this.”
“You, um… haven’t heard the new orders yet, then?” said Leo carefully, with a warning glance at Claire—
“What new orders? I’m on my way to see the little schmuck—that is, the man right now. Get to the bottom of this…” He turned to Claire, switching firmly to a kinder tone. “It’s all right, we’ll get it straightened out. All Tony’s internal bleeding is stopped, and there’s no further sign of infection. You quaddies are tough. You hold your health much better in gravity than we downsiders do in free fall. Well, we explicitly designed you not to undergo de- conditioning. I could only wish the confirming experiment hadn’t happened under such distressing conditions. Of course,” he sighed, “youth has something to do with it.… Speaking of youth, how’s little Andy? Sleeping better for you now?”
Claire almost burst into tears. “I don’t know,” she squeaked, and swallowed hard.
“What?”
“They won’t let me see him.”
Leo, studying his fingernails distantly, put in, “Andy was removed from Claire’s care. On charges of child- endangering, or some such thing. Didn’t Bruce tell you that either?”
Dr. Minchenko’s face was darkening to a brick-red hue. “Removed? From a breast-feeding mother— obscene!” His eyes swept back over Claire.
“They gave me some medicine to dry me up,” explained Claire.
“Well, that’s something…” his mollification was slight. “Who did?”
“Dr. Curry.”
“He didn’t report it to me.”
“You were on leave.”
“ ‘On leave’ doesn’t mean ‘incommunicado.’ You, Graf! Spit it out. What the hell’s going on around here? Has that pocket-martinet lost his mind?”
“You really haven’t heard. Well, you’d better ask Bruce. I’m under direct orders not to discuss it.”
Minchenko gave Leo a stabbing glare. “I shall.” He pushed off and entered the corridor through the airseal doors, muttering under his breath.
Claire and Leo were left looking at each other in dismay.
“How are we going to get Tony back now?” cried Claire. “It’s less than twenty-four hours till Silver’s signal!”
“I don’t know—but don’t cave now! Remember Andy. He’s going to need you.”
“I’m not going to cave,” Claire denied. She took a steadying gulp of air. “Not ever again. What can we do?”
“Well, I’ll see what strings I can pull, to try and have Tony brought up—bullshit Bruce, tell him I have to have Tony to supervise his welding gang or something—I’m not sure. Maybe Minchenko and I together can work something, though I don’t want to risk rousing Minchenko’s suspicions. If I can’t,” Leo inhaled carefully, “we’ll have to work out something else.”
“Don’t lie to me, Leo,” said Claire dangerously. “Don’t leap to conclusions. Yes, I know—you know—the possibility exists that we won’t be able to retrieve him, all right, I said it, right out loud. But please note any, er, alternative scenarios depend on Ti to pilot a shuttle for us, and must wait until we re-connect with the hijack crew. At which point we will have captured a Jumpship, and I will begin to believe that anything is possible.” His brows quirked, stressed. “And if it’s possible, well try it. Promise.”
There was a growing coldness in her. She firmed her lips against their tremble. “You can’t risk everybody for the sake of just one. That’s not right.”
“Well… there are a thousand things that can go wrong between now and some—point of no return for Tony. It may turn out to be quite academic. I do know, dividing our energies among a thousand what-ifs instead of concentrating them for the one sure next-step is a kind of self-sabotage. It’s not what we do next week, it’s what we do next, that counts most. What must you do next?”
Claire swallowed, and tried to pull her wits back together. “Go back to work… pretend like nothing’s going on. Continue the secret inventory of all possible seed stocks. Uh, finish the plan of how we’re going to hook up the grow-lights to keep the plants going while the Habitat is moved away from the sun. And as soon as the Habitat is ours, start the new cuttings and bring the reserve tubes on-line, to start building up extra food stocks against emergencies. And, uh, arrange cryo-storage of samples of every genetic variety we have on board, to re-stock in case of disaster—”
“That’s enough!” Leo smiled encouragement. “The next step only! And you
She nodded.
“We need you, Claire,” he added. “All of us, not just Andy. Food production is one of the fundamentals of our survival. We’ll need every pair, er, every set of expert hands. And you’ll have to start training youngsters, passing on that how-to knowledge that the library, no matter how technically complete, can’t duplicate.”
“I am not going to cave,” Claire reiterated through her teeth, answering the undercurrent, not the surface, of his speech.
“You scared me, that time in the airlock,” he apologized, embarrassed.
“I scared myself,” she admitted.
“You had a right to be angry. Just remember, your true target isn’t in here—” he touched her collarbone, above her heart, fleetingly. “It’s out there.”
So, he had recognized it was rage, rage blocked and turned inward, and not despair, that had brought her to the airlock that day. In a way, it was a relief to put the right name to her emotion. In a way it was not.
“Leo… that scares me too.”
He smiled quizzically. “Welcome to the human club.”
“The next step,” she muttered. “Right. The next
Leo turned back to the freight bay with a sigh. The next-step speech was all very well, except when people and changing conditions kept switching your route around in front of you while your foot was in the air. His gaze lingered a moment on the quaddie docking crew, who had connected the flex tube to the shuttle’s large freight hatch and were unloading the cargo into the bay with their power handlers. The cargo consisted of man-high grey cylinders, that Leo did not at first recognize.
But the cargo wasn’t supposed to be unrecognizable.
The cargo was supposed to be a massive stock of spare cargo-pusher fuel rods. “For dismantling the Habitat,” Leo had sung dulcetly to Van Atta, when jamming the requisition through. “So I won’t have to stop and reorder. So what if we have leftovers, they can go to the Transfer Station with the pushers when they’re relocated. Credit them to the salvage.”
Disturbed, Leo drifted over to the cargo workers. “What’s this, kids?”
“Oh, Mr. Graf, hello. Well, I’m not quite sure,” said the quaddie boy in the canary-yellow T-shirt and shorts of Airsystems Maintenance, of which Docks & Locks was a subdivision. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before. It’s massive, anyway.” He paused to unhook a report panel from his power-handler and gave it to Leo. “There’s the freight manifest.”
“It was supposed to be cargo-pusher fuel rods.…” The cylinders
“They gurgle,” the yellow-shirted quaddie added helpfully.
“Gurgle?” Leo looked at the code number on the report panel more closely, glanced at the grey cylinders— they matched. Yet he recognized the code for the pusher rods—or did he? He entered ‘Fuel Rods, Orbital Cargo Pusher Type II, cross ref, inventory code.’ The report panel blinked and a number popped up. Yes, it was the same—no, by God! G77618PD, versus the G77681PD emblazoned on the cylinders. Quickly he tapped in ‘G77681PD.’ There was a long pause, not for the report panel but for Leo’s brain to register.
