“Oh. Where is everybody?” I asked.
“Most are outside working,” McLeve said. “You’ll meet them at dinner.”
We stayed at the axis, drifting with the air currents, literally floating on air. I knew already why people who came here wanted to stay. I’d never experienced anything like it, soaring like a bird. It wasn’t even like a sail plane: you wore the wings and you flew with them, you didn’t sit in a cockpit and move controls around.
There were lights along part of the axis. The mirrors would take over their job when they were installed; for the moment the lights ran off solar power cells plastered over the outside of the sphere. At the far end of the sphere was an enormous cloud of dust. We didn’t get close to it. I pointed and looked a question.
“Rock grinder,” McLeve said. “Making soil. We spread it over the northern end.” He laughed at my frown. “North is the end toward the sun. We get our rocks from the Moon. It’s our radiation shielding. Works just as well if we break it up and spread it around, and that way we can grow crops in it. Later on we’ll get the agricultural compartments built, but there’s always five times as much work as we have people to do it with.”
They’d done pretty well already. There was grass, and millet and wheat for the chickens, and salad greens and other vegetable crops. Streams ran through the fields down to a ring-shaped pond at the equator. There was also a lot of bare soil that had just been put in place and hadn’t been planted. The Shack wasn’t anywhere near finished.
“How thick is that soil?” I asked.
“Not thick enough. I was coming to that. If you hear the flare warnings, get to my house. North pole.”
I thought that one over. The only way to ward yourself from a solar flare is to put a lot of mass between you and the sun. On Earth that mass is a hundred miles of air. On the Moon they burrow ten meters into the regolith. The Shack had only the rock we could get from the Moon, and Moonbase had problems of its own. When they had the manpower and spare energy they’d throw more rock our way, and we’d plaster it across the outer shell of the Shack, or grind it up and put it inside; but for now there wasn’t enough, and come flare time McLeve was host to an involuntary lawn party.
But what the hell, I thought. It’s beautiful. Streams rushing in spirals from pole to equator. Green fields and houses, skies dotted with fleecy white hens; and I was flying as man flies in dreams.
I decided it was going to be fun, but there was one possible hitch.
“There are only ten women aboard,” I said.
McLeve nodded gravely.
“And nine of them are married.”
He nodded again. “Up to now we’ve mostly needed muscle. Heavy construction experience and muscle. The next big crew shipment’s in six months, and the company’s trying like hell to recruit women to balance things off. Think you can hold out that long?”
“Guess I have to.”
“Sure. I’m old navy. We didn’t have women aboard ships and we lived through it.”
I was thinking that I’d like to meet the one unmarried woman aboard. Also that she must be awfully popular. McLeve must have read my thoughts, because he waved me toward a big structure perched on a ledge partway down from the north pole. “You’re doing all right on the flying. Take it easy and let’s go over there.”
We soared down, and I began to feel a definite “up” and “down”; before that any direction I wanted it to be was “up.” We landed in front of the building.
“Combination mess hall and administration offices,” McLeve said. “Ten percent level.”
It took a moment before I realized what he meant. Ten percent level—ten percent of Earth’s gravity.
“It’s as heavy as I care to go,” McLeve said. “And any lighter makes it hard to eat. The labs are scattered around the ring at the same level.”
He helped me off with my wings and we went inside. There were several people, all men, scurrying about purposefully. They didn’t stop to meet me.
They weren’t wearing much, and I soon found that was the custom in the Shack; why wear clothes inside? There wasn’t any weather. It was always warm and dry and comfortable. You mostly needed clothes for pockets.
At the end of the corridor was a room that hummed; inside there was a bank of computer screens, all active. In front of them sat a homely girl.
“Miss Hoffman,” McLeve said. “Our new metallurgist, Corky Riggs.”
“Hi.” She looked at me for a moment, then back at the computer console. She was mumbling something to herself as her fingers flew over the keys.
“Dot Hoffman is our resident genius,” McLeve said. “Anything from stores and inventories to orbit control, if a computer can figure it out she can make the brains work the problem.”
She looked up with a smile. “We give necessity the praise of virtue,” she said.
McLeve looked thoughtful. “Cicero?”
“Quintilian.” She turned back to her console again.
“See you at dinner,” McLeve said. He led me out.
“Miss Hoffman,” I said.
He nodded.
“I suppose she wears baggy britches and blue wool stockings and that shirt because it’s cool in the computer room,” I said.
“No, she always dresses that way.”
“Oh.”
“Only six months, Riggs,” the Admiral said. “Well, maybe a year. You’ll survive.”
I was thinking I’d damned well have to.
I fell in love during dinner.
The chief engineer was named Ty Plauger, a long, lean chap with startling blue eyes. The chief ecologist was his wife, Jill. They had been married about a year before they came up, and they’d been aboard the Shack for three, ever since it started up. Neither was a lot older than me, maybe thirty then.
At my present age the concept of love at first sight seems both trite and incredible, but it was true enough. I suppose I could
