man with more money than sense. “Are you going to exercise?”
“Both of us are. Very gently, and very carefully for the first day or two. Muscle build-up under higher gravity comes amazingly fast, but it’s very easy to develop a sprain or tear tissue.”
He retreated into his own quarters, leaving Milly to wonder what manner of man she was dealing with. Was he interested in her personally, as Hannah Krauss insisted? If so, he showed no signs of it. Was he an Ogre, as everyone insisted? Then he was an Ogre on its best behavior.
Milly had to wait two days before she could answer those questions. The Witch of Agnesi flew steadily on, its acceleration never changing. Milly’s body gradually adapted to the unprecedented acceleration field. She moved slowly and carefully, and reminded herself that humans had evolved in a force field like this. Jack Beston remained for most of the time in his own quarters, and Milly kept to hers. They met twice a day to eat, to exercise — gently, at his insistence — and to talk about nothing. He was fidgety and restless, but uncommunicative.
Milly was not bored. She was too worried for boredom. She was busy obsessively analyzing and re-analyzing her own work, wondering if she had made some blunder that the others at the Argus Station had failed to catch, wondering if she would go down in history as a major discoverer or as one more footnote testifying to an alien signal that wasn’t. If she did take a break it was to wander over to the ports and stare out. When they reached turnover, the Sun, the ship, and Jupiter would lie almost exactly in a straight line. Already she could see the Sun’s intense glare out of one port, and Jupiter’s full face out of the one opposite. Ganymede, where her relatives lived and where until recently she had made her home, was never visible. The solar system felt very empty. She felt very alone.
Late on the afternoon of the third day, Jack Beston appeared and asked her if she would have dinner with him in his private quarters. She couldn’t think of any reason to say no, so she agreed, but when the time came and she knocked on the door leading to his cabin, she felt highly uncomfortable. As she entered the sitting room she had to remind herself that so far as he was concerned she had never been here before.
She wandered around, offering compliments on the well-designed furniture and expensive decor. At last he said, “You know, back on Argus Station I have a reputation for being paranoid about security. I’m not, really, about anything but the project itself. Zetter’s the security freak, not me. But when I bought this ship it came with a monitoring system already installed for the private quarters.”
Did that mean he knew she had been snooping around? It must. She stared at him. His face had a brooding expression, but he didn’t sound upset at her — certainly not as upset as Milly felt. “I’m sorry. When I came aboard, I wondered — I’ve never been on a ship anything like this before, so I just—”
“Don’t apologize. Do you know what I look for in a person who applies to work on the Argus Project? Insatiable curiosity, about everything in the universe.” He waved her to a seat by the low table and dropped to sit cross-legged on the cushions opposite. He smiled a grim smile. “Of course, when certain other people display that type of curiosity, I don’t like it at all. I don’t mean you, Milly. Have you scanned the news outlets recently?”
“No. Not since we left Argus Station.”
“Well, I have. We sent word that we had a possible signal from the stars to just two places: Odin Station, and the Ganymede Office of Records. The signal that went to Ganymede was enciphered and should have been locked away. But somebody leaked it, and somebody cracked it. There’s a blurt about us on the Paradigm Outlet. Most of it is made-up nonsense, as you’d expect, but it says we have a message from aliens. Your name is mentioned. It’s going to be a pain in the ass until all this dies down. A hundred media chasers will be after you.”
“What do I tell them?” In her whole life, Milly had never met a single individual from any outlet.
“You refer them to me.” Jack Beston’s green eyes took on a gleam of anticipation. “I’ll give them more than they bargained for. I’ll offer them information — if they’ll tell me where the Ganymede leak came from.”
“Are you sure it was the Ganymede office? The signal you sent to the Odin Station wasn’t enciphered.”
“It didn’t need to be. Odin Station is locked as tight as the Bastard’s ass. He’d kill anyone on his project who leaked this kind of information, because even though he lost on the initial discovery he’s hoping to get there first with interpretation.”
“I thought the race was over.”
“Not until we know what the signal means!’
“Then why did you send any message at all to Odin Station?”
“A calculated risk. We need the Bastard’s inputs for verification. It’s either that, or sit around for years while we change orbit position. And I’m too impatient to wait for things.” He followed Milly’s eyes, to where an array of little servers were creeping through from the kitchen and positioning themselves by the low table. “Well, the hell with all that. I didn’t ask you to dinner to obsess about work. Let’s eat. Help yourself.”
Milly wondered what to expect as she opened the server lids. Her earlier inspection of the kitchen suggested a level of cuisine beyond anything she had ever encountered. It was a relief to find exactly the same kinds of food that she had grown up with.
No, put it differently. This looked like what she was used to. Milly placed a minimal amount of food on her plate. She thought of Hannah’s warning, the seduction of new female workers, and Jack’s own I’m too impatient to wait for things. If he were planning to put a move on her, was he above adding a little psychotropic additive to affect her mood? She speared a small green bean on her fork and tasted it.
Jack Beston was watching closely. “Are you all right? You’ve hardly taken any.”
“I suppose that I’m a bit surprised.” Milly gestured with her fork at her plate. “This is fine, but it’s the same sort of food as we used to eat at home.”
“You mean it’s too plain, rather than high-class?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that.”
“But you might think it.” Jack had loaded his plate with about ten times as much as Milly, though so far he hadn’t taken a single bite. “I’m sorry, but when it comes to eating I’m a low-brow. I think I developed my food tastes early in life, and I wasn’t born rich. I had richness thrust upon me.”
“I know.”
“Hannah told you?”
“Right.”
“You’ve not taken enough food to feed a mouse. And so far you have nibbled on one very small bean. What else did Hannah tell you?”
Milly put down her fork. “Since you insist on asking, she warned me to be very careful. You have a habit, she said, of making passes at women on your staff, especially ones who are new. And I’m the most recent arrival.”
He was staring at her and nodding his head thoughtfully. This was probably where she got fired.
“So you’re nervous,” he said, “and that’s spoiling your appetite?”
“Maybe.”
“And maybe there’s more to it than that.” Jack reached across the table to take her hand, but she pulled it back out of reach. He nodded. “You really are nervous. Maybe you are worried about the food and think there could be something wrong with it. Now I’m going to tell you a few things, Milly Wu, and whether you believe me or not, and whether after I talk we sit here and eat a civilized dinner together, or whether you leave and lock yourself in your cabin for the rest of the trip, is up to you. Either way, I won’t hold it against you.
“First, I do find you very attractive, and I have since your original interview. Also, I know I have a reputation, and there’s some truth to what Hannah told you. But I wish Hannah had told you something else. I have never, ever, tried to use position or money or influence to pressure someone into having sex if she doesn’t want to. I’m not interested in any form of coercion. Also, I have never tried to drug a person, man or woman, to do anything for any reason.”
He paused and Milly saw that his hands, still extended across the table, were trembling. “Hannah didn’t tell me most of that,” she muttered. “I’m glad you did. And I believe you.”
“Good. Because now we reach the hard part so far as I’m concerned. I told you I find you attractive, and I do. But if you had come on strong to me tonight and suggested that we have sex — I’m not saying that you ever had any such thought — I’m sure I would have been a big disappointment. Can’t you see that I’m tense and nervous as hell, and have been for days, and that it has absolutely nothing to do with you? I asked you to dinner to get my mind off something else.”
“The visit to Odin Station?”
