“Oh, calcium. I see.” Freddy nodded in exaggerated agreement. “You want to help me tonight?”
Lance patted his underarms with the towel, then braced his feet against the rowing machine while he slipped into his shirt.
“Sure, what else do I have to do?”
They drifted leisurely down the connecting tunnel and entered the Mars module. The computer circuits and multiplexers ran behind the ceiling panels in the module’s internal tunnel. Freddy hooked his arm through a handhold and trained a penlight on the top page of his papers. The page was a spaghetti of colored lines and numbers. Freddy muttered thoughtfully as he traced his finger along one of the lines.
“I tried phoning Becky again tonight,” said Lance. “She wasn’t home.”
Freddy directed the penlight at a tiny box set into a crease in the ceiling.
“That’s three nights in a row,” said Lance.
“Maybe she’s away.” Freddy tapped the box with his finger.
“Away where?”
“How would I know? People go places.”
“I’ve never gone three days without talking to her. Never.”
“You have an agreement with her?”
“What sort of agreement?”
“You know, an agreement. You up here for six months. She down there for six months. Six months a long time.” Freddy opened the box with the blade of a screwdriver. “How long you been going out?”
“Two years,” said Lance. “We met when we were seniors at Kansas. She was the prettiest girl I ever saw. Well, I showed you her picture.”
Freddy hiked himself up until his eye was an inch from the inside of the box. Wires and circuits matched the diagram on the paper.
“You talk with her about you coming up here?” he asked.
“Of course we did. I told her that it was only six months, but that it would be very good for my long-range career plans. After that, we could talk about getting married.”
“Hmmm. I see,” said Freddy.
“What does that mean? Did I do something wrong?”
“No, I just found the relay I was lookin’ for.”
“Anyway,” Lance continued, “now I’m not so sure about getting married.”
“Because you can’t get her on the phone?”
“Yeah. No. Well, yeah,” said Lance. “That’s never happened. It’s like a sign.”
“Sign of what?”
“That something is wrong. People don’t always tell you. They give you signs.”
“Maybe she just don’ expect you to call.”
“I always have before.”
“You weren’ in space before.”
“But I always called.”
“You know what you beginning to sound like, man? The catechism the nuns taught me in school. ‘Who made me?’ ‘God made me.’ ‘Who God?’ ‘God the Supreme Being Who made all things.’”
“What’s wrong with that?” said Lance.
Freddy shook his head. “Lemme see the next page.”
They floated in silence, Freddy tracing computer circuits and Lance mulling over his crisis with Becky. The Swedish tech swam down the tunnel.
He nodded to the two crewmen, then disappeared into the observation blister. As soon as the door closed, Freddy chuckled.
“What’s so funny?” said Lance.
“Look at your watch and tell me when ten minutes is up.”
Lance obeyed, assuming that the ten-minute period was related to Freddy’s work. He signaled when the time had passed. Moments later, a female Martian appeared. She ignored the two crewmen and made straight for the observation blister. The door opened and she slipped inside.
Freddy laughed.
“Now what’s so funny?” said Lance.
“I been in here the last two nights. Same thing. He goes into the blister and ten minutes later some chick shows up. Last night it was one of the Europeans. Wonder what’d happen if two showed up.”
“There would be a fight.”
“Or maybe our friend’d need some help.” Freddy winked.
“Not from me,” said Lance.
“Can you imagine? I had a water-bed once, till my cousin Felix used it one night and forgot to take his boots off. Thought I was floating then, but that’d be nothing compared to this. All kinds of tumbling, all kinds of angles. And with the Earth and stars right outside the window. Beats lookin’ across an air shaft, eh?”
“I never have.”
“Tha’s right. No air shafts in Kansas.”
There was a thud against the blister door.
“What’s that?” Lance blurted.
“Newton’s Law.”
Freddy left Lance with instructions to keep a close eye on the circuitry, then headed for the command module to test the adjustments he had made to the relay. The project that Commander Tighe had assigned him was far less complicated than he had expected. If necessary, he could have reconfigured the entire computer system in two or three evenings. But Freddy was in no rush.
As he approached the command module, Freddy noticed two figures slipping out of The Bakery. Even at a distance of one hundred feet, he recognized the red mop of Stu Roberts and the ample ass of Russell Cramer. The two men entered Hab 1.
Freddy knifed past the command module. The test he was about to run could wait. As he passed the hatch to Hab 1, he could see Roberts and Cramer at the door to Roberts’s compartment. Freddy cast his eyes up and down the tunnel. No one was in sight. He pulled himself into The Bakery. Like the Mars module, it was in nighttime illumination: pools of dim light and long stretches of shadow. Freddy nosed up to the tiny lab assigned to Hugh O’Donnell. The door was closed. The strip of cellophane tape O’Donnell stretched across the padlock each night to reveal signs of intrusion was undisturbed.
Dart throwing was easy in micro-gee, thought Hugh O’Donnell. Since the dart flew in a precisely straight line, rather than arc toward the floor in response to gravity, all you needed were an accurate aim and a correct release point in your throwing motion.
The darts were little more than plastic soda straws tipped with Velcro. O’Donnell threw three of them at the dart board, retrieved them, and returned to the foot loops at the far end of the ex/rec area. Over and over again. He never tired of throwing bull’s-eyes.
Directly below the darts’ flight path, Chakra Ramsanjawi and Hisashi Oyamo huddled over their chessboard. They played silently, although each one would chuckle when he removed one of the other’s pieces from the board. Occasionally, Ramsanjawi cast a baleful glance in O’Donnell’s direction, as if the incessant flight of the darts disturbed his concentration. O’Donnell ignored him.
“Care for a game?”
Dan Tighe hovered in the entryway.
“Why not?” said O’Donnell. He removed his three darts from the board while Dan rummaged through one of the recreation compartments for three more.
As they played, Dan scrutinized O’Donnell’s every movement. The scientist threw darts as silently and as intensely as Ramsanjawi and Oyamo concentrated on their chess. He would close one eye, tense his body, and move his throwing hand back and forth repeatedly as if it were on an invisible track before he exhaled deeply and launched the dart on its dead-straight path. There was a rigidity about O’Donnell’s movements that was completely at odds with his lanky, loose-jointed frame. Dan sensed an inability, or an unwillingness, to relax. He couldn’t decide which.
“I see you’re still shaving,” Dan said between rounds. “I thought after a few days you’d grow a beard like everyone else.”
“You haven’t,” said O’Donnell. He started to aim.
“I’ve mastered the long, slow strokes.”
“Really?” said O’Donnell, taking his eye off the target. “I suppose your face is red from windburn.”
“Yeah, well—I guess I really don’t like beards.”
O’Donnell said nothing. He fired one dart and settled into his aiming ritual with a second.