“Right,” Dan shouted back, over his shoulder.
Where is Amanda? He asked himself. The wardroom was empty. The doors to the privacy compartments along the passageway were closed. And where is Fuchs? he wondered, starting to feel nettled.
He found them both in the sensor bay, where Fuchs was explaining something about the x-ray projector.
“It would be more helpful if we could use a small nuclear device,” the planetary astronomer was saying, totally serious. “That would be the most convenient way of generating x-rays and gamma rays all at the same time. But of course, nuclear devices are banned.”
“Of course,” Amanda said, looking just as intent as Fuchs.
“Pancho needs you on the bridge, Mandy.” Dan said.
She looked startled for a flash of a second, then said, “Right.”
As she hurried toward the bridge, Dan asked Fuchs, “What in the name of the nine gods of Sumatra do you want a nuke for?”
“I don’t!” Fuchs said. “They’re illegal, and justly so.”
“But you just said —”
“I was explaining to Amanda about x-ray spectroscopy. How we use xrays to make an asteroid fluoresce and reveal its chemical composition. The x-rays from this solar flare would have been very helpful to us if we were only close enough to the Belt.”
“But a nuke?”
Fuchs spread his hands. “Merely an example of how to produce x-rays and gamma rays on demand. An example only. I have no intention of bringing nuclear explosives into space.”
“I don’t know,” Dan said, scratching his chin. “You might be onto something. Maybe we could talk the IAA into letting us use nukes as sources for spectroscopic studies.”
Fuchs looked aghast. Dan laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. Fuchs saw the joke and grinned weakly back.
Dan’s mood darkened as he edged down the narrow walkway in the aft end of the module. He did not like the thought of being exposed to hard radiation. He had taken a lifetime’s worth of radiation back in his earlier days, working in space. Much more of a dose would kill him, he knew. It wouldn’t be an easy way to go, either.
As he lifted the covers protecting the electron guns’ innards and checked them for the eleventh time since they’d launched out of lunar orbit, Dan thought, Maybe Stavenger’s right. Get a jolt of nanomachines, let them clean up the damage the radiation’s done, rebuild me from the inside. So I won’t be able to go back to Earth. So what? What’s down there that I’d miss so much?
He knew the answer even as he asked the question. Sea breezes. Blue skies and soft sunsets. Birds flying. Flowers. Huge ugly brutal cities teeming with life. Vineyards! Dan suddenly realized that no one had yet tried to grow wine grapes off-Earth. Maybe that’s what I’ll do when I retire: settle down and watch my vineyards grow.
The intercom speaker set into the narrow walkway’s overhead carried Pancho’s voice. “Dan, you ready for me to light up the guns?”
The electron guns were just as good as they’d been all the other times he’d inspected them. Closing the cover on the one on his right, Dan answered, “You may fire when ready, Gridley.”
Pancho retorted, “I don’t know who this Gridley guy is, but I can’t rev up the guns till you close both their covers and seal ’em right and proper.”
“Aye, aye, skipper,” Dan said.
By the time he made it back to the bridge, Pancho was nowhere in sight. Amanda sat alone in the right-hand seat, and the bridge was rocking to the beat of high-intensity pop music. As soon as she saw Dan come through the hatch, Amanda snapped the music off.
“Pancho’s in the loo,” she said as Dan slid into the command-pilot’s seat.
“How’s the storm?”
“Precisely on track.” Amanda tapped at one of her touchscreens; it displayed a simplified map of the inner solar system, the orbits of Earth and Mars shown as thin lines of blue and red, respectively; the position of Starpower 1 was a blinking bright yellow dot. A lopsided gray miasma was almost touching the dot.
Dan’s mouth went dry. “I hate these things,” he mumbled.