“You awake, man?” he asked Tavalera, rapping on his fishbowl helmet.

Tavalera opened his eyes. Groggily, he asked, “Who the hell are you?”

Gaeta grinned. “Your guardian angel, man. I’m your frickin’ guardian angel.”

Holly watched the whole thing on Fritz’s portable display monitor. Standing with the other technicians, she saw Gaeta sail back into the airlock, carrying the limp astronaut in the powerful arms of his armored suit.

He saved him, Holly thought, her heart racing. He’s saved that man’s life.

While the technicians cycled the airlock Holly rushed to the wall phone by the inner hatch and called for emergency medical services. Surprise showed clearly on the medic’s face, even in the palm-sized screen of the wall phone, but he promised to have a team at the airlock in less than five minutes.

The inner hatch sighed open and Gaeta clumped through, still holding the injured, spacesuited man.

“Did you get it all down?” Gaeta asked, his voice booming through the suit’s amplifier. “Cameras all on?”

“Yes, yes,” said Fritz, sounding annoyed. “You will be on all the news nets, never fear.”

Three medics in white coveralls came pounding down the corridor to the airlock, trailed by a powered gurney and a crash wagon. They quickly got the injured man’s helmet off, slapped an oxygen mask over his face, pulled the suit torso off him and jabbed a hypo into his arm. Then they whisked him off toward the infirmary in the village.

Holly turned back to Gaeta, still in his massive suit.

“You saved his life,” she said, looking up at him. She could barely make out his face through the heavily tinted visor.

“He generated good publicity,” said Fritz, a little sharply.

Holly countered, “He risked his own life to save a man in danger.”

With an almost exasperated sigh, Fritz said, “He risked his life, yes. He also risked the suit, which is worth several hundred millions.” Glancing up at Gaeta he added, “We can always find another daredevil; replacing the suit would not be so easy. Or cheap.”

Gaeta laughed; it sounded like thunder echoing off the corridor’s metal walls. “C’mon, Fritz, let’s get back to the shop so I can get out of this tin can.”

Holly walked beside Gaeta, still clutching her container of chili in one hand. It was ice cold now, she knew. Gaeta plodded down the corridor like a ponderous robot in a bad vid, with Fritz on his other side. The technicians trailed along behind.

At last they reached the workshop and the technicians unsealed the hatch at the suit’s rear. Gaeta crawled out, stood up, and stretched his arms over his head languidly. Holly heard vertebrae pop.

“Damn, that feels good,” he said, smiling.

She stepped closer to him and saw that his clothes were drenched with perspiration. He smelled like old sweat socks.

Gaeta caught her hesitant expression. “Guess I oughtta shower, huh?”

Fritz was still unhappy with him. “An extravehicular excursion was not planned. You shouldn’t have done it. What if the propulsion unit had failed? It hasn’t been properly tested for flight activity.”

Gaeta grinned at him. “Fritz, everything worked fine. Don’t be such a gloomy fregado. Besides, I couldn’t leave the guy out there, he might have died.”

“Still, you had no right to—”

“Can it, Fritz. It’s over and no damage was done to the precious suit.” To Holly he said, “Wait there just a couple mins, kid. I gotta get outta these clothes and hit the shower.”

He ambled to the lavatory off at the workshop’s rear, whistling tunelessly. Holly watched the techs clambering over the suit, checking all its systems and shutting them down, one by one.

Gaeta came back, his hair glistening and slicked back, wearing a fresh set of coveralls.

“Now, where do we eat?” he asked. “I’m starving.”

Fritz glanced at his wristwatch. “The restaurants are all closed by now. We’ll have to eat in our quarters.”

Holly held up her plastic container. “I’ve got some chili, but it’s got to be reheated.”

“Chili! Great!” said Gaeta.

Glancing at Fritz and the other techs, Holly said, “There isn’t enough for all of us.”

Gaeta took her by the arm and started for the lab’s door. “There’s enough for us two, right? These other clowns can get their own suppers.”

Holly let him lead her out into the corridor without a glance back at the others. But in her mind she was saying, Malcolm’ll have to notice this!

Charles Nicholas was a chubby, chinless little man who had learned to wear clothes so that he somehow managed to look dapper even in a plain sports shirt and comfortable slacks. As the senior man on duty at the Communications office that evening, he had watched Gaeta’s heroics in fascination.

His assistant, Elinor, happened to be his wife. She was slightly taller than he, much slimmer, and wore clothes even better than he did. They always tried to have their working shifts together. They spent every waking moment together and, of course, slept in the same bed. Yet while Charles was openly admiring of Gaeta’s feat in rescuing the injured astronaut, Elinor was somewhat dubious.

“They might have staged the whole thing,” she said to her husband in her squeaky, strangely sexy voice.

Charles was rerunning the vid. “Staged it? How could they stage it? It was an accident. That kid could’ve died.”

“They could have set it up weeks in advance. For the publicity.”

“Nobody was watching except us and the EVA crew.”

“But they got it all on a chip, didn’t they? They’ll want to beam it to the nets, back Earthside.”

Charles shook his head. “They’ll have to get permission for that. They’ll have to ask Vyborg, he’s in charge of news releases.”

“He’ll okay it,” said Elinor. “All they have to do is ask him. He likes publicity.”

“Professor Wilmot doesn’t.”

“So they won’t ask Wilmot. They’ll ask Vyborg and he’ll okay it without bucking it upstairs.”

“You think so?”

“Bet you five credits,” Elinor replied.

Charles said nothing, thinking that Elinor was probably right. She usually was. Sure enough, a call came through from somebody named Von Helmholtz, who identified himself as Gaeta’s chief technician, asking permission to beam their vid of the rescue to the news nets on Earth and Selene. Charles routed the request to Vyborg’s private line. In less than ten minutes Vyborg called back, gladly granting permission.

“You owe me five,” Elinor said, grinning evily at Charles.

“I never bet,” he said.

“Makes no difference,” she said loftily. “It’s a moral victory for me.”

He tried to change the subject. “Have you made up your mind about what we should call our village?”

“Something better than Village C,” she said.

“I think we should name it after some great figure from literature. Cervantes, maybe. Or Shakespeare.”

“You know they both died the same year?”

“No.”

“Yes; 1616. You can look it up.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Bet five?”

“That I will bet on,” Charles said, sticking out his hand.

They shook on it, Elinor thinking, We’re married more than ten years and he still doesn’t realize that I only bet on sure things. She smiled kindly at her husband. It’s one of things that I love about him.

Holly and Gaeta were walking slowly along the gently climbing path that led toward her apartment building. It was well past midnight; the habitat was in its nighttime mode. The solar windows were closed and everything was dark except for the small lights set atop slim poles along the edges of the path, and the windows of some of the living quarters up ahead.

“Look up at the stars,” Gaeta said, stopping in the middle of the path.

“They’re not stars,” said Holly, “they’re lights from the land up there.”