“At least we’re close to the toilet and washroom,” Paul said, pointing along the corridor that sloped upward conspicuously in both directions.

Hanging onto the open doorjamb while her feet barely pouched the deck, Joanna lopked bleary-eyed at her honeymoon suite and said wretchedly, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“It’s not that bad, is it?”

“No, Paul,” she said, her face pasty-white. “I’m really going-’ She clutched at her middle.

Paul grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her toward the toilet area. Joanna moaned and gagged. Pushing her weightlessly down the short length of the corridor, their feet barely touching the deck, Paul slid Joanna sideways through the open doorway. She bumped gently against the wall inside.

“Just let go,” he said to her, leaning over her bowed back to start the toilet’s air suction flow. “This happens to almost everybody. I should’ve realized it’d hit you. I’m sorry, I just didn’t think—”

He kept on talking while Joanna puked her guts into the zero gravity toilet.

“It’s all my fault,” he kept saying. “I’m so damned sorry. I never stopped to think that you’d be sick.” As he spoke and Joanna vomited, Paul fought to hold down the bile rising in his own throat.

Some honeymoon, Paul said to himself. Two days in orbit. two days sick as a dog. Joanna had tried to be brave, tried to fight down the nausea that assailed her, but whenever she moved her head it overpowered her.

I should have known, Paul berated himself over and over She’s never been up here before. It gets everybody, one way or another. Damned idiot! You did your thinking with your balls Honeymoon in zero gravity. Upchuck city.

He spent the entire first day alternating between Joanna miserably sick in their cubicle, and the research labs anc manufacturing facility. The experiments on fabricating thin-film video screens and special alloys in zero gravity and the high vacuum of space were going well.

The director of the manufacturing facility was a sandy-haired bespectacled Australian with degrees in metallurgy and management from the University of Sydney. He patiently took Paul through every step of the zero-gravity smelting and refining system they had built.

There were hardly any other people in the area. The facility took up more than a third of the space station’s inner wheel, but Paul saw only a handful of technicians and other personnel, all in coveralls of one color or another, all of them busily ignoring them as the facility director conducted the mandatory tour for the new CEO.

“The board’s very interested in the Windowall development,” Paul told the director.

“That’s good, I suppose.”

Paul went on, “Better than good. If we can manufacture wall-sized screens on a scale big enough for the TV market, it’ll make this operation very profitable.”

The younger man shrugged. “Thin-film manufacturing is no great problem. Give us the raw materials and we’ll make flat screens the size of Ayer’s Rock, if you want”

Paul laughed. “Ten feet across should do, for now.”

The director remained quite serious. “We can do that. But what I really wanted to show you…” He led Paul to an apparatus that looked something like an oversized clothes drier.

Peering through a thick, tinted observation port, Paul saw an array of fist-sized molten metal droplets glowing red-hot as they hung weightlessly inside a capacious oven heated by concentrated sunlight. Tentatively, he touched the glass with his fingertips. It was hardly warm.

“The vacuum is a fine insulator,” the younger man said, with just a hint of an Aussie accent. “Just open the far side of the oven to space and we don’t have to worry about heat transfer much at all.”

Still, Paul thought it looked damned hot in there. The place smelled hot, liked a foundry or a steel mill. Paul realized it was all in his imagination; his brain was linking what he was seeing to memories associated with blast furnaces and smelting forges. Yet imaginary or not, he felt beads of perspiration trickling down his ribs.

The director looked youthfully cool. No perspiration stained his light tan coveralls.

“By focusing the incoming solar energy,” he was explaining, “we can generate temperatures close to the black-body theoretical limit — better than five thousand kelvins.”

Paul already knew that, but he let himself look impressed. “I’m surprised that you keep the droplets so small. I always pictured a big ball of red-hot metal hanging in the vacuum chamber.”

The youngster smiled tolerantly and nudged his rimless glasses back up his nose. “It’s a lot easier to handle a bunch of small spherules than one big glob. We can spin them up quicker, make them flatten out into sheets.”

“How do you spin them?” Paul asked.

“Magnetic fields. Dope the molten mix with a little iron and we spin the spherules, flatten them out into sheets, meld them together. It’s straightforward and it doesn’t take all that much energy.”

“So you’re using centrifugal force to produce sheets of alloy.”

The kid nodded and his glasses slid slightly down his nose again. “Then we turn off the heat and let the sheets outgas in vacuum. That drives out all the impurities while the alloy’s hardening.”

“All the impurities?” Paul asked.

The director gave him a lopsided grin. “Enough,” he said. “Come on over here, I’ll show you.”

He pushed off the oven wall with one foot and glided past a trio of woriters bent over a piece of equipment that Paul did not recognize. Its access hatch was open and one of the workers — a slim Asian woman — was reaching into its innards while the two men with her muttered in low, exasperated tones. Paul didn’t understand what they were saying, but he knew the tone of voice: something had broken down and they were trying to figure out how to fix it.

“Here’s the final product,” the young director said, coasting to a stop in front of a long workbench. He slid his feet into the restraining loops set into the floor and pulled a thin sheet of metal, about a foot square, from a stack that was tied to the workbench with Velcro straps.

Paul flexed the thin sheet of shining metal in his hands. It bent almost double with ease.

“Higher tensile strength than the best steel alloys made on Earth,” said the director proudly, “yet it weighs less than half of the Earth-manufactured alloys.”

Paul felt impressed. “Detroit’s going to like this,” he said. “With an alloy like this they can make cars that are half the weight of the competition, so their energy efficiency will be double anything else on the road.”

“And the cars will be safer, too,” the youngster said, “because this alloy’s stronger than anything else available.”

“Good,” said Paul, smiling with genuine satisfaction. “Damned good.”

“But there’s a problem.”

Paul’s smile evaporated. “Cost?”

The kid nodded. “When you figure the cost of bringing the raw materials up here to orbit, this alloy costs ten times what groundbased alloys cost.”

Paul looked around the facility. It’s all here, he thought. We’ve got a new industrial base within our grasp. Almost. We can make billions. If…

Turning back to the earnest young director, he said, “Suppose I could provide you with the raw materials at a cost twenty times lower than they cost now?”

The youngster’s eyes widened behind his rimless glasses. “Twenty times cheaper? How?”

“From the Moon.”

The kid looked as if Paul had just offered to put the Tooth Fairy to work for him. “Sure. From the Moon.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know, Mr. Stavenger. Everybody knows you’ve been pushing to set up a mining operation at Moonbase. But that’s years away, at best.”

Paul smiled tightly. “It wasn’t all that long ago that people said we were years away from zero-gee manufacturing.”

“Well, yeah, maybe. But—”