Joanna's jaw dropped and her black-satin hair gleamed with liquid
highlights as she shook her head. "_Crehut_, you are green!" she
exclaimed. Then, assuming sociability with an effort, "You're mighty
pretty though. The trip takes a little more than one Earth-day."
"Thanks--I see," replied Lynne. She felt she was beginning to see a
lot of things. Along with her archaic ideas about the rigors of a
space-ship takeoff, she had apparently retained some mighty obsolete
theories about the speed of space-travel, at least on the Earth-Mars
run. In her mind it was a matter of weeks if not months, depending upon
the relative positions of the two planets.
A little over one Earth-day--if her growing feeling that she was the
victim or core of some vast unseen conspiracy were correct, then there
would have been plenty of time for Rolf to be summoned from Mars after
her non-variant answers had given the brain-station bosses the clue to
her newly-developed telepathic powers.
But why all the secrecy? It didn't take her long to find an answer.
Had she been asked immediately to come to Mars she would have refused
point-blank to make the trip. Her conditioning, her whole life would
have forced her to reply in the negative.
So Rolf Marcein had been sent for with orders to make her want to leave
Earth with him, by fair means or foul. And he had not hesitated to
employ the foul. She felt her whole body blush as she recalled some of
the brazen suggestions he had made, some of her responses, especially
to his embraces earlier that evening.
It was going to be a very interesting session, she decided, as she
followed the girl into the single small but beautifully compact central
lounge or saloon that space requirements permitted on the Mars-ship.
She looked around but failed to see his tall figure and saturnine
face--treacherous face, she thought--among the half-dozen passengers
already reclining in plastolounges, watching the amazing panorama
projected on the ceiling from the viewplate recorders in the prow and
stern of the huge space-vessel.
She followed Joanna to a chair, tried to share the girl's tremulous
excitement. After all, she thought, she had felt much the same
on emerging from the seminary to take her first position as a
data-recording supplement for the biggest of all cybernetics machines,
the "brain" that occupied six thousand acres of the Sahara Desert.
"Look!" the girl whispered enthusiastically. "There's X-Three, the last
of the derelict space-stations."
Lynne watched the oddly complex structure, that resembled a pair of
unrooted pyramids fastened point to point, as it revolved slowly across
and out of the plane of vision.
"What do they use it for now, Joanna?" she murmured.
"Nothing," the girl said with a trace of scorn.
Lynne knew she should have known about that. She recalled now a vidar
newscast in which the abandonment of the last of the space-stations had
been mentioned. In the years before A-engines were finally perfected
space-stations were vitally necessary as change-over stops for
interplanetary rocket flights. But once fuel ceased to be a problem
they had been used merely as meteor-warning points and weather stations.
In the first function they had proved useless--in fact one of them had
been destroyed by a large space-missile--and weather forecasting and
control were practised far more efficiently by electronic mastery of
the Heaviside Layer. Lynne shouldn't have forgotten--but when she heard
it the matter of space-stations had been utterly unimportant in her
life.
A steward in space-black bolo and clout offered them vari-flavored
colafizzes from a rack strapped about his waist. Lynne wondered at this
mode of serving the drinks while she sipped hers but decided not to ask
Joanna. She didn't want to appear a total numbskull to a girl whose
whole life had consisted of conditioning for Mars.
She found out soon enough when Rolf Marcein walked into the saloon
before she had finished sipping her drink. She rose to greet him, to
haul him off somewhere so they could talk alone--and as she did so she
automatically dropped her colafizz in the receptacle ready to receive
it in one arm of her plastolounge.
Joanna made a grab for it as it bounced off and rose lazily in the air
and turned slowly over. The African girl caught it before it released
any of the liquid remaining in it, pushed it firmly down into the
hollow space reserved for it, where it was magnetically held.
But Lynne was not paying much attention. She was having enough trouble
holding herself upright as her feet displayed an astonishing reluctance
to keep on the floor while the rest of her wanted to describe a lazy
parabola across the saloon. She did an off-to-Buffalo and wound up
against Rolf's chest with his arms about her.