"It is good to take pride in your handiwork, Dar."
"Thanks." Dar grinned. "Though I wasn't about to squelch the feeling, Fess—I'm not that much of a Puritan."
Fess didn't respond.
"Besides, it's not my design—though I can't see why Lona wants another room for the factory. We can just barely sell the dozen brains we make in a month, as it is." Dar cocked his head to the side. "But I think I'm beginning to see the effect she's trying for, now."
He was silent long enough so that Fess prompted him: "And that effect is?"
"A castle." Dar turned away. "Not that she doesn't deserve it—but she also doesn't have to let everybody know."
The call light on the console was blinking as Dar stepped in from the airlock. He pulled his suit open just enough to tilt back the helmet as he stepped over to punch for playback. The comm screen lit up with the face of Maxima's Director of Imports. He knew Myrtle was plain, as women go, but she looked very attractive at the moment. Dar remembered his vision of Lona, and realized how much too long she'd been away.
"Shipment coming in, Dar," Myrtle's face said. "A miner's trying to make a few kwahers on his way back out from Ceres. He's bringing in the usual mixed bag—silicon, metals, and replacement parts. If you're interested, he'll be opening shop about 1600. 'Bye, now." She favored him with her favorite sheep's eyes just before the screen went dark.
"She'll never stop," Dar sighed. "I swear that woman has given me the best leers of her life."
"No doubt because she is certain it is safe to do so," Fess assured him. "Will you go, Dar?"
"Are you kidding? We've only got a month's supply of pure silicon left! And the aluminum and gold are getting low, too." Dar stripped off his suit in a hurry and hung it on its peg in passing, heading for the shower.
"You could buy a smelter," Fess reminded him, "and buy raw minerals much more cheaply, from the local miners."
His answer was a blast of water-noise—Dar preferred the sensation of spray to the admittedly quicker supersonic vibration that shook dirt loose; and why not use water, when it was only going to be purified and fed into the fusion reactor, anyway? His voice rose above the burble. "Don't trust 'em, Fess. The big one on Ceres does a better job than any home bottle could do—and I can buy an awful lot of pure minerals for what a smelter would cost."
Besides, with his own furnace, he wouldn't have as many occasions to go into town and see other people.
Dar headed out a half-hour later, cleansed, depilated, and anointed, with a hot meal in his belly and Lona's shopping list in his pocket. He knew well enough what they were low on, of course, but she always hit a few things he wouldn't have thought of. He had to admit she was more experienced at shopping.
Of course, it could also be that she knew more about building and programming computers.
"No question there," he said, holding up a hand and closing his eyes. "I defer to your superior wisdom." It was galling to have to admit it, but he did. "I scarcely know how to grow rock candy, let alone a molecular circuit."
"But there's nothing to it," she'd said. "You see, this little sawtoothed line means a resistor, and the number over it tells you how many ohms it has to be."
Dar frowned and peered over her shoulder.
"The paper," she reminded him.
"I am looking at the paper."
"But I want you to concentrate, too." Lona pushed her chair aside so that the schematic was between them. "And these parallel lines show a capacitor."
"But how do I tell how many ohms the resistor is? The real one, I mean, not the one in the drawing."
"It's printed on the side of the box."
"Yeah, but we're talking about me being able to make sure the robots are using the right ones. What if the wrong number gets stamped on the side? Or if it's the right number, but a stray resistor is in there with the wrong number of ohms?"
"Hm." Her brow knit (she had a very pretty frown, Dar thought). "That is a good point, my love. So that's why Mama taught me how to read the color code."
"Color code?"
"Yes. You see how each of these rings painted on the resistor has a different color? Well, each color is equivalent to a number…"
And so it had gone—electronics, chemistry, particle physics, with Lona always impatient, always trying to breeze past and hit only the points absolutely necessary for the job, and Dar always doggedly pulling her back to the part she'd skipped, knowing that if he didn't keep asking "Why?" it wouldn't be very long before he wouldn't understand what she was talking about.
When you're trying to learn, it helps being a teacher.
She'd taught him enough to be able to supervise the factory, which meant that he knew how to do every job himself, if he had to—but he still didn't know enough to plan a job, and certainly couldn't have designed anything more complicated than an autobar. He was studying whenever he could, of course—and she'd been delighted, when she had come home from that third trip to Terra and had found the hard copy sitting out on his desk…
"Dar! You've been studying!"
"Huh?" Dar had looked around in panic. "I won't do it again! I promise!"
"No, do!" Lona bent over to look more closely, and Dar bad a dizzy spell. "It's about wave propagation!"
Dar glanced at his desk, irritated; waves were the last thing he'd wanted to propagate, just then. "Well, sure. I promised you I'd learn enough to run the factory, remember?"
"But I already taught you enough for that. This is above and beyond the call—and it's all on your own! Oh, you wonderful man!" And she turned to him, hauling his face up to hers for a kiss that was so deep and dazzling that he began to think maybe he was pretty wonderful, after all.
When she let him up for air, he gasped, "You keep that up, and I'll have to study all the time."
She did it again, then propped him up before he could slide to the floor. "All right, I'm keeping it up—and you! So start studying. Even when I'm around. Why didn't you before?"
"Uh…" Dar bit his lip. "Well, uh… I kinda thought you might feel like I was, uh…"
"Poaching on my territory?" She shook her head (her hair bounced so prettily when she did that!), eyes shining up at him. "Knowledge is free, sweetheart—or at least, the price is limited to how much studying you're willing to do to gain it. And the more you know, the prouder I am to be with you." Then she'd co-opted his lips again, to show just what form her pride took.
Well, she was body-proud, Dar reflected—and had a perfect right to be. She'd sure given him reason to keep his nose in the books when she was gone. He'd learned calculus and was beginning on some of the more esoteric branches of mathematics, and was almost up to date on wave mechanics—but that still left an awful lot he didn't know: circuitry, information theory, particle physics… "I wonder if I'll ever be able to learn it faster than the scientists are developing the knowledge," he wondered aloud.
"That is possible, Dar." Fess lay in the cargo hold, his computer plugged into the car's controls. "The rate of new discoveries is slowing down, on Terra. There are as many articles published as ever, but they are increasingly derivative. The number of original concepts published and tested declines every year."
Dar frowned. "Odd, that. I'd heard the universities were graduating more Ph.D.s than ever."
"True, Dar, but they no longer require truly original work for their dissertations. Nor will they—bureaucracy tends toward stability, and truly new ideas can upset that stability."
"Well, the Proletarian Eclectic State of Terra is bureaucratic." Dar frowned. "But its most prominent characteristic is that it's one of the tightest totalitarian governments ever seen. I thought dictatorships wanted research, to give them new and better weapons."