He used his forward rocket motor to kill his velocity relative to the little asteroid on which Dome 27 had gone up, then guided the scooter into the dome’s airlock with tiny, delicate bursts from his attitude jets. Ever so slowly, the scooter settled toward the floor of the airlock: the gravity of the asteroid (which was less than a mile across) seemed almost as much rumor as reality.

As soon as the outer airlock door closed and his gauges showed there was pressure outside, Johnson unsealed the scooter’s canopy. He didn’t have to wait long. Two people floated into the airlock: Liz Brock and a man who was helping her. He said, “We’ve loaded her up with as much codeine as she can hold, and then maybe a little more for luck.”

“Doesn’t help,” the electrolysis expert said. Her voice was slow and dragging. “Doesn’t help much, I mean. I feel like I’m drunk. I feel like my whole head’s weightless. But I still hurt.” She looked like it. She had lines at the corners of her mouth that hadn’t been there the last time Johnson saw her. Skin stretched tight across her cheekbones. She kept one hand on the right side of her belly, though she didn’t seem to notice she was doing it.

After she got into the scooter, Johnson fastened her safety harness when she didn’t do anything but fumble with it. Anxiously, he asked the fellow who’d helped her into the airlock, “She’s not throwing up, is she?”

“No,” the man answered, which relieved him: dealing with vomit in the scooter was the last thing he wanted to do.

He used his attitude jets to slide out of the airlock, then went back to the Lewis and Clark faster than he’d gone away. When he returned to the ship, Dr. Miriam Rosen was waiting at the inner airlock door to the shuttle bay. “Come on, Liz, let’s get you over to the X-ray machine,” she said. “We’ll see if we can figure out what’s going on in there.”

“All right.” Liz Brock sounded altogether indifferent. Maybe that was the codeine talking. Maybe, too, it was the pain talking.

Johnson wanted to tag along to find out whatever he could, but didn’t have the nerve. He watched the doctor lead away the electrolysis expert. Before long, he’d get answers through the grapevine.

And he did. Things came out piecemeal, as they had a way of doing. It wasn’t appendicitis. He heard that pretty soon. He didn’t hear what it was for three or four days. “Liver cancer?” he exclaimed to Walter Stone, who told him. “What can they do about that?”

“Not a damn thing,” the senior pilot said grimly. “Keep her from hurting too bad till she dies-that’s about the size of it.” He seldom showed much of what he thought, but he was visibly upset here. “Could have been you or me, too, just as easy. No rhyme or reason to this-only dumb luck.”

“Yeah.” Johnson felt lousy, too. He didn’t mind being an ambulance driver, but he hadn’t signed up to be, in essence, a hearse driver. And there were also other things to worry about. “This won’t hurt the plan too much, will it?”

Now Stone looked stern and determined. “Nothing hurts the plan, Glen. Nothing.”

“Good,” Glen Johnson said. “We’ve still got a lot of work to do.”