“How’d you like a spate in the drive tubes?”

She came out of her fixed anthology of gripes and looked at him. Until now he had been another anonymous customer, another plug-in for the medmon. “Well, shit, sure I’d tumble to that, only—”

“I believe I might be able to get you on the crew.”

“Who says?”

“I do; I’ll take it up with Ted Landon.”

“You could do that? I mean, it’s tough to get—”

“Of course. I can see this is bloody tedious. Must be dreadful, particularly for folk like me, who’re just the same old thing, piping it through the medmon.”

“You know it.” She brightened and her thin face filled with interest. “You could maybe get me workin’ with that team? I mean, just cleanin’ the tubes would be, you know, interface solid state, lots of fieldwork and some lab stuff, too, I’d—”

“Fine. You seem the sort who should be set free of this.” He would have waved an arm in mute demonstration, but he made the attempt and found motor control gone. “Feel like a zombie.”

“Here, we’re nearly through.” She flipped a switch and he could move his right arm.

“Seems a pity I have to use up someone’s time to do this—the monitoring, the patching, so on.”

“Yeah. You should be able to handle it yourself. How come you’re not on self-serve medmon?”

“Ted’s being careful. Wants to monitor all the old scruffs like me.”

“Jeez. Just makes more work.”

“Precisely.”

“Frap, if you could get me into engine work—”

“Think you could put me over onto self-serve? I mean, it’s a dreadful waste.”

“I guess so.”

“Good. I’m not going to make a mistake where my own health is concerned, after all.”

She looked at him. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Thanks, very.”

He relaxed. Relays thumped and sensation returned to his chest and arms. He hated dealing with people the way he had just done, but at times there seemed no way out.

Nigel was in a good mood. He and Carlotta and Nikka had spent the evening playing sambau on a traditional board. He had lost heavily, giving up a month’s worth of household chore time to Nikka and some ship credit to Carlotta. Unfazed, he kept up a stream of bad puns and unlikely stories.

“What’s got into you?” Carlotta asked. “Been skoffing those disallowed drugs again?”

“Nothing so mundane.” He winked and thumped his chest “You see here a revitalized son of Britain.” He paused, weighing whether to go on. Then: “I got on self-serve.”

“Oh, good,” Nikka said mildly.

Carlotta said, “Translation: now nobody’ll know how fast he’s falling apart.”

“Correct! A man’s enzymes are not suitable points for snooping by program directors and similar riffraff.”

Carlotta asked, “How’d you do it?”

“Moment of opportunity. Talked the medmon attendant into it.”

“Um. The attendant’s got the right—decentralized authority and all …” Carlotta said, frowning. “But a simple systems review will catch it.”

“That’s where you come in.” Nigel watched her expectantly as she arched an eyebrow. “You’ve got plenty of comm-systems lackeys. Surely you can exempt me from their small-minded scrutiny.”

The two women glanced at each other and laughed. “So that’s—”

“The old razzmatazz,” he said lightly.

“Nigel, you want me to put information into the system that’s not true.”

“Truth is merely an opinion that has survived.”

“You mean faking data.”

“Right, sacred holy data.”

“You’re presuming on our, our—”

“Oh, come on. We’re not English schoolchildren, sitting about eating crumpets and reading When the Otters Came to Tea. This is for keeps.”

Nikka said softly, “You’re asking a lot, Nigel.”

“Love survives forever and all that, but vanity is less rugged. I can’t sit in this apartment scanning reports and doing nothing.” .

“If you’re not physically capable—”

“Don’t you see, that’s merely a hand stick to beat me with. Ted—”

“I can’t do something dishonest!” Carlotta cried.

“Dishonest? Seems to me its in what the Americans delightfully call a gray area.”

Nikka said slowly to Carlotta, “It would mean a lot to him. Otherwise he’ll lose his job.”

“Which means what?” she replied. “No more servo work on the surface.”

Nikka leaned forward earnestly. “That’s very important to him.”

“Him! Always him!”

“We have to support each other,” Nikka said stiffly.

“Mierda seca.”

“I believe that means—”

“What I mean is, we’re both revolving around him. Don’t you see that?”

Nikka blinked, her face immobile. “There is inevitably some inequality …”

“Sí, nobody can balance it all perfecto—but we’re, we’re competing for Nigel, and that’s wrong.”

“Yes,” Nigel said, “it is. I don’t see this as part of a contest, though. You—”

“I see it that way,” Carlotta said.

“And I don’t,” Nikka responded. “I’m simply saying that Nigel needs help.”

He said mildly, “I’d like to go down there in person. No chance they’ll allow that. So servo’d is the only way I’ll see anything of Isis.”

Carlotta looked at Nikka and doubt crowded into her face. Nigel watched. It was best to keep well out of things now.

Carlotta had come out of the sun-streaked decaying barrios of Los Angeles, carapaced in executive competence. She skated with womanly grace over the myriad details of a systems-analyst universe.

Her career had involved collisions with managers and bosses, job switches and long hours. The natural drift in a technical career was to loft into contract manager, then program director, then division head, buoyant in the modern managerial morass. She resisted. She wanted to keep close to the work.

In time she got a reputation as a terrific trou bleshooter who suffered fools not at all, particularly if they were bosses. She had her own standards and they had made her unapproachable. Until Lancer departed Earth orbit and started trials, she had been bottled up inside herself. Nikka had liked her from the start, though, and along with Nigel had slowly developed connections, getting the three of them through the early, uneasy years, and onto a plateau of comfortable intimacy.

But any three-way dynamic was stressed, inevitably, if only by constant comparison with the conventional two-person model, which looked so bloody easy. How much loyalty did their snug harbor command? Nigel wondered as he watched Carlotta.

“I … I suppose I might … for a while. Only while we’re in Isis space, though.”

“Great! Knew you’d see the advantage of an old sod not having to explain every gimpy leg.”

He was being falsely jovial, and they all knew it, but it gave the women a chance to sit back and listen to him as he rattled on about the surface work. Nigel studied Carlotta’s pensive eyes as he talked. She smiled reflexively at his jokes, but she glanced at Nikka now and then tentatively, as if seeking approval. He saw that she had made this compromise more for Nikka than for him. Very well. He had gone begging and had gotten what he asked. Best not to fret over the reasons.

—we’re competing for him, she had said. Perhaps so. He had to admit that he rather enjoyed that, had always been open to this sort of arrangement, as far back as California, with Shirley and Alexandria—

He abruptly jerked his head, stopping the thought. The women flicked puzzled looks at him. He made his face become casual, distant.

He didn’t like to think of his previous three-way tie, and how it had ended. Letting the past filter into the present that way was a bad idea. He had to try to see Nikka and Carlotta as they were, above a calculus dictated by experience.

Still, he could not ignore the other side of the equation. In counterpoint to competing for him, they in the bargain competed with him … for each other.

It worked. He kept his own medical records and was able to disguise temporary injuries or stillness. That kept him on the roster but didn’t help him get jobs he wanted. It was weeks before a good servod surface mission came along, and Nigel didn’t make the squad.