Dr. Yei paused, went on. “I shouldn’t be telling you this yet, but Sinda in Nutrition is next for you. I’ve always thought she was an extraordinarily pretty girl”
“She has a laugh like a hacksaw.”
Dr. Yei blew out her breath impatiently. “We’ll discuss it later. At length. Right now I have to talk with Claire.” She thrust him firmly out the door and keyed it shut on his frown and muffled objections.
Dr. Yei turned back to Claire and fixed her with a stern gaze. “Claire—did you and Tony continue to have sexual relations after you became pregnant?”
“Dr. Minchenko said it wouldn’t hurt the baby.”
“Dr. Minchenko knew?”
“I don’t know… I just asked him, like, in a general way.” Claire studied her hands guiltily. “Did you expect us to stop?”
“Well, yes!”
“You didn’t tell us to.”
“You didn’t ask. In fact, you were quite careful not to bring up the subject, now that I think back—oh, how could I have been so blind-sided?”
“But downsiders do it all the time,” Claire defended herself.
“How do you know what downsiders do?”
“Silver says Mr. Van Atta—” Claire stopped abruptly.
Dr. Yei’s attention sharpened, knife-like and uncomfortable. “What do you know about Silver and Mr. Van Atta?”
“Well—everything, I guess. I mean, we all wanted to know how downsiders did it.” Claire paused. “Downsiders are strange,” she added.
After a paralyzed moment, Dr. Yei buried her suffused face in her hands and sniggered helplessly. “And so Silver’s been supplying you with detailed information?”
“Well, yes.” Claire regarded the psychologist with wary fascination.
Dr. Yei stifled her chortles, a strange light growing in her eyes, part humor, part irritation. “I suppose—I suppose you’d better pass the word to Tony not to let on. I’m afraid Mr. Van Atta would become a little upset if he realized his personal activities had a second-hand audience.”
“All right,” Claire agreed doubtfully. “But—you always wanted to know all about me and Tony.” “That’s different. We were trying to help you.” “Well, we and Silver are trying to help each other.” “You’re not supposed to help yourselves.” The sting of Dr. Yei’s criticism was blunted by her suppressed smile. “You’re supposed to wait until you’re served.” Yei paused. “Just how many of you are privy to this, ah, Silver-mine of information, anyway? Just you and Tony, I trust?”
“Well, and my dormitory mates. I take Andy over there in my off hours and we all play with him. I used to have my sleep restraints opposite Silver’s until I moved out. She’s my best friend. Silver’s so—so brave, I guess—she’ll try things I’d never dare.” Claire sighed envy.
“Eight girls,” Yei muttered. “Oh, lord Krishna… I trust none of them have been inspired to emulation yet?”
Claire, not wishing to lie, said nothing. She didn’t need to; the psychologist, watching her face, winced. Yei turned indecisively in air. “I’ve got to have a talk with Silver. I should have done it when I first suspected—but I thought the man had the wit not to contaminate the experiment—asleep on my feet. Look, Claire, I want to talk with you more about your new assignment. I’m here to try and make it as easy and pleasant as possible—you know I’ll help, right? I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
Yei peeled Andy off her neck where he was now attempting to taste her earring and handed him back to Claire, and exited the airseal door muttering something about “containing the damage…”
Claire, alone, held her baby close. Her troubled uncertainty turned like a lump of metal under her heart. She had tried so hard to be good…
Leo squinted approvingly against the harsh light and dense shadows of the vacuum as a pair of his space-suited students horsed the locking ring accurately into place on the end of its flex tube. Between the two of them their eight gloved hands made short work of the task.
“Now Pramod, Bobbi, bring up the beam welder and the recorder and put them in their starting position. Julian, you run the optical laser alignment program and lock them on.”
A dozen of the four-armed figures, their names and numbers printed in large clear figures on the front of each helmet and across the backs of their silvery work suits, bobbed about. Their suit jets puffed as they jockeyed for a better view.
“Now, in these high-energy-density partial penetration welds,” Leo lectured into his spacesuits’s audio pick-up, “the electron beam must not be allowed to achieve a penetrating steady-state. This beam can punch through half a meter of steel. Even one spiking event and your, say, nuclear pressure vessel or your propulsion chamber can lose its structural integrity. Now, the pulser that Pramod is checking right now—” Leo made his voice heavy with hint; Pramod jerked, and hastily began punching up the system readout on his machine, “utilizes the natural oscillation of the point of beam impingement within the weld cavity to set up a pulsing schedule that maintains its frequency, eliminating the spiking problem. Always double check its function before you start.” The locking ring was firmly welded to its flex tube and duly examined for flaws by eye, hologram scan, eddy current, the examination and comparison of the simultaneous x-ray emission recording, and the classic kick-and-jerk test. Leo prepared to move his students on to the next task.
“Tony, you bring the beam welder over—TURN IT OFF FIRST!” Feedback squeal lanced through everyone’s earphones, and Leo modulated his voice from his first urgent panicked bellow. The beam had in fact been off, but the controls live; one accidental bump, as Tony swung the machine around, and—Leo’s eye traced the hypothetical slice through the nearby wing of the Habitat, and he shuddered. “Get your head out of your ass, Tony! I saw a man cut in half by one of his friends once by just that careless trick.”
“Sorry… thought it would save time… sorry…” Tony mumbled.
“You know better.” Leo calmed, as his heart stopped palpitating. “In this hard vacuum that beam won’t stop till it hits the third moon, or whatever it might encounter in between.” He almost continued, stopped himself; no, not over the public comm channel. Later.
Later, as his students unsuited in the equipment locker, laughing and joking as they cleaned and stored their work suits, Leo drifted over to the silent and pale Tony. Surely I didn’t bark at him that hard, Leo thought to himself. Figured he was more resilient… “Stop and see me when you’re finished here,” said Leo quietly.
Tony flinched guiltily. “Yes, sir.” After his fellows had all swooped out, eager for their end-of-shift meal, Tony hung in air, both sets of arms crossed protectively across his torso. Leo floated near, and spoke in a grave tone.
“Where were you, out there today?”
“Sorry, sir. It won’t happen again.”
“It’s been happening all week. You got something on your mind, boy?”
Tony shook his head. “Nothing—nothing to do with you, sir.”
Meaning, nothing to do with work, Leo interpreted that. All right, so. “If it’s taking your mind off your work, it does have something to do with me. Want to talk about it? You got girl trouble? Little Andy all right? You have a fight with somebody?”
Tony’s blue eyes searched Leo’s face in sudden uncertainty, then he grew closed and inward once again. “No, sir.”
“You worried about going out on that contract? I guess it will be the first time away from home for you lads, at that.”
“It’s not that,” denied Tony. He paused, watching Leo again. “Sir—are there a great many other companies out there besides ours?
“Not a great many, for deep interstellar work,” Leo replied, a little baffled by this new turn in the conversation. “We’re the biggest, of course, though there’s maybe a half dozen others that can give us some real competition. In the heavily populated systems, like Tau Ceti or Escobar or Orient or of course Earth, there’s always a lot of little companies operating on a smaller scale. Super-specialists, or entrepreneurial mavericks, this and that. The outer worlds are coming on strong lately.”