nervously. “Crisis over. Just make sure I okay every figure you enter in the computer before you put it in. Ravi, do you know where we are?”
He bit his lip. “I will, before long,” he said, “I’m getting a fix on Jupiter and three of the moons, and triangulating with the Sun; fairly soon I’ll know our exact position relative to where we ought to be. Whether we can get back there without running the gauntlet of the asteroid belt, that’s another thing; we may have made a critical mistake before we crossed the orbit of Mars, and it’s just possible that the whole asteroid belt is between us and the direction we had intended to go. And unless Ching says the computer is back to where we can rely on it absolutely, I don’t think we ought to make any major course corrections. There might be some kind of glitch in the mechanism which regulates the drives, so that we enter into the computer exactly what we want the Ship to do, and how we want to maneuver, and instead the Ship does something else.”
He could see Moira shudder, and she lifted her hands from the sail controls and stared at them curiously, in a helpless way that seemed wholly at odds with everything he knew of Moira.
He said, “I can see now why they wanted a psychic on the crew, Moira. You knew, before we were holed. And you knew the damage was in the gym.”
“But not in time for it to do us any good,” Moira said, tightly. She lowered her eyes and would not look at him.
“I think the first thing for us to do is to deal with the damage in the gym,” Teague said, “and to check out all the Life-Support equipment and verify that it’s working exactly as it should—”
“No,” Peake said steadily. He started shucking his pressure suit. “After this kind of crisis, we’re all drained and blood sugar is dropping, so we get panicky and start imagining all kinds of horror. As you said, we’re working on stored food, so there’s no danger of getting something lethal because the synthesizers aren’t working. I suggest we go and have that dinner we were about to have when the meteor struck us.”
Only Ravi protested. “I don’t want to leave the Bridge until I’m sure we’re safely out of proximity to the asteroid belt—”
“At the rate we’re going, that will be about six minutes,” Peake said shortly, bending to check what he was doing, “and you need food just as much as the rest of us. Anyhow, even if we were out beyond the orbit of Neptune, there would be no way to exclude the possibility of a grain-of-sand type hitting us again. It’s about as unlikely as the sun going nova in the next twenty minutes. Come along and have some dinner, Ravi; sitting there in that chair isn’t going to keep all the little meteors out of our path!”
“You too, Moira,” Ching said, stopping behind her chair. “You’ll think more clearly with some food inside you — and I know I will, too.”
Peake slung his pressure suit over his arm. He said, “All of you. Bring these, and the helmets, back to me— main cabin and store them right where they were. You can see, now, the importance of having them accessible in every module, at every moment!”
As they pushed, one by one, into the free-fall corridor which would take them back to the main cabin where the food console and their musical instruments were stored, Teague bounced up behind Ching. She had taken off the helmet of the pressure suit, and had it tucked under her arm; the heat of the suit made her dark hair cling in wispy little tendrils to the back of her neck. He pried her hands loose from the crawl-bar. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll hold on to you. I won’t let you get hurt. You’ve got to learn not to be afraid of it. Ching. Come on, put your arms around my neck.”
Hesitantly, she complied, feeling his rough cheek against hers. Somehow the feel steadied the lurching sickness inside her. Under ordinary conditions she very much disliked touching anyone, feeling they were all too aware of her difference; she knew how they felt,
that she was not quite human… as if the genetic tinkering had had some monstrous effect on her, freakishness, and if they touched her, the strangeness would somehow rub off; she had learned to keep herself rigidly away. Only, under the multiple shocks of the past hours, Teague’s strength felt warm and comforting, she wanted to cling to him and cry. She wound her arms around him with relief, hiding her face as he pushed off and they flew the length of the corridor, coming up with a soft bump at the far end. Teague pushed her gently through the lock and they were in the familiar gravity of the main cabin. She clambered down from his arms, began to strip off her pressure suit, hanging it in the rack, She felt self-conscious about the way the thin tunic clung, wrinkled and sweaty, to her small breasts.
“I ought to go and shower and put this thing in the disposal!”
Teague chuckled. “We’re all the same. Look,” he said, laughing at the long rip in the thin nonwoven fiber of his pants, “I’m practically exposed! Not that it makes any difference here, for heaven’s sake, we’d all better get accustomed to the sight of each other’s bodies. Unless we need clothes for protection, I see no reason we should’t go nude at least part of the time. You’re not prudish, are you, Ching?”
She shook her head. She had grown accustomed, certainly, to the sight of nude bodies — about half the athletics at the Academy were done co-educationally and in the nude, clothing being worn only where needed for support. Full-breasted women like Fontana had needed some support when running or engaged in active sports. Ching was thin and small-breasted and never needed them; but she had never been one of those who felt more comfortable in the nude, and had in general worn at least a minimum of clothing. Teague, she remembered, had usually preferred to go naked in the gym or swimming pools. She said, trying not to feel embarrassed at her own unwillingness to do the same, “You don’t have to wear clothes for my sake, Teague. Whatever feels comfortable.”
“Thanks.” Teague stripped off the thin fiber suit and thrust it into a disposal chute. He noticed a stray sheet of the music paper he had covered with a scribbled note, lying on the floor; caught it up and started to send it down the chute after the paper suit, but Ching caught his arm.
“Teague, don’t. Finish it first. I really want to see how it comes out, and I’m sure Peake would, too. He’s enough of a musician—”
“Enough of a musician not to appreciate anything less than Bach or Mozart,” Teague said, wryly, but he did slide the page into the bin which held his flute, Ravi came in, saw Teague’s nude body, and said, “That makes sense.” He took off his pressure suit, pulling off part of the wrinkled fiber suit under it. As Fontana and Peake and Moira came in through the sphincter, Ravi asked, “Does anyone here seriously object to nudity? We could conserve material for clothing by wearing it only when we’re doing dirty work, or want protection.” “I don’t mind anyone else going naked,” Peake said, “but I like something between my bottom and the seat of the chairs.” He hung his pressure suit and helmet in the rack, went and dialed himself some food from the console.
“I handle that by putting a towel or something on the seat,” Teague said, taking a small handful of fiber towels from the dispenser at the bottom of the food machine and putting them over the seat. “We recycle the towel material anyhow.”
“I don’t care who wears what, either,” Moira said, “and personally I prefer to go naked about half the time. As long as one thing is made perfectly clear — that it’s not a sexual invitation. When it is, I’ll make it obvious. If people can distinguish between simple nudity and putting my body up for grabs, I’ll go naked. Just don’t get the wrong idea, anybody.” She stripped off her own crumpled tunic and pants, got herself a plate of food, and sat down to eat.
Ching felt abashed and embarrassed at her own unwillingness to follow suit, as if she were a spoilsport. I envy Moira’s confidence, she thought. I wish I could do that.
Fontana said, “Well, I prefer wearing clothes. My skin is sensitive, and I prefer not to shiver with every stray draft. Anyhow, I prefer to keep nudity for private occasions, if nobody minds.”
Ching thought, well, if Fontana feels that way too, at least I’m. not the only one!
Ravi’s eyes followed Moira; her pale skin was freckled all along the back, too, and her small breasts hardly more than brown nipples, the body of a girl of twelve. Fontana and even Ching had more sensuous bodies, but he remembered, with a quick stir of sexual memory, how intensely he desired Moira. Damn; and she had made it very clear how she felt about having that associated with simple nudity. Maybe that was the trouble with nudity, that it was hard to refrain from making those associations here, when you were with a woman you had known. In the gym, or even on the Bridge, where they were deliberately doing something else, he might not have betrayed himself but here he knew he would do so.
Peake watched Teague bringing a tray toward Ching, looking again with appreciation at the heavy layered muscles, the thatch of curling red hair on Teague’s chest and the matching red patch below. He was acutely conscious of his own body, thin, dark, gangling, awkward, bones protruding with almost skeletal impact, Ugly, he
