What could I say? That there was one rule for most people, and another for my daughter? Triton Station is in the backyard, in terms of interstellar space; but it’s also out near the edge of the old Solar System, too far away for Inner System comforts. An excellent place for a message relay between the Halo and the Inner System, that’s why it was put there in the first place. But it’s small and spartan. And the station isn’t down on Neptune ’s satellite, the way that most people think. It’s in orbit around Triton, with just a small manned outpost on the surface of the satellite itself for supplies, raw materials, and cryogenics research. There are a few unmanned stations bobbing about in the icy atmosphere of Neptune itself, 350,000 kilometers away, but nobody in her right mind ever goes to visit them.

The sixty Station personnel are a strange mixture of dedicated researchers and psychological loners who find the Inner System and even the Titan Colony much too crowded for them. Some of them love it there, but as soon as the 100-gee balanced drive is in general use, Triton Station will be only a day and a half flight away and well within reach of a weekend vacation. Then I suppose the disgusted staff will curse the crowds, and decide its time to move farther out into the Halo seeking their old peace and quiet.

“You’ll be bored,” I said, trying another argument. “They’re more antisocial than you can imagine, and you won’t know anybody there.”

“Yes, I will. I know Sven Wicklund, and we always got along famously. He’s still there, isn’t he?”

“He is, blast him,” said McAndrew. “But as to what he’s been up to out there for the past six months…”

His voice tailed away and the old slack-jawed, half-witted look crept over his face. He was rubbing his fingers gently along his sandy, receding hairline, and I realized where his thoughts were taking him.

“Don’t be silly, Mac. I hope you’re not even considering it. If Wicklund won’t tell you what he’s doing, you don’t imagine he’ll talk to Jan about it, do you, if she’s just at Triton Station for a short visit?”

“Well, I don’t know,” began McAndrew. “It seems to me there’s a chance—”

“I feel sure he’ll tell me,” said Jan calmly.

Unfortunately, so was I. Wicklund had been bowled over by Jan when she was only fourteen and didn’t have a tenth of her present firepower. If she could lead him around then with a ring through his nose, today with her added wiles it would be no contest.

“Let’s not try to decide this now,” I said. “The ceremony’s starting, and then we have to get ready to meet Tallboy. Let’s talk about it afterwards.”

“Oh, I think we can decide it easily enough now,” said McAndrew.

“No, that’s all right,” said Jan. “It can wait. No hurry.” Sorry, Jeanie, said her smile at me. Game, set and match.

After that I found it hard to keep my mind on Tallboy’s visit. Luckily I wasn’t on center stage most of the time, though I did tag along with the tour, watching that high forehead nodding politely, and his long index finger pointing at the different pieces of equipment on display. I also had a chance to talk to everyone when they completed their individual briefings.

“Impressive,” said Gowers when she came out. She had been first one up, describing her theories and experiments on the focusing of light using arrays of kernels. A tough area of work. To set up a stable array of Kerr-Newman black holes called for solutions to the many-body problem in general relativity. Luckily there was no one in the System better able to tackle that — Emma Gowers had made a permanent niche for herself in scientific history years before, when she provided the exact solution to the general relativistic two-body problem. Now to test her approximations she had built a tiny array of shielded kernels, small enough that all her work was done through a microscope. I had seen Tallboy peering in through the eyepiece, joking with Emma as he did so.

“So he seems sympathetic?” I said.

“More than that.” She took a deep breath and sat down. She was still hyper after her presentation. “I think it went very well. He listened hard and he asked questions. I was only scheduled for ten minutes, and we took nearly twenty. Keep your fingers crossed.”

I did, as one by one the others went in. When they came out most of them echoed her optimism. Siclaro was the only questioning voice. He had described his system for kernel energy extraction, and Tallboy had given him the same attentive audience and nodded understandingly.

“But he asked me what I meant by `spin-up,’ ” Siclaro said to me as we stood together outside the main auditorium.

“That’s fair enough — you can’t expect him to be a specialist on this stuff.”

“I know that.” He shook his head in a worried fashion. “But that came at the end of the presentation. And all the time I was talking, he was nodding his head at me as though he understood everything — ideas a lot more advanced than simple spin-up and spin-down of a Kerr black hole. But if he didn’t know what I meant at the end, how could he have understood any of the rest of it?”

Before I had time to answer, my own turn arrived. I came last of all, and though I had prepared as hard as anyone I was not a central part of the show. If Tallboy had to leave early I would be cut. If he had time, I was to show him over the Hoatzin, and make it clear to him that we were all ready for a long trip, as soon as his office gave us permission.

His energy level was amazing. He was still cordial and enthusiastic after seven hours of briefing, with only one short food break. We took a pod, just the two of us, and zipped over to the Hoatzin. I gave him a ten-minute tour, showing how the living area was moved closer to the mass disk as the acceleration of the ship was increased, to provide a net one-gee environment for the crew. He asked numerous polite general questions: how many people could be accommodated in the ship, how old was it, why was it called the inertia-less drive? I boggled a little at the last one, because McAndrew had spent large parts of his life explaining impatiently to anyone who would listen that, damn it, it wasn’t inertia-less, that all it did was to balance off gravitational and inertial accelerations. But I went over it one more time, for Tallboy’s benefit.

He listened closely, nodded that deep-browed head, and watched attentively as I moved us a little closer to the mass disk, so that we could feel the net acceleration on us increase from one to one-and-a-half gees.

“One more question,” he said at last. “And then we must return to the Institute. You keep talking about accelerations, and making accelerations balance out. What does that have to do with us, with how heavy we feel?”

I stared at him. Was he joking? No, that fine-boned face was as serious as ever. He stood there politely waiting for my answer, and I felt that sinking feeling. I’m not sure what I told him, or what we talked about on the way back to the Institute. I handed him on to McAndrew for a quick look at the Control Center, while I hurried off to find Limperis. He was in his office, staring at a blank wall.

“I know, Jeanie,” he said. “Don’t tell me. I had to sit in on every briefing except yours.”

“The man’s an idiot,” I said. “I think he means well, but he’s a complete, boneheaded moron. He has no more idea than Wenig’s pet monkey what goes on here in the Institute.”

“I know. I know.” Limperis suddenly showed his age, and for the first time it occurred to me that he was long past official retirement. “I hoped at first that it was just my paranoia,” he said. “I wondered if I was seeing something that wasn’t there — some of the others were so impressed.”

“How could they be? Tallboy had no idea what was going on.”

“It’s his appearance. That sharp profile. He looks intelligent, so we assume he must be. But take the people here at the Institute. Wenig looks like a mortician, Gowers could pass as a dumb-blonde hooker, and Siclaro reminds me of a gorilla. And each of them a mind in a million. We accept it that way round easily enough, but not in reverse.”