The radar alarm buzzed during a dinner in which Lundgard's flow of talk
had battered vainly against silence and finally given up. Bo vaulted
over to the control panel and checked. No red light glowed, and the
auto-pilot wasn't whipping them out of danger, so they weren't on a
collision course. But the object was getting close. Bo calculated it
was an asteroid on an orbit almost parallel to their own, relative
speed only a few feet per second; it would come within ten miles or
so. In the magnifying periscope, it showed as a jagged dark cube,
turning around itself and flashing hard glints of sunlight off mica
beds--perhaps six miles square, all crags and cracks and fracture
faces, heatless and lifeless and kindless.
V
Lundgard yawned elaborately after dinner. "Excuse," he said. "Unless
somebody's for chess?" His hopeful glance met the grimness of Bo and
the odd sadness of Valeria, and he shrugged. "All right, then. Pleasant
dreams."