“Yeah.”

He flipped slowly and brought his head down into the hole. “Looks like it goes on.”

—Very far?—

“Dunno. Some runny brown stuff back in there. Looks wet.”

—Yuk. Leave it for the bio boys.—

“Check.” He righted himself. drifting lazily over a glinting field of steepled crystals. “Hey, it’s lunchtime.”

—Let’s eat here.—

“Could get good hot chow back at sleep-slot one.”

She grimaced. —And unsuit just to get inside? Roast pheasant with chestnut sauce wouldn’t be worth having to wipe up this mess an extra time.—

They tethered from the nominal ceiling and broke out food tubes. “Even self-heated, this stuff is pretty bad,” Carl grumbled.

—It’s worth it to me, just to be away from the others.—

“Yeah, know what you mean.”

Their ration was stored in their backpacks, heated there and available by sucking on a tube that emerged near the chin. Eating was not an elegant process. Lani had a curious natural daintiness that made her turn away for each gulp of the light, aromatic broth. She floated with her arms and knees tucked in gracefully, an economical cross-limbed Asian sitting posture, more elegant than the usual spacers crouch. Carl smiled. She was a hard worker, lean and lithe, with steady, remorseless energy.

—I enjoy getting off by ourselves.—

“Uh-huh.”

—Particularly in such a lovely, well… jeweled palace.—

“Right. Damn pretty.” Carl wondered vaguely about Virginia.

—Do we have to tell anyone about it?—

“Huh?”

—Couldn’t it be a place… just for us?—

“Uh, why?”

—To get away. We could come here and bask in the light and, well, have time to talk.—

Carl didn’t feel comfortable with this turn of the conversation. “Look, somebody’d find it fast enough. I mean, we’d have to leave a port exit in the insulation, to get back in here ourselves.”

—Not if we disguised it some way.—

Carl struggled for a reply, some technical reason why it wouldn’t work. “You mean, mark it as a pressure hatch? Something like that?”

—I suppose so.—She studied him intently but said no more.

After a long pause Carl spoke again. “Somebody’d notice. It’d be just like Samuelson to come by, check on us. Pop the seal and make the discovery for himself.”

—You think so?—

“Sure, he’s a straitlaced, um, type.” He had barely stopped himself from saying a straitlaced, by-the-book Ortho. Lani was an Ortho, too, but one of the good ones.

—I suppose we should report it to Planetary.—

“Yeah, Quiverian’ll blow his buttons.”

—Still… I would like to have, you know, a retreat.—

“Plenty of volume in Halley—almost three hundred cubic kilometers.” He couldn’t imagine wanting to spend time sitting in an ice-walled hole, even if it did get you away from the rest of the dozen people in the First Watch. Better to go outside if you wanted that. Have the whole solar system to look at.

—Well, perhaps later, then. We could do it all ourselves, without the mechs.—Lani looked at him with a doelike, expectant gaze. Carl glanced away nervously.

“I dunno. Might have to insulate it.”

Unless he could steer the talk to Virginia, he wanted to deflect conversation away from personal things, to keep their relationship friendly but strictly professional. He started talking about the insulation problem, how much worse it was here than on Encke.

Humans liked temperatures around three hundred degrees Absolute, but some of the frozen gases boiled away in a furious phase transformation around a hundred degrees. Even a casual brush from a skinsuit would bring an answering puff of gas. Maintaining that two-hundred-degree differential had meant developing flexible, layered insulators. The merest breath of air would evaporate the very walls from an uninsulated chamber.

There would always be some boiloff, so the tunnel system had to let the vapor escape toward the surface, where it vented to free space. At the same time, controlled harvesting of the ice was the key to the expedition’s success. The biosphere needed a flux of water, gases, even the metals and grit contaminating the comet. So some of the boiloff was recovered, filtered to keep the cyanide level down, and cycled back into the habitats.

Without a virtually labor-free system to supply fluids and gases, there would have to be more people awake and working. That, in turn, would put more demand on the biomatrix, which drove a spiral of costs. This was the fundamental reason why living inside Halley Core was essential. As usual, profit and loss had the final say.

Keeping locks and ports from leaking heat to the nearby ice was tricky, tedious labor that Carl disliked. He belabored this point for several minutes, not because he liked to gripe, but because he couldn’t think of any other way to keep control of the conversation. At last he wound down. There was a long, uncomfortable silence.

—I was hoping we could find some time alone together, —Lani said simply, though she blinked several times.

“I… yeah, I got that.”

—You have felt it?—

“Well…”

—I have known you three years now. Long enough to learn how special you are.—Her eyes were large, black, and as deep as a pool. She was being direct and clear and it obviously took an effort of will not to look away. He could see that she had rehearsed this.

“There… there isn’t anything so great about me. I like space work. It’s my life, same as you.”

—We have much in common.—

“Yes, we do.”

—In the long times we will spend on watch together perhaps…—Her gaze faltered.

“Look, I think a great deal of you, Lani.”

—I am happy of that.—But her face had lost its pensive, focused look. Her certainty was fading. And there isn’t a dammed thing I can do about it, he thought. There’s no way I can give her the answer she wants.

“But, I mean, I don’t… really… think of you that way.”

She stiffened. —Oh.—

She isn’t any better at talk like this than I am. She misses my hints. So I have to say it straight out and that hurts her. Damn! “You’re… a great teammate, sure as hell you are.”

Her long eyelashes batted several times. The thin, broad mouth twisted ruefully. —Thank you.—

“God, I don’t mean to… to brush you off or anything.”

—There is no need to be concerned. You are speaking the truth, as you must.—

“You really are attractive, too, I don’t mean anything like that.”

Now that he thought about it, she was quite good-looking. Serving a sixteen-month watch, she’s thinking about pairing off. They all would be. Still, he simply had not thought of her as more than a co-worker. Why?

Somehow, she simply wasn’t his type. No instant attraction, no zip.

Or was that a habit he had picked up—rejecting nearly all women if he didn’t get a buzz off them immediately? Carl avoided Lani’s gaze, took a draw on his feed tube. Even on his Earthside holidays, he had always been careful to keep affairs sharply defined. Groundlings liked the pizzazz of space; there were plenty of groupies. It was easy to let them know he was interested in two weeks of sex and laughs and fun in the sun, period. Sometimes he’d been tempted to keep a woman’s number, give her a ring next time he was down… but once back in orbit cool ambition ruled. He never called.

Opportunity favored the prepared mind, as the old cliché had it, but opportunity in space also favored the uncommitted soul. If a long mission came around, those with family ties found it hard to go. And the Psychological Review Board took that into account, lowered your rating. They claimed otherwise, but everybody knew the truth. All that went into his calculations. And sure enough, the big chance—Halley—had come around, vindicating his strategy.

Then too, Lani was an Ortho. Likes should marry likes.

Virginia, now, she was smart, sexy, and a Percell. Plenty of zip there. Best to stick to your own kind. Except for holidays Earthside, he had followed that policy ever since his teenage randiness wore off and he had time to actually think. There were enough Percell women in space to keep him occupied.