gone a long time.”
“You don’t understand, Tod.” She tossed her head again. “I want to know that everything’s waiting for me when I get back. Exactly the same as I left it.”
“I think I understand,” he said slowly. “I keep a lock-coop myself near the base in Salt Lake. Store a few things there, sleep over sometimes when I want to get away from everything. Big enough for a bunk and an all-san. But it doesn’t eat up my pay when I’m away.”
“No you don’t!” she said impatiently. “You’re like everybody else! Most people these days don’t own anything but themselves! We’re all property of GovCorp!”
“Maggie, you’re not going to start all that again?”
“You wouldn’t be so complacent if you’d been raised in New England!”
Jameson groaned inwardly. Another argument! “Maggie, that’s all over and done with a long time ago,” he said in an attempt to soothe her.
“Is it?” she said. “You should visit the town I grew up in and see all the old people with napalm burns and missing arms and legs.”
“Maggie, it was over before you were born.”
“The war might have been over. But not the pacification. I was six years old when that ended. I remember
“That was a rebellion,” he said, unwilling to stir her up. “The government had to put it down.”
“It was a war.” She gave him a look that dared him to challenge her.
Jameson sighed. They were on dangerous ground. Old passions, old political slogans that Maggie had learned secondhand. But they could still get her into trouble. And him too, for not reporting her. New England rebs had gained a pretty good foothold in the Congress since the agony of reunification, but they didn’t get promoted too far in Federal jobs unless they demonstrated their reliability.
“It’s over and done with,” Jameson repeated uncomfortably. “Maggie, when it comes to that, I had a great- grandfather who was killed in the Kansas City explosion.”
“You still don’t understand.” She turned sorrowful blue eyes on him. “You’re just one of those people that GovCorp uses to fill in its blanks with.”
“Look,” he said, feeling his temper rise. “If you’re going to keep blaming me for ancient history, maybe we’d better call this whole thing off. I can always move back to the MacDonald Towers.”
“You just don’t scan it, do you,” she asked. “I feel sorry for you, Tod.”
“All right!” he said angrily. “If that’s the way you want it!” He moved to his stack of belongings against the wall and shouldered the duffle bags.
“Tod,” she began, starting toward him. The vid phone chimed. Jameson stepped aside, out of pickup. Maggie said, “Don’t go yet,” and pressed the
“It’s somebody with a who override,” she said worriedly. “It must be a high-priority call.” She pressed the Accept button.
The screen lit up with a picture of a jowly man holding up a Space Resources Agency dispatcher badge. “MacInnes,” he said without preamble, “you’ve been ordered to report to the Jupiter ship at once. All leaves are canceled. A cab will be at your residence in thirty minutes to take you to the Dallasworth shuttleport. Is Commander Jameson with you?”
“Well…” She looked uncertainly toward Jameson.
He took a step into pickup range. “I’m here,” he said.
“Fine, Commander,” the dispatcher said. “Do you have any luggage at the MacDonald?”
“No.”
“Good. You can take the cab with MacInnes.”
“What’s this about?” Jameson said. “I still have three weeks to go on my leave.”
“I can’t tell you that, Commander,” the dispatcher said. “There’ll be a briefing aboard ship.”
“Can you at least tell me if—”
“That’s all, Commander,” the dispatcher said, and clicked off.
Maggie had disappeared into the bedroom. He found her throwing things into a small zipbag. The green dress was crumpled carelessly in a corner. She was wearing a loose one-piece travel suit with elastic cuffs at wrist and knee.
“Need any help?” he said.
“No. I’ve been ready for a year. I just have to call building security before we leave and tell them to put the apartment under seal.”
“Can I leave my stuff here?”
“I suppose you’d better.” She gave him a canny look. “We’re not coming back, are we.”
“Not till we’ve been to Jupiter and back,” he said. “It looks like the mission’s on. And there’s been some kind of change in it.”
Chapter 9
“Here they come now,” Captain Boyle said.
Jameson looked out the port. It took him a moment to focus on what the captain was peering at, and when he did, it was sharp with the clarity of space despite the quarter-mile distance. It looked like a string of widely spaced pearls stretched out horizontally, held taut by the spacesuited bosun’s mates at either end. Two more attendants were riding scooters above and below the long tether.
“Good God!” Jameson said. “Don’t they have spacesuits?”
“I’m told they do,” the captain said dryly. “But they haven’t been trained to use them yet. Something to occupy us on the long outward trip, eh?”
Jameson shook his head wonderingly. “Rescue balls! They stuffed them into rescue balls! Skipper, we can’t nursemaid a bunch of beginners like those! Not when they’ll be working with dangerous materials outside the ship and in zero-g conditions! It’d compromise the safety of the ship.”
“We’re not going to nursemaid them, mister,” Boyle said. “We’re going to instruct them in the presence of their executive officer and stay away from them. Those are the orders.”
“Captain, that’s crazy! You can’t let a bunch like that wander around unsupervised! There’s too much trouble they can get into!”
“Look lively now! They’re here!”
There was a bump outside that sent a tiny shiver through the spinlock antechamber. Jameson, sweating in his full-dress greens, drew himself up in an approximation of a formal stance, hands clasped behind his back, feet spread, one toe hooked surreptitiously under a baseboard projection to keep himself from drifting away. The spin for the entire ship had been stopped for several days now so the additional modules could be bonded to the rim without having workers and materials fly off into space. The trim of the ship had been altered by the new, awkwardly placed mass, and the computers were working overtime to shift weights and balance the new stresses.
Kay Thorwald, the second officer, was floating in parade position just beside the captain, her large jaw set firmly, her formidable bust swollen to semiglobular shapes in the absence of gravity, her wide mannish shoulders held back squarely. Like Jameson, she’d been tapped as one of the execs to help Captain Boyle pipe the nuclear- bomb crews aboard.
Clustered against the opposite wall was the Chinese delegation, spruced up for the occasion in fashionably wrinkled blue cotton Mao jackets and baggy trousers. Captain Hsieh was in the middle, a chunky, smallish man with a round, pedantic face, hands held stiffly at his sides, straining to stretch his spine. His first officer, Yeh Fei, was at his left. Yeh was a big, hulking fellow with a sloping shelf of forehead and a lantern jaw. The third member of the welcoming committee was Tu Jue-chen, the new Struggle Group leader sent up from Earth. As unacknowledged political officer, she carried more clout than Captain Hsieh. She was a terrifying harpy with hollow cheeks, malicious monkey-eyes, and a mouth crowded with big square teeth.
All three of them were wearing the round badges that showed a stylized representation of Lady Ch’ang-o
