"But I just found you again! It isn't fair, not so soon."

"I'll be back," he promised. "You've always meant to go out with Valkyrie. How can I go with you without experience? Have you anyone else you can trust with this?"

"No."

"I'll be back. Soon."

Ten gravities for ninety seconds is easily within the tolerance of a healthy man; but Aeneas had no wish to prolong the experience. He was laid flat on his back in a nylon web, encased in baggy reflective coverall and under that a tight garment resembling a diver's wet suit. The neckseal and helmet were uncomfortable, and it was an effort to exhale against the higher pressures in the helmet.

He had thought waiting for the launch the most unpleasant experience he'd ever had: lying awkwardly on his back, with no control of his destiny, enclosed in steel; then the laser cut in.

He weighed far too much. His guts ached. Like the worst case of indigestion imaginable, he thought. There was no way to estimate the time. He tried counting, but it was too difficult, and he lost count somewhere. Surely he had been at eighty seconds? He started over again.

There was noise, the loud, almost musical two-hundred-fifty-cycle tone of the explosions produced as the laser heated the air in the chamber under him- how close? he wondered. That great stabbing beam that could slice through metal aimed directly at him; he squirmed against the high gravity, and the effort was torture.

The noises changed. The explosion tone drifted down the scale. He was beyond the atmosphere, and the laser was boiling off material from the thrust chamber, reaching closer and closer to him Silence. The crushing weight was gone. He was falling endlessly, with no way to know. Was he in orbit? Or was he plunging downward to his doom? He closed his eyes to wait, and then he felt he was truly falling, with the sick sensations of a boat in motion-he opened his eyes again to orient himself in the capsule.

Will they pick me up? There was to reason they shouldn't. New crewmen arrived weekly, and he was merely another. He listened for a voice, a signal, anything "Hullo, laddie. All right in there?"

Aeneas grabbed for the microphone and pressed the talk switch. "That was one hell of a ride." He fought for control of his voice. "I think I'm all right now."

"Except that you feel like letting the world's record fart, right?" the voice said. "Go ahead. You'll feel better."

He tried it. It helped.

"Hang on there, mate. Be alongside in a minute," the voice said. It took less than that. There were clunks and thuds, and the capsule jarred with some impact. " Righto. You're new in this game, they tell me."

"Yes, very," Aeneas replied.

"Right. So we'll start by testing your suit. I've got a bottle attached to the outlet, crack the atmosphere evac valve a half turn, there's a good chap."

A short moment of panic. The capsule held half an atmosphere. When the capsule was evacuated, only his helmet above the neckseal would contain pressure. The tight garment he wore was supposed to reinforce his own skin so that it would be able to hold the pressure differences, and it had worked in the ground training chamber; but there had been physicians waiting there-. Aeneas did as he was told. As the air hissed out, the pressure in his guts returned, but worse.

"Fart again, lad. How's the breathing?"

"All right." He carried out the instruction. Again it helped. It was hard work to breathe out, but there didn't seem to be any problems.

"Good. Open the valve the rest of the way and let's get you out of there." Pumps whirred, and he felt more sensations of internal pressure. The wetsuit was very tight around every part of his body. His heart pounded loudly, and he felt dizzy.

"Now unstrap and open the hatch."

The steel trap around him seemed comfortable and safe compared to what he might find outside. Aeneas gingerly unfastened the straps that held him to the D-frame-webbed bunk and immediately floated free. It took longer than he had thought it would to orient himself and get his feet braced so that he could turn the latches on the hatchway, but Aeneas was surprised to find that he had no trouble thinking of what had been the capsule "wall" as now "down" and the hatchway as "up." The falling sensation vanished as soon as there was something to do.

The man outside hadn't mentioned the tether line on its reel on his belt, but the ground briefing had stressed that before the hatch was open he should clip the tether to the ring by the hatchway. That took fumbling, but he managed it.

The hatch opened smoothly and he put his head outside. There was brilliant sunshine everywhere, and he was thankful for the sun visor and tinted faceplate of his helmet. Crisp shadows, Earth an enormous bulging circular mass of white clouds and blue sea, not below but just there; stars brilliant when he looked away from Earth and sun… he had seen the pictures a thousand times. It wasn't the same at all.

He used his hands to rotate himself. There was an odd vehicle about seven meters long at the aft end of the capsule. Its nose was shoved into the capsule thrust chamber, and it reminded Aeneas of dogs. An open framework of thin aluminum bars with-saddles? But why not? A mirrored helmet atop bulky metallic shining coveralls perched on the nearest saddle. Aeneas couldn't see a face inside it.

"One of the ones who listen, eh?" the voice said, "Jolly good. Now you see that line above you?" Aeneas looked up and saw an ordinary nylon rope. It seemed to be a solid rod. "Get hold of it and clip it on your belt. After that, reach inside and unclip your own line. And don't be slow about it." There was a pleasant note to the voice, but it expected to be obeyed.

Aeneas complied quickly. He was reeled very slowly toward the spindly personnel carrier, and with a lot of difficulty and help from the pilot managed to get astride one of the saddles. His feet slipped easily under loops in the thing's "floor"-Aeneas supplied the quotation marks because there was only a minuscule grillwork there-and a safety harness went around his waist.

Now that he was in the carrier, he could look around, and he did unashamedly.

The launch crew had cut it pretty fine, Aeneas told himself. Heimdall floated less than a kilometer away.

It looked like a junkyard. Two large curved cylindrical sausages on the ends of cables rotated around each other at a distance of nearly half a kilometer. The sausages had projections at crazy angles: solar cell arrays, shields, heat dissipation projectors connected to the station by piping, antennae. There was an inflated tube running from each cylinder to an amorphous blob between them, and part of the center structure rotated with the cylinders. Most of the center did not rotate.

Other junk-the pregnant machine-gun shapes of supply capsules, cylinders of all sizes, inflated structures of no recognizable shape-floated without apparent attachment near the axis of spin. Solar panels and orange sunshades lay everywhere. Heimdall had no real form.

"Quite a sight, isn't it?" his companion said. "Name's Kit Penrose, old chap. Officer in charge of everything else. Weight control, atmosphere recycling, support systems, all the marvy things like that. Also the taxi driver. Who're you?"

" MacKenzie."

"Oh, Christ, a bloody Scot. You don't sound one. Engineer?"

Aeneas shrugged, realized the gesture couldn't be seen, and said, "Like you. Little of everything, I suppose. And I'm American."

"American, en? Whoever or whatever you are, the ground crew seemed worried about you. Well, you're OK. Here we go." He did something to the panel in front of him and the spindly structure moved slowly toward the satellite. His capsule was still attached at the nose. "We'll just take this along, eh?" Penrose said.

"Yes, my kit's in there." And I may need everything in it, Aeneas thought.