closest to the lav.”
“You?” Pancho looked surprised. “Since when are you comin’ on the mission?”
“Since about four days ago,” Dan said. “That’s when I made up my mind… about a lot of things.”
PELICAN BAR
“So here’s my plan,” Dan said, with a grin. He and Pancho were hunched over one of the postage-stamp-sized tables in the farthest corner of the Pelican bar, away from the buzzing conversations and bursts of laughter from the crowd standing at the bar itself. Their heads were almost touching, leaning together like a pair of conspirators.
Which they were. Inwardly, Dan marveled at how good he felt. Free. Happy, almost. The double-damned bureaucrats have tried to tie me up in knots. Humphries is behind it all, playing along with the IAA and those New Morality bigots. Those uptight psalm-singers don’t want us to reach the asteroids. They like the Earth just the way it is: miserable, hungry, desperate for the kind of order and control that the New Morality offers. This greenhouse warming is a blessing for them, the wrath of God smiting the unbelievers. Anything we do to try to help alleviate it, they see as a threat to their power.
Vaguely, Dan recalled from his childhood history lessons something about a group called the Nazis, back in the twentieth century. They came to power because there was an economic depression and people needed jobs and food. If he remembered his history lessons correctly.