'I got a hand that looks like a foot,' said D.W., staring at his cards with disgust.
'I'm a skilled surgeon,' Anne said. 'I could help you with a problem like that.' Emilio laughed.
'Nothing's gonna help this mess. Fold.'
'One for me,' Anne told Alan.
'Dealer takes three. You know, Sandoz, it's draw poker. You don't always have to stand pat,' Alan Pace explained patiently, dealing out his own three cards. 'You can draw.'
'Robichaux's the artist,' Emilio said serenely. 'He draws. I stand pat.'
'Leave me out of this,' Marc yelled from the little gym off the commons.
'Nice that you guys have nothing better to do than play cards,' Jimmy called from the bridge, where he and George were processing sequential images of the vast region between the center sun and the two outliers, hoping to detect some telltale difference—a smeared line or a displaced dot—that would indicate a planet moving in orbit. They'd been circling at.25 G high above the plane of the Alpha Centauri system for weeks and were collectively bored witless. 'Some people around here are actually working.'
'Anne and I could take your appendix out if you like,' Emilio offered, raising his voice slightly. He looked back at his cards. 'See your two and raise you two.'
Sofia and Anne folded. Alan tossed in two more Wolverton tube peanuts. George, taking a break, strolled buoyantly into the common room and reached over Anne's shoulder to look at the cards she'd thrown down. 'No guts!' he said. 'I'd have played that!' She glared at him, but he planted a noisy kiss on the back of her neck. Quarter G was a lot of fun.
Emilio added four peanuts and then four more and leaned back in his chair, squinting through imaginary cigarette smoke. 'Cost you eight legumes to find out what I've got, Pace.'
Alan ignored the Bogart impression and took the bet. Sandoz would play with anything or nothing. 'Fives? You stood pat with a pair of fives?' Alan cried when they laid the cards down. 'Sandoz, I will never understand you! Why didn't you draw three cards?'
Emilio smiled delightedly and shrugged. 'Fives are good enough to beat fours, yes? My deal. Ante up, ladies and gentlemen, ante up.' The cards went out again, Emilio's infectious merriment spreading around the table as they each looked at the hands he dealt them.
'The perfect poker face,' D.W. said, shaking his head. 'He laughs at everything he gets. The good hands are funny and so are the lousy ones.'
'This is true,' Emilio agreed amiably. 'Alan, just for you. Pick a card at random and I'll draw.'
Alan pulled a card from the middle of Emilio's hand and Emilio dealt himself a new one off the top of the deck. Predictably, he found it hilarious, and it was impossible to tell if he'd just gotten four of a kind or busted a flush. When the bets came around to him, he pushed his whole pile of peanuts into the center. 'Winner takes all. Come on, Pace,' Emilio urged.
They laid their cards down again and Alan roared with indignation. 'I don't believe it! A straight.'
Emilio was practically crying now. 'And the worst part is, you filled it. I was holding nothing!' He pushed the peanuts over to Alan and held up a hand, becoming before their eyes the very Buddha, soul of disinterest. 'The trick is not to care. I have a perfect indifference to winning.'
There were cries of 'Liar!' and dark mutterings about confession from Anne and Sofia and D.W., who'd all seen Emilio take the skin off his face maniacally sliding into home, and wide eyes from Alan, amazed by the eruption.
'He is completely full of shit, Alan,' George told him. 'He doesn't care about poker because he doesn't like peanuts. But he'll cut your heart out at second base if he thinks you're going to steal third.'
'This is also true,' Emilio acknowledged peaceably, gathering up the deck while the others vilified him. 'And if we were playing for raisins, it would be different. I like raisins.'
'Raisins make a mess of the cards,' Sofia pointed out.
'Do you ever get tired of being practical?' Emilio demanded.
'Bingo,' they heard Jimmy say quietly.
'No, poker,' Emilio corrected him. 'Bingo is with those square cards, and you put beans on the numbers…' He fell silent as Jimmy came into the common room. One by one, they turned to look and went motionless, waiting.
'A planet,' Jimmy said, dazed. 'We found it. We found a planet. Might not be the Singers' planet, but we found a planet.'
Since rotating the asteroid at the halfway point, to turn the engines around and begin deceleration, they'd stopped every two weeks to do periodic broad-spectrum imaging, engines off, and to listen for radio signals, which became relatively strong but remained strangely intermittent. As the
Now they all crowded around the bridge display as Jimmy ran the images back and forth in sequence, so they could see a point of light, varying in brightness from image to image, moving slightly. 'Look,' he said, 'you can even see the difference in the reflected sunlight. It's sort of gibbous here.'
Marc Robichaux, who'd come out of the tiny gym when he heard the uproar, leaned around Jimmy and pointed to a smear, somewhat closer to the central sun. 'And here. Another one.'
'Good eye, man,' Jimmy said. 'Sure enough. That's one, too.'
'Can you enlarge these regions, Jimmy?' Marc asked, towel hung over his neck, still breathing fast, but not from treadmill work any longer.
'No point in it. Real-time observation, folks. We can just plain look at them with the telescope.' A few minutes later, they could see the first planet directly, appearing now as a fuzzy ball, grayish and lumpy. And then the second, the one Marc had spotted, much larger and with two substantial companion bodies.
'Moons,' George said softly, putting his arm around Anne and pulling her close. 'Moons!'
'Forget the first one. There's our planet,' Marc said, with complete confidence. 'A good-sized moon keeps a planet's precession steady enough for stable weather patterns to develop. If there's open water, moons make tides, and tides breed life.' Anne looked at him, brows up, the question unasked. The naturalist smiled. 'Because that's the way God likes it, Madame.'
And then everyone was talking at once, congratulating Jimmy and George and Marc, discussing how long it would take to get to the planet with the moons, excitement swamping the funk they'd been in as the sterile weeks had dragged by. The buzz of conversation halted when D.W. looked around for Emilio and then called out sharply, 'Sit down 'fore you fall down, son,' and pushed past the little crowd around the display, making his way through the common room benches and tables. He wasn't quite quick enough to catch Emilio before he hit the floor.
There was, at first, a burst of laughter because Emilio looked so comical, going down like a puppet with the strings cut, but in slow motion because of the low gravity. Alan Pace thought impatiently that he'd only done it as a joke and was irritated as usual at the man's habitual frivolity.
Anne was right behind Yarbrough. 'It's okay,' she said matter-of-factly as the laughter died and turned to consternation. 'He's just fainted.' She could have lifted Emilio off the floor herself; at.25 G, he only weighed about thirty pounds. But intellectual equality aside, Anne Edwards retained a certain deference toward male sensibilities, so she looked up at D.W., intending to ask him to carry Emilio into his cabin for her. She was astonished to see that Yarbrough was trembling. Then it clicked and many things became clearer to her.
'Jimmy, would you lug him into his room for me, please?' she called out in a slightly bored voice, to minimize the drama. D.W. opened the door to Emilio's room and stepped out of the way as Jimmy went by, a giant Raggedy Andy carrying Emilio, who looked like a rag doll himself, limp in the big man's arms. Anne gave the situation about three seconds' consideration and then gave D.W. a firm and reassuring hug, brief but forthright, before squeezing past Jimmy into the little cabin. Jim left and she closed the door behind him.
Emilio was already coming out of it. Anne could hear D.W. just outside the door, in full East Texas cry, making everyone laugh and steering the conversation back to the planet. The voices receded, and Anne looked back
