Iris

aerodynamically sound, turquoise and white car, outwardly a somewhat modified copy of a 1960 Chevrolet Corvette. The differences were, of course, largely dictated by an environment radically removed from that of the original machine.

There was no rubber. The world was too cold for organics,and gravity was too low for the car to rely on surface friction for its tractive grip. 60vet would ride across the ice on the wire tires of a Lunar rover, each tire the generator grid for a charge-coupling static field. This ice was not slippery—at these temperatures it would take enormous pressure to generate the film of liquid water that was the soul of a skid—but the car was light. . . . Very little force stood in the way of tire-spinning immobility. Technology had to help.

The hull was made from another bubbleplastic relative, easily disguised as metal, and the transparent parts couldn't be distinguished from ancient glass. Prynne even went to the extent of putting little 'safety plate' decals in appropriate corners, but these windows would never break. What should have been the trunk was filled with a small life-support system. At virtual gunpoint, he had been forced by John and Ariane to dedicate the tonneau to an extension of the passenger compartment and a rear seat of sorts. The biggest anomaly lay under the hood. It would have been possible to put an internal combustion engine in the sealed compartment and feed a turbocharged carburetor from oxygen tanks, but that would have been a ridiculous extravagance. 60vet's power plant was a two-cylinder Stirling engine, run off the heat from a nuclear- isotope generator. The thing would have been totally silent, even on Earth, and Prynne had idly toyed with the idea of feeding comchip-simulated engine noises into the cabin. As Prynne assembled his car, he was sometimes joined by Vana, who liked to watch him work, seemingly fascinated by the sure way he assembled the mountainous array of tiny parts from memory. It was an antiquarian hobby and rather unusual to see in a world in which few people did any work with their hands. She would give him things that he asked her for, and now she had become familiar enough with the strange, bulky tools that he seldom had to point.

After a while the man stopped to rest and drink a cup of coffee. He had a little table set up beside his workbench and on it was a portable camp kitchen, charged that morning with preprogrammed foods. He sat and stared at the woman, sipping the drink. He'd been under the machine when she camethrough the

'lock, and this was the first chance he'd had to look at her face. He realized with a familiar pang that her lips seemed a little swollen. He looked away, and finally said, 'Vana, I don't like it.'

'What? Is something wrong with your car?'

He shook his head. 'It's . . . well, it's this business about everyone sleeping with everybody else. I just don't like it.'

She laughed, an incredulous note in her voice. 'Why not? You're getting as much as anyone. Maybe more than you did before ...'

'That's not it. . . .' He stopped. He knew what he wanted to say: that he loved her, not all the others, that he wanted her to love him alone. . . . But he couldn't tell her that. Not again. Not when he knew how angry it could make her, how hard. No. It wouldn't do. But what else could he say? 'I guess it's just that it hasn't come about naturally. We don't even all like each other. . . .' He saw that he had her interest and quickly pursued the line of argument. 'This hasn't 'just happened,' you know. It was imposed on us by Cornwell.'

'You really think so? Don't you think that this is a good thing? This morning there was a lot more laughter and good cheer going around than I've seen since the early days, aboard Cam. John's just too much of a weakling to get us to—'

He cut her off. 'No, he isn't! Can't you see? He's done it for his own selfish reasons. He wants what we have, what he can't buy with all his money. I don't blame him for it, but he hides what he's doing behind a mess of philosophical crap! Since he has no one, he wants to keep us all apart. . . .' Vana's face grew angry-looking. 'Oh, for pity's sake!' They both fell silent and Prynne realized that she'd seen through him, to the incessant background of conversations that had filled their relationship. At last she said, 'How soon do you think we'd get bored with each other, out here, without something to keep us interested?' He shrugged, looking miserable, and she sighed. 'OK. Forget it. What tool do you want next? The crescent monkey or whatever it is?'

When the domes had been inflated and hardened, Sealock and Krzakwa finished stripping the remains of the ship. The Hyloxso matrices were detached and sitting in a storage rack that had been made from excess girders. The chemical engines had been set up on an insulating platform along with a number of other temporarily useless items, looking like an equipment-auction display. What was left of Deepstar had been put on motorized treads and driven away to a point a little distance from the colony. Jana had been wanting to do a cross section of the mare and they could do it, testing their drill at the same time. The exhaust plume from the well thus produced would be fed through tubing to a condenser and thence to the reactor-fuel storage tank that the work- packs were finishing. When they were ready they stopped to check everything out and discuss procedures. 'Now remember,' said Sealock, 'keep the thrust under a hundred kilograms. We don't want this thing in orbit.' Krzakwa looked at him in disgust. He'd gotten used to this sort of thing, after a fashion, but it still rankled. 'You're not still mad at me for dropping the reactor, are you?'

'No.'

Tem sighed. There was no sense in trying to penetrate his reactions today. It would be a wasted effort. He let the suit optics track back toward the camp, magnifying the image that was on the other side of Sealock's bulky figure, and stopped: a small, gleaming artifact was moving across the ice, away from the little split-open dome that had been its garage. 'What the hell is that?' Sealock looked, then grinned. 'That's Prynne's little toy. I'm surprised he hasn't mentioned it to you. . .

. 60vet lives!' Leaping down from the drill's structural tower, he went bounding off, and Krzakwa followed.