It’ll be good to get to the Pub and sip a brew or two, Ripley said to himself. By god, I’ll even spring for the imported stuff tonight.
The construction work was going well. Slower than Fuchs had expected, but Ripley was satisfied with the progress that the crew was making. Looking up through his fishbowl helmet, he could see the habitat glinting in the sunlight as it spun slowly, like a big pinwheel.
Okay, he thought, so maybe it does look like a clunky kludge. Bunch of spacecraft tacked together in a circle, no two of ’em exactly the same. But by god the kludge was pretty near finished; soon people could go up and live in that habitat and feel just about the same gravity as on the Moon.
Got to get the radiation shielding working first, he reminded himself. Sixteen different sets of superconducting magnets and more to come. Getting them to work together is gonna be a bitch and a half.
The work was so damned tedious. Flatlanders back on Earth thought that working in microgee was fun. And easy. You just float around like a kid in a swimming pool. Yeah. Right. The reality was that you had to consciously plan every move you made; inside the spacesuit you had to exert real strength just to hold your arms out straight or take a few steps. Sure, you could hop around like a jackrabbit on steroids if you wanted to. Hell, I could jump right off Ceres and go sailing around like Superman if I had a mind to—and I if didn’t worry about breaking every bone in my legs when I landed. Working in microgee is tough, especially in these damned suits.
Well, I’m finished for today, he said to himself as he watched the habitat slowly disappear beyond the sharp, rugged horizon. Ceres is so small, he thought. Just a glorified hunk of rock hanging in the middle of nothing. Ripley shook his head inside his bubble helmet, amazed all over again that he was working ‘way out here, in this no-place of a place. He started back toward the airlock again, kicking up lingering clouds of gritty dust with each careful, sliding step. Looking down awkwardly from inside the helmet, he saw that the suit was grimy with dark gray dust all the way up the leggings, as usual. The arms and gloves were crummed up, too. It’ll take a good half-hour to vacuum all this crud off the suit, he told himself.
The airlock was set into a dome of local stone, its thick metal hatch the only sign of human presence on Ceres’s surface, outside of the two spindly-looking shuttlecraft sitting out there. Ripley was almost at the hatch when it swung open and three spacesuited figures stepped out slowly, warily, as if testing each step they made in this insubstantial gravity. Each of their spacesuits showed a HSS logo on the left breast, just above their name tags. Ripley wondered if they might be the guys Big George had shellacked in the Pub. They had all been Humphries employees, he recalled.
They were carrying bulky packing crates, probably filled with equipment. In Ceres’s low gravity, a man could carry loads that required a small truck elsewhere. All of them had tools of various sorts clipped to belts around their waists.
“Where you goin’, guys?” Ripley asked good-naturedly over the common suit-to-suit radio frequency.
“Loading up the shuttle,” came the answer in his earphones.
“Same old thing every day,” another of them complained. “More crap for the mining ships up in orbit.”
They got close enough to read Ripley’s name stenciled on the hard shell of his suit. Ripley realized that they were so new to
Ceres they hadn’t gotten their own individual suits yet. They had apparently picked the suits they were wearing from HSS’s storage; their names were lettered on adhesive strips pasted onto the torsos.
“Buchanan, Santorini, and Giap,” Ripley read aloud. “Hi. I’m Niles Ripley.”
“We know who you are,” Buchanan said sourly.
“The horn player,” said Santorini.
Ripley put on his peacemaking smile, even though he figured they couldn’t see it in the dim lighting.
“Hey, I’m sorry about that brawl couple nights ago,” he said placatingly. “My friend got carried away, I guess.”