the web would have been superfluous. The web's own mass was less than fifty pounds, which had not done much to the sum of those vectors as it absorbed its share of the men's momentum. Consequently, the men had an angular velocity with respect to the station, and they were approaching the latter.
To a seventeenth century mathematician, conservation of angular momentum may have been an abstract concept, but to Silbert it was an item of very real, practical, everyday experience — just as the orbit of a comet is little more than a set of numbers to an astronomer while the orbit of a baseball is something quite different to an outfielder. The problem this time was even worse than usual, partly because of Bresnahan's mass and still more because of his inexperience.
As the two approached the station their sidewise motion became evident even to Bresnahan. He judged that they would strike near the rim of the spinning structure, if they hit it at all, but Silbert had other ideas.
Changing the direction of the spin axis by landing at the hub was one thing — a very minor one. Changing the rate of spin by meeting the edge could be a major nuisance, since much of the apparatus inside was built on and for Earth and had Earth's gravity taken for granted in its operation. Silbert therefore had no intention of making contact anywhere but at one of the “poles” of the station. He was rather in the situation of a yo-yo whose string is winding up on the operator's finger; but he could exercise a little control by climbing as rapidly as possible “up” the cord toward the structure or allowing himself to slide “down” away from it.
He had had plenty of experience, but he was several minutes playing them into a final collision with the entry valve, so close to the center of mass of the station that the impact could produce only a tiny precession effect. Most of its result was a change in the wheel's orbit about Raindrop, and the whole maneuver had taken such a small fraction of an orbital period that this effect nearly offset that produced when they had started up the rope.
“Every so often,” remarked the spaceman as he opened the air lock, “we have to make a small correction in the station orbit; the disturbances set up by entering and leaving get it out of step with Raindrop's rotation. Sometimes I wonder whether it's worth the trouble to keep the two synchronized.”
“If the station drifted very far from the lock below, you'd have to jump from the liquid surface, which might be awkward,” pointed out the younger man as the closing hatch cut off the starlight.
“That's true,” admitted the other as he snapped a switch and air started hissing into the small lock chamber. “I suppose there's something to be said for tradition at that. There's the safety light” — as a green spot suddenly glowed on the wall— “so you can open up your suit whenever you like. Lockers are in the next room. But you arrived through this lock, didn't you?”
“Right. I know my way from here.”
Five minutes later the two men, divested of spacesuits, had “descended” to the rim of the station where weight was normal. Most of this part of the structure was devoted to living space which had never been used, though there were laboratory and communication rooms as well. The living space had been explained to Bresnahan, when he first saw it, as why Silbert was willing to spend three quarters of his time alone at a rather boring job a hundred thousand miles from the nearest company. Earth was badly crowded; not one man in a million had either as much space or as much privacy.
Weisanen and his wife had taken over a set of equally sumptuous rooms on the opposite side of the rim, and had been in the process of setting up housekeeping when the two employees had descended to Raindrop's surface a short time before. This had been less than an hour after their arrival with Bresnahan on the shuttle from Earth; Weisanen had wasted no time in issuing his first orders. The two men were prepared to find every sign of disorder when the door to the “headquarters” section opened in response to Silbert's touch on the annunciator, but they had reckoned without Mrs. Weisanen.
At their employer's invitation, they entered a room which might have been lived in for a year instead of an hour. The furniture was good, comfortable, well arranged, and present in quantity which would have meant a visible bulge in a nation's space research budget just for the fuel to lift it away from the earth in the chemical fuel days.
Either the Weisanens felt strongly about maintaining the home atmosphere even when visiting, or they planned to stay on the station for quite a while.
The official himself was surprisingly young, according to both Bresnahan's and Silbert's preconceived notions of a magnate. He could hardly have been thirty, and might have been five years younger. He matched Bresnahan's five feet ten of height and looked about the same weight; but while the computerman regarded himself as being in good physical shape, he had to admit the other was far more muscular. Even Silbert's six feet five of height and far from insignificant frame seemed somehow inadequate beside Weisanen's.
“Come in, gentlemen. We felt your return a few minutes ago! I take it you have something to report, Mr. Bresnahan. We did not expect you back quite so soon.” Weisanen drew further back from the door and waved the others past him. “What can you tell us?” He closed the door and indicated armchairs. Bresnahan remained on his feet, uneasy at the incompleteness of his report; Silbert sank into the nearest chair. The official also remained standing. “Well, Mr. Bresnahan?”
“I have little — practically nothing — to report, as far as detailed, quantitative information is concerned,” the computer man took the plunge.
“We stayed inside the Raindrop only a few minutes, and it was evident that most of the detailed search for life specimens would have to be made with a microscope. I hadn't planned the trip at all effectively. I now understand that there is plankton-collecting apparatus here which Mr. Silbert uses regularly and which should have been taken along if I were to get anything worth showing to you.”
Weisanen's face showed no change in its expression of courteous interest. “That is quite all right,” he said. “I should have made clear that I wanted, not a detailed biological report, but a physical description by a non- specialist of what it is like subjectively down there. I should imagine that you received an adequate impression even during your short stay. Can you give such a description?”
Bresnahan's worried expression disappeared, and he nodded affirmatively.
“Yes, sir. I'm not a literary expert, but I can tell what I saw…'
“Good. One moment, please.” Weisanen turned toward another door and raised his voice. “Brenda, will you come in here, please? You should hear this.”
Silbert got to his feet just as the woman entered, and both men acknowledged her greeting.
Brenda Weisanen was a full head shorter than her husband. She was wearing a robe of the sort which might have been seen on any housewife expecting company; neither man was competent to guess whether it was worth fifty dollars or ten times that. The garment tended to focus attention on her face, which would have received it anyway. Her hair and eye-brows were jet black, the eyes themselves gray, and rounded cheeks and chin made the features look almost childish, though she was actually little younger than her husband. She seated herself promptly, saying no more than convention demanded, and the men followed suit.
“Please go on, Mr. Bresnahan,” Weisanen said. “My wife and I are both greatly interested, for reasons which will be clear shortly.”
Bresnahan had a good visual memory, and it was easy for him to comply. He gave a good verbal picture of the greenish, sunlit haze that had surrounded him — sunlight differing from that seen under an Earthly lake, which ripples and dances as the waves above refract it. He spoke of the silence, which had moved him to keep talking because it was the “quietest” silence he had known, and “didn't sound right.”
He was interrupted by Silbert at this point; the spaceman explained that Raindrop was not always that quiet. Even a grain-of-dust meteoroid striking the skin set up a shock wave audible throughout the great sphere; and if one were close enough to the site of collision, the hiss of water boiling out through the hole for the minute or two needed for the skin to heal could also be heard. It was rather unusual to be able to spend even the short time they had just had inside the satellite without hearing either of these sounds.
Bresnahan nodded thanks as the other fell silent, and took up the thread of his own description once more. He closed with the only real feature he had seen to describe — the weed-grown cylinder of the water-to-space lock, hanging in greenish emptiness above the dead-black void which reached down to Raindrop's core. He was almost poetical in spots.
The Weisanens listened in flattering silence until he had done, and remained silent for some seconds thereafter. Then the man spoke.
“Thank you, Mr. Bresnahan. That was just what we wanted.” He turned to his wife. “How does that sound to you, dear?”
