Wryness bent his lips upward. Gratitude was irrelevant. The Lunarians had their reasons for keeping as much human staff of both races in their space operations as possible. He, Terran, served a genuine purpose, less as a transporteer who could tolerate higher accelerations than they could than as advisor, trouble-shooter, partner of the engineers whom he brought to their work. A sophotect with similar capabilities wouldn’t necessarily do better, he told himself fiercely; and if he depended on life-support systems, why, a machine had its requirements too.
The thoughts had flashed through him in a fraction of a second. The message grabbed his attention. Its few words rammed into him. He sat for a while dumbstruck.
Lilisaire wanted him back. At once.
He had expected some communication about the job ahead. To read it in isolation had been an impulse, irrational, a sudden desire to escape for five or ten minutes. Such feelings grew in you on a twenty-four-month tour of duty.
But Lilisaire wanted him straight back.
“Easy, lad, easy,” he whispered. Put down love and lust and all other emotions entangled around her. Think. She was not calling him to her for his personal sweet sake. He could guess what the crisis might be, but not what help he might give. The matter must be grave, for her to interrupt this undertaking on which he was embarked. However mercurial some of the Lunarian magnates were, they all took their Venture most seriously. An alliance of entrepreneurs was their solitary last hope of maintaining an active presence in deep space.
Absently, as a nearly automatic accompaniment to thought, he evoked a scan of his destination. It was now about six million kilometers away. At her present rate of braking, the ship would get there in one more daycycle.
Magnified and enhanced, the image of the asteroid swam in the viewtank as a rough oblong lump, murky reddish, pocked with craters shadow-limned against harsh sunlight. Compared to the lesser Jovian moons where Valanndray, with Kenmuir’s assistance, had led machines in the labor of development, this was a pygmy.
However, a robotic prospector had found resources worth extracting, not ices and organics but ferrous and actinide ores. A work gang was waiting for human direction—robots, of course, not sophotects: mindless, unaware, though versatile and adaptable. Skilled vision identified a landing field, a cluster of shelters, glints off polished metal skins.
Nearby loomed the skeletal form of a shield generator, big enough for its electrodynamic fields to fend particle radiation not merely off a spacecraft, but off an entire mining plant. Nevertheless it was small, when he compared those that had let him visit Ganymede and return alive.
A visit, and brief. The settlers there were sophotects, for only machines could function in such an environment and only machines that thought, that were aware, could cope with its often terrible surprises. In law the big inner satellites of Jupiter were territory of the World Federation Space Service. In practice they belonged to the cybercosm.
Kenmuir dismissed the recollection and stood up. His heart thudded. To be with Lilisaire again, soon, soon! Well, if his feelings were like a boy’s, he could keep his words a man’s. He went back to the recreation room.
Valanndray was still there, toying with orbital mechanics variations. He turned to confront the pilot. His face, fine-boned, ivory-pale, lifted ten centimeters above Kenmuir’s. On this crossing he had laid flath-boyancy aside and clothed his litheness in a coverall; but it was of deep-blue perlux, and phosphorescent light-points blinked in the fabric. Recorded snow blew behind him, recorded wind beneath the musical voice: “So, Captain?”
Kenmuir halted. Tall for an Earthling, he had long ceased letting Lunarian height overawe him. “A surprise. You won’t like it, I’m afraid.” He recited the message. Within him, it sang.
Valanndray stood motionless. “In truth, a reversal,” he said at length, tonelessly. “What propose you to do?”
“Set you off with the supplies and equipment, and make for Luna. What else?”
“Abandonment, then.”
“No, wait. Naturally, we’ll call in and explain the situation, if they don’t already know at headquarters.”
The big oblique eyes narrowed. “Nay. The Federals would retrieve it and learn.”
Irritation stirred. Kenmuir had simply wanted to be tactful. Their months together had given him an impression that his associate was in some ways, down below the haughtiness, quite woundable. Valanndray might have felt hurt that the other man was so ready to leave him behind.