“IF,” she interrupted. “On a rock this small, the first stray meteoroid big enough to get through your laser deflectors will knock it out of alignment. And that’s assuming it was accurate in the first place, which, from what I’ve seen so far, would be asking a lot. Look, what you have to do is clear the gap between the wheel and the well walls, float the whole assembly out, check the tension on the wires that run around it, pull the bearings apart, nanoplane them, and repack them with buckyballs. Take you a day.”
Inspector McCarthy raised her hands and put them down again in a clear gesture of disgust. “All right, Wigner, I’ve already seen enough to spoil my appetite, but let’s go out to your ship anyway.”
“No,” Sasha sent on their private line, “not like that. Calm her down first, I don’t want her to scare Tina.”
“Sasha…” Dolph pleaded. The last thing he wanted to do was insult the testy Inspector. Maybe…
“No argument on this: my call, darling.”
Dolph took a deep breath. “Uh, Ms. McCarthy?”
The woman turned to him. “Well? What is it?”
“We, uh, have a three-year-old girl with us. Uh, her name is Tina. Angry people frighten her. Could you…?” Leave the shouting act for the adults, he wanted to say—but he choked that back. Temper, grace.
“You what?” Inspector McCarthy sounded shocked and confused. “What is a child that age doing out here? Why wasn’t this in my briefing?”
Dolph closed his eyes and counted to ten again. “Inspector, she’s in our records. Bom at L4 Von Braun station. The Hopper is family rated.”
“For transportation! Not as a nursery! Why didn’t you leave her with her grandparents or something? Until this job is done?”
Was there any way, he wondered, that he could space this screaming harridan and get away with it? His past and their problems with their parents were none of her damn business. Since when did a habitat inspection become an excuse to cross-examine someone’s life? Or was this an attempt to provoke him, make him do something like what he was supposed to have done on the Moon that would let some big belt corporation step in and take the asteroid that was all they owned.
“We wanted her with us and nothing in the IPA rules said we couldn’t take her.”
“You didn’t ask?” The inspector sounded incredulous.
“Ms. McCarthy, one of the reasons we came out to the Belt was to get away from having to ask. About everything.”
Eileen McCarthy rotated to face him, a silent cipher behind a shiny faceplate.
“One of the reasons? What did they do to you kids to make you risk this? No,” she held up a hand, “You’re right about that. I don’t need to know your past. The kid’s out here now and we’ll just have to deal with it. Some would say that it’s maybe better that way, if the whole family goes at once. Let’s go down to your ship.” She got in the Tram cage for the two-and-a-half-kilometer ride out to the Hopper.
Out of her helmet, Inspector Eileen McCarthy looked as formidable as she sounded. Her curly hair was as steel-gray as her manner. Her slight excess mass softened her face to a degree, and the one-sixth gee of the tethered spacecraft did not tug the features down as much as they would on her native Earth. Otherwise, Dolph thought, the hook nose and down-turned lips would have evoked some costumer’s idea of a witch. He tried to imagine her as someone’s lover, once upon a time, and failed.
She wrinkled that large nose as soon as her helmet came off when she emerged from the air lock into their bedroom/wardroom, “Child,” she said to Sasha, “ypu need to take the lenses off the air-cleaning lasers and polish them occasionally. The automatic systems you have can’t get at them, and, in this low gravity, they develop a film that blocks some of the most effective frequencies. Surface tension effect—take a microscope to them some day and see what I mean.”
“Ms. McCarthy—” Sasha began, a note of outrage in her voice. Dolph held up a hand and shook his head vigorously. Too much was at stake to risk offending the offensive. Sasha, fortunately, caught the hint. “We’ve been a bit busy. I’ll get to it before you come back. Anyway, you’re welcome to share a meal with us.”
It wasn’t much—a plate of protein biscuits and three narrow-necked, low-g water glasses.
Inspector McCarthy ignored it. “You want to live out here all alone? You learn to be very careful. Yes, you’re in the Pallas association, but most of the time, you’ll still be a week or two away from any physical help. Hell, most of the time you kids will be too many light-minutes away for anyone to even use your computer’s motiles interactively. We may have retroviruses to make our genes radiation tolerant, but the bugs and viruses we take with us have no such luck. They mutate. Cleanliness is a survival skill. While I’m at it, my briefing said you’re going to mount your A.I. on an Opticor 721. Tell me it’s not so! You ought to have one of ICA’s double N thirty-sixes.”
Sasha shook her head. “We could get three 721s for the price of one of those…”
Inspector McCarthy scowled.
Sasha smiled. “So we did.”
McCarthy looked surprised and almost smiled—at least Dolph thought he could detect some movement in the deep crevasses that emanated from the comers of her mouth. Then, without saying anything more, she sat down, reached for a protein biscuit, took a bite and chewed. It was so quiet that Dolph could hear her crunch the flavor nuts between her teeth.
Finally she swallowed, lifted her glass of water, watched it slosh around a bit, drank, and nodded. “I’ll give you a marginal pass on that. I like redundancy, excess capacity, and graceful degradation. Mind you, three double N thirty-sixes would have been better.”
Tina chose that time to come out of her compartment, swinging from the handholds as was her custom, so that she could look adults in the eye. They kept her hair short, for convenience and her favorite nightie was a brown flannel jumper—nothing really abnormal, but the total effect could, Dolph realized all too late, be distinctly simian.
She also needed a changing, but before he could do anything, Tina swung over to the wardroom ceiling above and in front of Inspector McCarthy, directly over her plate, and shyly mumbled, “Hi.”
What was most noticeable in the following seconds was the growing color in Inspector McCarthy’s hitherto pale cheeks as the smell wafted about. “Do you,” she choked out at length, “ever discipline this child? What exactly are… her behavioral limits?”
“Hi?” Tina repeated in a small uncertain voice. McCarthy had used, Dolph realized, at least two words that were not often used in the Wigner family. He and Sasha were determined to be as not like their parents as they could.
“Tina,” Sasha began, conversationally, “hasn’t mastered low-gravity toilets yet, but she’s working on it, at her own pace. Aren’t you, darling?”
Tina pouted. “I’m Tina, not darling.’ ”
Sasha beamed indulgently. “Tina, this is Inspector McCarthy, who will be helping us get our new house ready.”
“Hi?” Tina repeated. “Are you a which?”
Inspector Eileen McCarthy wrinkled her nose, took a deep breath. “Hello, Tina.” Then she reached up and pulled the child from her handhold.
“Let me go, you which!” Tina protested.
Inspector McCarthy handed her off to her mother with a suffering look. Then she turned to Dolph. “When you are both working on the habitat, where is she?”