Her face flushed red and her eyes glowed — she looked more attractive than ever. “How can that happen?”

“I don’t know, but it’s standard physics. Ask McAndrew.” (I knew well enough, but I’d had more than I wanted of this conversation.)

It was like that all the time. We found it hard to agree on anything, and it became clear as soon as we were on the way that Anna Griss was used to delegating and not to doing. Poor old Will Bayes did triple duty. Luckily there was not too much that could be done without a communications link to Earth — except shout at Will and keep him on the run.

Yet McAndrew — I thought at first I was imagining it — McAndrew was the eye of the hurricane. When she was within two yards of him, Anna Griss became all sweetness and light. She humbly asked him questions about the drive and about time dilation; she deferred to his opinions on everything from diet to Dostoevski; and she hung first on his word and then on his arm, blinking her eyelashes at him.

It was sickening.

And McAndrew — the great lout — he lapped it up.

“What’s she doing?” I said to Bayes when the other two were out of earshot. “She’s making a fool of herself.”

He winked at me. “You think so, and I think so — but does he think so? Before we left she told me to get a full dossier about him and bring it on this trip. She’s been reading it, too. You have to know Anna. What she wants, she gets. Wouldn’t look bad for her personal records, would it, to have a five-year cohab contract with the most famous scientist in the System?”

“Don’t be silly. She doesn’t even like him.”

“She does, you know.” He stepped closer and lowered his voice. “I know Anna. She has appetites. She wants him, and I think she’d like a cohab contract.”

I snorted. “With Mac? That’s ridiculous! He belongs to — to science.” And I fully believed it, until one morning I found myself applying a pheromonal amplifier behind my ears, and dressing in a new lime-green uniform that fitted a lot closer than my standard garb.

And McAndrew — the great lout — he never noticed or said one word.

While this was going on, we were hurtling outward away from the Sun. With our acceleration at a hundred gee, the living-capsule was snuggled in close to the massplate. The plate’s gravitational attraction just about balanced the body force on us produced by the ship’s acceleration, leaving us in a comfortable and relaxing half-gee environment. The tidal forces caused by the gravity gradient were noticeable only if you looked for them. McAndrew’s vacuum drive worked flawlessly, as usual, tapping the zero point energy — “sucking the marrow out of spacetime,” as one of Mac’s colleagues put it.

“I don’t understand,” I’d once said to him. “It gets energy out of nothing.”

McAndrew looked at me reproachfully. “That’s what they used to say in 1910, when mad scientists thought you might get energy from the nucleus of an atom. Jeanie, I thought better of you.”

All right, I was squelched — but I didn’t understand the drive one bit better.

At the halfway mark we rotated the ship to begin deceleration and I cut the drive while we did it. Anna Griss had an opportunity to send her backlog of messages, and finally gave Will Bayes a few hours of peace. I was amused to see that her communications gave the impression that she was running everything on the Hoatzin. Her increased absence from Headquarters she attributed to delays on the trip. If the level of scientific expertise in the Food Department matched her own, she would probably get away with it.

For me, this should have been the best part of the mission, the reason I remain in space and never look for a Downside job. With the drive off we flew starward in perfect silence. I stayed by the port, watching the wheel of heaven as the ship turned.

The Hoatzin was within five percent of light-speed. As we performed our end-over-end maneuver, the colors of the starscape Doppler-shifted slowly from red to blue. I caught a last glimpse of Sol and its attendants before the massplate shielded them from view. Jupiter was visible through the optical telescope, a tiny point of light a fifth of a degree away from the Sun’s dazzling disk. Earth was gone. Its reflected photons had been lost on their hundred-and-fifty-billion mile outward journey.

I turned the telescope ahead, in a hopeless search for Manna. It was a speck in the star-sea, as far ahead of us as the Sun was behind. We would not detect its presence for another two weeks. I looked for it anyway. Then the shield came on to protect us from the sleet of hard radiation and particles caused by our light-chasing velocity. The stars blinked out. I could pay attention again to events inside the Hoatzin.

With little else to occupy her attention, Anna delegated her chores to Will Bayes and concentrated everything on charming McAndrew. Will and I received the disdain and the dog work. I sat on my anger and bided my time.

As for Mac, he had disappeared again inside his head. We had loaded a library of references on Lanhoff and the organic materials of the Halo into the computer before we left the Institute. He spent many hours absorbing that information and processing it in the curiously structured personal computer he carries inside his skull. I knew better than to interrupt him. After just a couple of futile attempts to divert him, Anna learned the same lesson. No doubt about it: she was quick. No scientist, but when it came to handling people she did instinctively what I had taken years to learn. Instead of social chit-chat, she studied the same data that McAndrew had been analyzing and asked him questions about it.

“I can see why there ought to be a lot of prebiotic organic stuff out in the Halo,” she said during one of our planned exercise sessions. She was dressed in a tight blue leotard and pedaling hard at the stationary cycle. “But I never did follow Lanhoff’s argument that there may be primitive life there, too. Surely the temperature’s far too cold.”

It was still the “Griss-Lanhoff” Theory for official records, but with us Anna had dropped her pretence of detailed knowledge of Lanhoff’s ideas. She had been the driving force to carry his ideas to practical evaluation. We all knew it; for the moment that was enough for her. I had no doubt that we would see another change when we arrived back in the Inner System.

McAndrew was idly lifting and lowering a weighted bar. He hated exercise, but he grudgingly went along with general USF orders for spaceborne personnel.

“It is cold in the Halo,” he said. “Just a few degrees above absolute zero, in most of the bodies. But it may not be too cold.”

“It’s much too cold for us.”

“Certainly. That’s Lanhoff’s point. We know only about the enzymes found on Earth. They allow chemical reactions to proceed in a certain temperature regime. Why shouldn’t there be other life-supporting enzymes that can operate at far lower temperatures?”

Anna stopped pedaling, and I paused in my toe-touching. “Even at the temperatures here in the Halo?” she said.

“I think so.” McAndrew paused in his leisurely bar-lifting. “Lanhoff argues that with plenty of complex organic molecules and with a hundred billion separate bodies available, a lot of things might develop in four billion years. He expected to find life somewhere out here — primitive life, probably, but recognizable to us. He was prepared to find it, and the Star Harvester was equipped to bring back samples.”

We dropped the subject there, but it went running on in my mind while Anna took McAndrew off to program an elaborate meal. I could hear her giggling from the next room, while visions of a Halo civilization ran wild through my brain. Life had appeared there, evolved to intelligence. The Halo society had been disturbed by the arrival of our exploring ship. Lanhoff was a prisoner. His ship had been destroyed. The Inner System and the Halo would go to war…