Space Lash

1

“It's not very comfortable footing, but at least you can't fall off.”

Even through the helmet phones, Silbert's voice carried an edge that Bresnahan felt sure was amused contempt. The younger man saw no point in trying to hide his fear; he was no veteran of space and knew that it would be silly to pretend otherwise.

“My mind admits that, but my stomach isn't so sure,” he replied. “It can't decide whether things will be better when I can't see so far, or whether I should just give up and take a running dive back there.”

His metal-clad arm gestured toward the station and its comfortable spin hanging half a mile away. Technically the wheel-shaped structure in its synchronous orbit was above the two men, but it took careful observing to decide which way was really “up.”

“You wouldn't make it,” Silbert replied. “If you had solid footing for a jump you might get that far, since twenty feet a second would take you away from here permanently. But speed and velocity are two different animals. I wouldn't trust even myself to make such a jump in the right direction — and I know the vectors better than you do by a long shot. Which way would you jump? Right at the station? Or ahead of it, or behind it? And which is ahead and which is behind? Do you know?”

“I know which is ahead, since I can see it move against the star back-ground, but I wouldn't know which way to jump. I think it should be ahead, since the rotation of this overgrown raindrop gives us less linear speed than the station's orbit; but I wouldn't know how far ahead,” Silbert said.

“Good for you.” Bresnahan noted what he hoped was approval in the spaceman's tone as well as in his words. “You're right as far as you committed yourself, and I wouldn't dare go any farther myself. In any case, jumping off this stuff is a losing game.”

“I can believe that. Just walking on it makes me feel as though I were usurping a Biblical prerogative.”

The computerman's arm waved again, this time at the surface underfoot, and he tried to stamp on it at the same moment. The latter gesture produced odd results. The material, which looked a little like clear jelly, gave under the boot but bulged upward all around it. The bulge moved outward very slowly in all directions, the star patterns reflected in the surface writhing as it passed. As the bulge's radius increased its height lessened, as with a ripple spreading on a pond. It might have been an ultra-slow motion picture of such a ripple, except that it did not travel far enough. It died out less than two yards from Bresnahan's foot, though it took well over a minute to get that far.

“Yeah, I know what you mean. Walking on water was kind of a divine gift, wasn't it? Well, you can always remember we're not right on the water. There's the pressure film, even if you can't see it.”

“That's so. Well, let's get on to the lock. Being inside this thing can't be much worse than walking around on its surface, and I have a report to make up.” Silbert started walking again at this request, though the jelly-like response of the water to his footfalls made the resulting gait rather odd. He kept talking as he led the way.

“How come that friend of yours can't come down from the station and look things over for himself? Why should you have to give the dope to him secondhand? Can't he take weightlessness?”

“Better than I can, I suspect,” replied Bresnahan, “but he's not my friend. He's my boss, and pays the bills. Mine not to reason why, mine but to act or fry. He already knows as much as most people do about Raindrop, here. What more he expects to get from me I'm not sure. I just hope that what I can find to tell him makes him happy. I take it this is the lock.”

They had reached a disk of metal some thirty feet in diameter, projecting about two feet from the surface of the satellite. It continued below the surface for a distance which refraction made hard to estimate.

Its water line was marked by a ring of black, rubbery-looking material where the pressure film adhered to it. The men had been quite close to it when they landed on Raindrop's surface a few minutes before, but it is hard to make out landscape details on a water surface under a black, star-filled sky; the reflection underfoot is not very different from the original above. A five-mile radius of curvature puts the reflected images far enough down so that human depth perception is no help.

Waves betrayed themselves, of course, and might have shown the lock's location — but under a gravitational acceleration of about a tenth of an inch per second squared, the surface waves raised by spacesuit boots traveled much more slowly than the men who wore them. And with their high internal energy losses they didn't get far enough to be useful.

As a result, Bresnahan had not realized that the lock was at hand until they were almost upon it. Even Silbert, who had known about where they would land and could orient himself with Raindrop's rotation axis by celestial reference features, did not actually see it until it was only a few yards away.

“This is the place, all right,” he acknowledged. “That little plate near the edge is the control panel. We'll use the manhole; no need to open the main hatch as we do when it's a matter of cargo.”

He bent over — slowly enough to keep his feet on the metal — and punched one of the buttons on the panel he had pointed out. A tiny light promptly flashed green, and he punched a second button.

A yard-square trap opened inward, revealing the top of a ladder. Silbert seized the highest rung and pulled himself through the opening head first — when a man weighs less than an ounce in full space panoply it makes little real difference when he elects to traverse a ladder head downward. Bresnahan followed and found himself in a cylindrical chamber which took up most of the inside of the lock structure. It could now be seen that this must extend some forty feet into the body of Raindrop.

At the inner end of the compartment, where curved and flat walls met, a smaller chamber was partitioned off. Silbert dove in this direction.

“This is a personnel lock,” he remarked. “We'll use it; it saves flooding the whole chamber.”

“We can use ordinary spacesuits?”

“Might as well. If we were going to stay long enough for real work, we'd change — there is local equipment in those cabinets along the wall. Spacesuits are safe enough, but pretty clumsy when it comes to fine manipulation.”

“For me, they're clumsy for anything at all.”

“Well, we can change if you want; but I understood that this was to be a fairly quick visit, and that you were to get a report back pronto. Or did I misread the tone your friend Weisanen was using?”

“I guess you didn't, at that. We'll go as we are. It still sounds queer to go swimming in a spacesuit.”

“No queerer than walking on water. Come on, the little lock will hold both of us.”

The spaceman opened the door manually — there seemed to be no power controls involved — and the two entered a room some five feet square and seven high. Operation of the lock seemed simple; Silbert closed the door they had just used and turned a latch to secure it, then opened another manual valve on the other side of the chamber. A jet of water squirted in and filled the space in half a minute. Then he simply opened a door in the same wall with the valve, and the spacesuited figures swam out.

This was not as bad as walking on what had seemed like nothingness. Bresnahan was a good swimmer and experienced free diver, and was used to being suspended in a medium where one couldn't see very far.

The water was clear, though not as clear as that sometimes found in Earth's tropical seas. There was no easy way to tell just how far vision could reach, since nothing familiar and of known size was in view except for the lock they had just quitted. There were no fishes — Raindrop's owners were still debating the advisability of establishing them there — and none of the plant life was familiar, at least to Bresnahan. He knew that the big sphere of water had been seeded by “artificial” life forms — algae and bacteria whose genetic patterns had been altered to let them live in a “sea” so different from Earth's.

2

Raindrop was composed of the nuclei of several small comets, or rather what was left of those nuclei after some of their mass had been used in reaction motors to put them into orbit about the Earth. They had been encased in a polymer film sprayed on to form a pressure seal, and then melted by solar energy, concentrated by giant foil mirrors.

Traces of the original wrapping were still around, but its function had been replaced by one of the first tailored life forms to be established after the mass was liquid. This was a modification of one of the gelatin-capsule algae, which now encased all of Raindrop in a microscopically thin film able to heal itself after small meteoroid punctures, and strong enough to maintain about a quarter of an atmosphere's pressure on the contents. The biological engineer who had done that tailoring job still regarded it as his professional masterpiece.

The methane present in the original comet material had been oxidized by other bacteria to water and carbon dioxide, the oxygen of course coming from normal photosynthesis. A good deal of the ammonia was still present, and furnished the principal reason why genetic tailoring was still necessary on life forms being transplanted to the weightless aquarium.

The men were drifting very slowly away from the lock, though they had stopped swimming, and the younger one asked, “How do we find our way back here if we get out of sight?”

“The best trick is not to get out of sight. Unless you want to examine the core, which I've never done, you'll see everything there is to see right here. There is sonic and magnetic gear — homing equipment — in your suit if you need it, though I haven't checked you out on its use. You'd better stay with me. I can probably show you what's needed. Just what points do you think Weisanen wants covered?”

“Well, he knows the general physical setup — temperature, rotation, general current pattern, the nature of the skin. He knows what's been planted here at various times; but it's hard to keep up to date on what's evolved since. These tailored life forms aren't very stable toward mutation influences, and a new-stocked aquarium isn't a very stable ecological environment. He'll want to know what's here now in the way of usable plants, I suppose. You know the Agency sold Raindrop to a private concern after the last election. The new owners seem willing to grant the importance of basic research, but they would sort of like a profit to report to the stockholders as well.”

“Amen. I'm a stockholder.”

“Oh? Well, it does cost something to keep supply ships coming up here, and…"

“True enough. Then this Weisanen character represents the new owners? I wonder if I should think of him as my boss or my employee.”

“I think he is one of them.”

“Hmph. No wonder.”

“No wonder what?”

“He and his wife are the first people I ever knew to treat a space flight like a run in a private yacht. I suppose that someone who could buy Raindrop wouldn't be bothered by a little expense like a private Phoenix rocket.”

“I suppose not. Of course, it isn't as bad as it was in the days of chemical motors, when it took a big commercial concern or a fair-sized government to launch a manned spaceship.”

“Maybe not; but with fourteen billion people living on Earth, it's a little unusual to find a really rich individual, in the old Ford-Carnegie tradition. Most big concerns are owned by several million people like me.”

“Well, I guess Weisanen owns a bigger piece of Raindrop than you do. Anyway, he's my boss, whether he's yours or not, and he wants a report from me, and I can't see much to report on. What life is there in this place besides the stuff forming the surface skin?”

“Oh, lots. You just aren't looking carefully enough. A lot of it is microscopic, of course; there are fairly ordinary varieties of pond-scum drifting all around us. They're the main reason we can see only a couple of hundred yards, and they carry on most of the photosynthesis. There are lots of non-photosynthetic organisms — bacteria — producing carbon dioxide just as in any balanced ecology on Earth, though this place is a long way from being balanced. Sometimes the algae get so thick you can't see twenty feet, sometimes the bacteria get the upper hand. The balance keeps hunting around even when no new forms are appearing or being introduced. We probably brought a few new bacteria in with us on our suits just now; whether any of them can survive with the ammonia content of Raindrop this high I don't know, but if so the ecology will get another nudge.

“There are lots of larger plants, too — mostly modifications of the big seaweeds of Earth's oceans. The lock behind us is overgrown with them, as you can see — you can look more closely as we go back — and a lot of them grow in contact with the outer skin, where the light is best. Quite a few are free-floating, but of course selection works fast on those. There are slow convection currents, because of Raindrop's size and rotation, which exchange water between the illuminated outer regions and the darkness inside. Free-floating weeds either adapt to long periods of darkness or die out fast. Since there is a good deal of hard radiation near the surface, there is also quite a lot of unplanned mutation over and above the regular gene-tailoring products we are constantly adding to the pot. And since most of the organisms here have short life spans, evolution goes on rapidly.”

“Weisanen knows all that perfectly well,” replied Bresnahan. “What he seems to want is a snapshot — a report on just what the present spectrum of life forms is like.”

“I've summed it up. Anything more detailed would be wrong next week. You can look at the stuff around us — there. Those filaments which just tangled themselves on your equipment clip are a good example, and there are some bigger ones if you want there just in reach. It would take microscopic study to show how they differ from the ones you'd have gotten a week ago or a year ago, but they're different. There will be no spectacular change unless so much growth builds up inside the surface film that the sunlight is cut down seriously. Then the selection factors will change and a radically new batch — probably of scavenger fungi — will develop and spread. It's happened before. We've gone through at least four cycles of that sort in the three years I've worked here.”

Bresnahan frowned thoughtfully, though the facial gesture was not very meaningful inside a space helmet.

“I can see where this isn't going to be much of a report,” he remarked.

“It would have made more sense if you'd brought a plankton net and some vacuum jars and brought up specimens for him to look over himself,” replied Silbert. “Or wouldn't they mean anything to him? Is he a biologist or just a manager?”

“I couldn't say.”

“How come? How can you work for him and not know that much?”

“Working for him is something new. I've worked for Raindrop ever since I started working, but I didn't meet Weisanen until three weeks ago.

I haven't been with him more than two or three hours' total time since. I haven't talked with him during those hours; I've listened while he told me what to do.”

“You mean he's one of those high-handed types? What's your job, anyway?”

“There's nothing tough or unpleasant about him; he's just the boss. I'm a computer specialist — programming and maintenance, or was until he picked me to come up here to Raindrop with him and his wife. What my job here will be, you'll have to get from him. There are computers in the station, I noticed, but nothing calling for full-time work from anyone. Why he picked me I can't guess. I should think, though, that he'd have asked you rather than me to make this report, since whatever I am I'm no biologist.”

“Well, neither am I. I just work here.”

Bresnahan stared in astonishment.

“Not a biologist? But aren't you in charge of this place? Haven't you been the local director for three years, in charge of planting the new life forms that were sent up, and reporting what happened to them, and how Raindrop was holding together, and all—?”

“All is right. I'm the bo's'un tight and the midship mite and the crew of the captain's gig. I'm the boss because I'm the only one here full time; but that doesn't make me a biologist. I got this job because I have a decently high zero-gee tolerance and had had experience in space. I was a space-station handyman before I came here.”

“Then what sort of flumdiddle is going on? Isn't there a professional anywhere in this organization? I've heard stories of the army using biochemists for painters and bricklayers for clerks, but I never really believed them. Besides, Raindrop doesn't belong to an army — it isn't even a government outfit any more. It's being run by a private outfit which I assumed was hoping to make a profit out of it. Why in blazes is there no biologist at what has always been supposed to be a biological research station, devoted to finding new ways of making fourteen billion people like what little there is to eat?”

Silbert's shrug was just discernible from outside his suit.

“No one ever confided in me,” he replied. “I was given a pretty good briefing on the job when I first took it over, but that didn't include an extension course in biology or biophysics. As far as I can tell they've been satisfied with what I've done. Whatever they wanted out of Raindrop doesn't seem to call for high-caliber professionals on the spot. I inspect to make sure no leaks too big for the algae to handle show up, I plant any new life forms they send up to be established here, and I collect regularly and send back to Earth the samples of what life there is. The last general sampling was nearly a month ago, and another is due in a few days. Maybe your boss could make do with that data — or if you like I can offer to make the regular sampling run right away instead of at the scheduled time. After all, he may be my boss too instead of the other way around, so I should be reporting to him.”

Bresnahan thought for a moment.

“All right,” he said. “I'm in no position to make either a decent collection or a decent report, as things stand. Let's go back to the station, tell him what's what, and let him decide what he does want. Maybe it's just a case of a new boss not knowing the ropes and trying to find out.”

“I'd question that, somehow, but can't think of anything better to do. Come on.”

Silbert swam back toward the lock from which they had emerged only a few minutes before. They had drifted far enough from it in that time so that its details had faded to a greenish blur, but there was no trouble locating the big cylinder. The door they had used was still open.

Silbert pulled himself through, lent Bresnahan a hand in doing likewise, closed the portal, and started a small pump. The pressure head was only the quarter atmosphere maintained by the tension of the alga skin, and emptying the chamber of water did not take long. The principal delay was caused by Bresnahan's failure to stand perfectly still; with gravity only a little over one five-thousandths Earth normal, it didn't take much disturbance to slosh some water away from the bottom of the lock where the pump intake was located.

Silbert waited for some of it to settle, but lacked the patience to wait for it all. When he opened the door into the larger lock chamber the men were accompanied through it by several large globules of boiling liquid.

“Wasteful, but helps a bit,” remarked the spaceman as he opened the outside portal and the two were wafted through it by the escaping vapor. “Watch out — hang on there. You don't have escape velocity, but you'd be quite a while getting back to the surface if you let yourself blow away.” He seized a convenient limb of Bresnahan's space armor as the younger man drifted by, and since he was well anchored himself to the top rung of the ladder was able to arrest the other's flight. Carefully they stepped away from the hatch, Silbert touching the closing button with one toe as he passed it, and looked for the orbiting station.

This, of course, was directly overhead. The same temptation which Bresnahan had felt earlier to make a jump for it came back with some force; but Silbert had a safer technique.

He took a small tube equipped with peep-sights from the equipment clip at his side and aimed it very carefully at the projecting hub of the wheel-shaped station — the only part of the hub visible, since the station's equator was parallel to that of Raindrop and the structure was therefore edge-on to them. A bright yellow glow from the target produced a grunt of satisfaction from Silbert, and he fingered a button on the tube. The laser beam, invisible in the surrounding vacuum, flicked on and off in a precisely timed signal pattern which was reported faithfully by the source-return mirror at the target. Another response was almost as quick.

3

A faintly glowing object emerged from the hub and drifted rapidly toward Raindrop, though not quite toward the men. Its details were not clear at first, but as it approached it began to look more and more like a luminous cobweb.

“Just a lattice of thin rods, doped with luminous paint for spotting and launched from the station by a spring gun,” explained Silbert. “The line connecting it with the station isn't painted, and is just long enough to stop the grid about fifty feet from the water. It's launched with a small backward component relative to the station's orbit, and when the line stops it it will drift toward us. Jump for it when I give the word; you can't miss.”

Bresnahan was not as certain about the last statement as his companion seemed to be, but braced himself anyway. As the glowing spiderweb approached, however, he saw it was over a hundred feet across and realized that even he could jump straight enough to make contact. When Silbert gave the word, he sprang without hesitation.

He had the usual moment of nausea and disorientation as he crossed the few yards to his target. Lacking experience, he had not “balanced” his jump perfectly and as a result made a couple of somersaults en route. This caused him to lose track of his visual reference points, and with gravity already lacking he suffered the moment of near-panic which so many student pilots had experienced before him. Contact with one of the thin rods restored him, however; he gripped it frantically and was himself again.

Silbert arrived a split second later and took charge of the remaining maneuvers. These consisted of collapsing the “spiderweb” — a matter of half a minute, in spite of its apparent complexity, because of the ingenuity of its jointing — and then starting his companion hand-over-hand along the nearly invisible cord leading back to the station. The climb called for more coordination than was at first evident; the spaceman had to catch his less experienced companion twice as the latter missed his grip for the line.

Had Silbert been going first the situation might have been serious. As it was, an extra tug on the rope enabled him to catch up each time with the helpless victim of basic physics. After the second accident, the guide spoke.

“All right, don't climb any more. We're going a little too fast as it is. Just hold onto the rope now and to me when I give the word. The closing maneuver is a bit tricky, and it wouldn't be practical to try to teach you the tricks on the spot and first time around.”

Silbert did have quite a problem. The initial velocities of the two men in their jumps for the spiderweb had not, of course, been the correct ones to intercept the station — if it had been practical to count on their being so, the web would have been superfluous. The web's own mass was less than fifty pounds, which had not done much to the sum of those vectors as it absorbed its share of the men's momentum. Consequently, the men had an angular velocity with respect to the station, and they were approaching the latter.

To a seventeenth century mathematician, conservation of angular momentum may have been an abstract concept, but to Silbert it was an item of very real, practical, everyday experience — just as the orbit of a comet is little more than a set of numbers to an astronomer while the orbit of a baseball is something quite different to an outfielder. The problem this time was even worse than usual, partly because of Bresnahan's mass and still more because of his inexperience.

As the two approached the station their sidewise motion became evident even to Bresnahan. He judged that they would strike near the rim of the spinning structure, if they hit it at all, but Silbert had other ideas.

Changing the direction of the spin axis by landing at the hub was one thing — a very minor one. Changing the rate of spin by meeting the edge could be a major nuisance, since much of the apparatus inside was built on and for Earth and had Earth's gravity taken for granted in its operation. Silbert therefore had no intention of making contact anywhere but at one of the “poles” of the station. He was rather in the situation of a yo-yo whose string is winding up on the operator's finger; but he could exercise a little control by climbing as rapidly as possible “up” the cord toward the structure or allowing himself to slide “down” away from it.

He had had plenty of experience, but he was several minutes playing them into a final collision with the entry valve, so close to the center of mass of the station that the impact could produce only a tiny precession effect. Most of its result was a change in the wheel's orbit about Raindrop, and the whole maneuver had taken such a small fraction of an orbital period that this effect nearly offset that produced when they had started up the rope.

“Every so often,” remarked the spaceman as he opened the air lock, “we have to make a small correction in the station orbit; the disturbances set up by entering and leaving get it out of step with Raindrop's rotation. Sometimes I wonder whether it's worth the trouble to keep the two synchronized.”

“If the station drifted very far from the lock below, you'd have to jump from the liquid surface, which might be awkward,” pointed out the younger man as the closing hatch cut off the starlight.

“That's true,” admitted the other as he snapped a switch and air started hissing into the small lock chamber. “I suppose there's something to be said for tradition at that. There's the safety light” — as a green spot suddenly glowed on the wall— “so you can open up your suit whenever you like. Lockers are in the next room. But you arrived through this lock, didn't you?”

“Right. I know my way from here.”

Five minutes later the two men, divested of spacesuits, had “descended” to the rim of the station where weight was normal. Most of this part of the structure was devoted to living space which had never been used, though there were laboratory and communication rooms as well. The living space had been explained to Bresnahan, when he first saw it, as why Silbert was willing to spend three quarters of his time alone at a rather boring job a hundred thousand miles from the nearest company. Earth was badly crowded; not one man in a million had either as much space or as much privacy.

Weisanen and his wife had taken over a set of equally sumptuous rooms on the opposite side of the rim, and had been in the process of setting up housekeeping when the two employees had descended to Raindrop's surface a short time before. This had been less than an hour after their arrival with Bresnahan on the shuttle from Earth; Weisanen had wasted no time in issuing his first orders. The two men were prepared to find every sign of disorder when the door to the “headquarters” section opened in response to Silbert's touch on the annunciator, but they had reckoned without Mrs. Weisanen.

At their employer's invitation, they entered a room which might have been lived in for a year instead of an hour. The furniture was good, comfortable, well arranged, and present in quantity which would have meant a visible bulge in a nation's space research budget just for the fuel to lift it away from the earth in the chemical fuel days.

Either the Weisanens felt strongly about maintaining the home atmosphere even when visiting, or they planned to stay on the station for quite a while.

The official himself was surprisingly young, according to both Bresnahan's and Silbert's preconceived notions of a magnate. He could hardly have been thirty, and might have been five years younger. He matched Bresnahan's five feet ten of height and looked about the same weight; but while the computerman regarded himself as being in good physical shape, he had to admit the other was far more muscular. Even Silbert's six feet five of height and far from insignificant frame seemed somehow inadequate beside Weisanen's.

“Come in, gentlemen. We felt your return a few minutes ago! I take it you have something to report, Mr. Bresnahan. We did not expect you back quite so soon.” Weisanen drew further back from the door and waved the others past him. “What can you tell us?” He closed the door and indicated armchairs. Bresnahan remained on his feet, uneasy at the incompleteness of his report; Silbert sank into the nearest chair. The official also remained standing. “Well, Mr. Bresnahan?”

“I have little — practically nothing — to report, as far as detailed, quantitative information is concerned,” the computer man took the plunge.

“We stayed inside the Raindrop only a few minutes, and it was evident that most of the detailed search for life specimens would have to be made with a microscope. I hadn't planned the trip at all effectively. I now understand that there is plankton-collecting apparatus here which Mr. Silbert uses regularly and which should have been taken along if I were to get anything worth showing to you.”

Weisanen's face showed no change in its expression of courteous interest. “That is quite all right,” he said. “I should have made clear that I wanted, not a detailed biological report, but a physical description by a non-specialist of what it is like subjectively down there. I should imagine that you received an adequate impression even during your short stay. Can you give such a description?”

Bresnahan's worried expression disappeared, and he nodded affirmatively.

“Yes, sir. I'm not a literary expert, but I can tell what I saw…"

“Good. One moment, please.” Weisanen turned toward another door and raised his voice. “Brenda, will you come in here, please? You should hear this.”

Silbert got to his feet just as the woman entered, and both men acknowledged her greeting.

Brenda Weisanen was a full head shorter than her husband. She was wearing a robe of the sort which might have been seen on any housewife expecting company; neither man was competent to guess whether it was worth fifty dollars or ten times that. The garment tended to focus attention on her face, which would have received it anyway. Her hair and eye-brows were jet black, the eyes themselves gray, and rounded cheeks and chin made the features look almost childish, though she was actually little younger than her husband. She seated herself promptly, saying no more than convention demanded, and the men followed suit.

“Please go on, Mr. Bresnahan,” Weisanen said. “My wife and I are both greatly interested, for reasons which will be clear shortly.”

Bresnahan had a good visual memory, and it was easy for him to comply. He gave a good verbal picture of the greenish, sunlit haze that had surrounded him — sunlight differing from that seen under an Earthly lake, which ripples and dances as the waves above refract it. He spoke of the silence, which had moved him to keep talking because it was the “quietest” silence he had known, and “didn't sound right.”

He was interrupted by Silbert at this point; the spaceman explained that Raindrop was not always that quiet. Even a grain-of-dust meteoroid striking the skin set up a shock wave audible throughout the great sphere; and if one were close enough to the site of collision, the hiss of water boiling out through the hole for the minute or two needed for the skin to heal could also be heard. It was rather unusual to be able to spend even the short time they had just had inside the satellite without hearing either of these sounds.

Bresnahan nodded thanks as the other fell silent, and took up the thread of his own description once more. He closed with the only real feature he had seen to describe — the weed-grown cylinder of the water-to-space lock, hanging in greenish emptiness above the dead-black void which reached down to Raindrop's core. He was almost poetical in spots.

The Weisanens listened in flattering silence until he had done, and remained silent for some seconds thereafter. Then the man spoke.

“Thank you, Mr. Bresnahan. That was just what we wanted.” He turned to his wife. “How does that sound to you, dear?”

The dark head nodded slowly, its gray eyes fastened on some point far beyond the metal walls.

“It's fascinating,” she said slowly. “Not just the way we pictured it, of course, and there will be changes anyway, but certainly worth seeing. Of course they didn't go down to the core, and wouldn't have seen much if they had. I suppose there is no life, and certainly no natural light, down there.”

“There is life,” replied Silbert. “Non-photosynthetic, of course, but bacteria and larger fungi which live on organic matter swept there from the sunlit parts. I don't know whether anything is actually growing on the core, since I've never gone in that far, but free-floating varieties get carried up to my nets. A good many of those have gone to Earth, along with their descriptions, in my regular reports.”

“I know. I've read those reports very carefully, Mr. Silbert,” replied Weisanen.

“Just the same, one of our first jobs must be to survey that core,” his wife said thoughtfully. “Much of what has to be done will depend on conditions down there.”

“Right.” Her husband stood up. “We thank you gentlemen for your word pictures; they have helped a lot. I'm not yet sure of the relation between your station time and that of the Terrestrial time zones, but I have the impression that it's quite late in the working day. Tomorrow we will all visit Raindrop and make a very thorough and more technical examination — my wife and I doing the work, Mr. Bresnahan assisting us, and Mr. Silbert guiding. Until then — it has been a pleasure, gentlemen.”

Bresnahan took the hint and got to his feet, but Silbert hesitated. There was a troubled expression on his face, but he seemed unable or unwilling to speak. Weisanen noticed it.

“What's the matter, Mr. Silbert? Is there some reason why Raindrop's owners, or their representatives, shouldn't look it over closely? I realize that you are virtually the only person to visit it in the last three years, but I assure you that your job is in no danger.”

Silbert's face cleared a trifle.

“It isn't that,” he said slowly. “I know you're the boss, and I wasn't worried about my job anyway. There's just one point — of course you may know all about it, but I'd rather be safe, and embarrassed, than responsible for something unfortunate later on. I don't mean to butt into anyone's private business, but Raindrop is essentially weightless.”

“I know that.”

“Do you also know that unless you are quite certain that Mrs. Weisanen is not pregnant, she should not expose herself to weightlessness for more than a few minutes at a time?”

Both Weisanens smiled.

“We know, thank you, Mr. Silbert. We will see you tomorrow, in spacesuits, at the big cargo lock. There is much equipment to be taken down to Raindrop.”

4

That closing remark proved to be no exaggeration.

As the four began moving articles through the lock the next morning, Silbert decided at first that the Weisanens' furniture had been a very minor item in the load brought up from Earth the day before, and wondered why it had been brought into the station at all if it were to be transferred to Raindrop so soon. Then he began to realize that most of the material he was moving had been around much longer. It had come up bit by bit on the regular supply shuttle over a period of several months. Evidently whatever was going on represented long and careful planning — and furthermore, whatever was going on represented a major change from the original plans for Raindrop.

This worried him, since Silbert had become firmly attached to the notion that the Raindrop plan was an essential step to keeping the human race fed, and he had as good an appetite as anyone.

He knew, as did any reasonably objective and well-read adult, how barely the advent of fusion power and gene tailoring had bypassed the first critical point in the human population explosion, by making it literally possible to use the entire surface of the planet for either living space or the production of food. As might have been expected, mankind had expanded to fill even that fairly generous limit in a few generations.

A second critical point was now coming up, obviously enough to those willing to face the fact. Most of Earth's fourteen billion people lived on floating islands of gene-tailored vegetation scattered over the planet's seas, and the number of these islands was reaching the point where the total sunlight reaching the surface was low enough to threaten collapse of the entire food chain. Theoretically, fusion power was adequate to provide synthetic food for all; but it had been learned the hard way that man's selfishness could be raised to the violence point almost as easily by a threat to his “right” to eat natural — and tasty — food as by a threat to his “right” to reproduce without limit. As a matter of fact, the people whom Silbert regarded as more civilized tended to react more strongly to the first danger.

Raindrop had been the proposed answer. As soon as useful, edible life forms could be tailored to live in its environment it was to be broken up into a million or so smaller units which could receive sunlight throughout their bulks, and use these as “farms.”

But power units, lights, and what looked like prefabricated living quarters sufficient for many families did not fit with the idea of breaking Raindrop up. In fact, they did not fit with any sensible idea at all.

No one could live on Raindrop, or in it, permanently; there was not enough weight to keep human metabolism balanced. Silbert was very conscious of that factor. He never spent more than a day at a time on his sampling trips, and after each of these he always remained in the normal-weight part of the station for the full number of days specified on the AGT tables.

It was all very puzzling.

And as the day wore on, and more and more material was taken from the low-weight storage section of the station and netted together for the trip to Raindrop, the spaceman grew more puzzled still. He said nothing, however, since he didn't feel quite ready to question the Weisanens on the subject and it was impossible to speak privately to Bresnahan with all the spacesuit radios on the same frequency.

All the items moved were, of course, marked with their masses, but Silbert made no great effort to keep track of the total tonnage. It was not necessary, since each cargo net was loaded as nearly as possible to an even one thousand pounds and it was easy enough to count the nets when the job was done. There were twenty-two nets.

A more ticklish task was installing on each bundle a five hundred pound-second solid-fuel thrust cartridge, which had to be set so that its axis pointed reasonably close to the center of mass of the loaded net and firmly enough fastened to maintain its orientation during firing. It was not advisable to get rid of the orbital speed of the loads by “pushing off” from the station; the latter's orbit would have been too greatly altered by absorbing the momentum of eleven tons of material. The rockets had to be used.

Silbert, in loading the nets, had made sure that each was spinning slowly on an axis parallel to that of Raindrop. He had also attached each cartridge at the “equator” of its net. As a result, when the time came to fire it was only necessary to wait beside each load until its rocket was pointing “forward” along the station's orbit, and touch off the fuel.

The resulting velocity change did not, in general, exactly offset the orbital speed, but it came close enough for the purpose. The new orbit of each bundle now intersected the surface of Raindrop — a target which was, after all, ten miles in diameter and only half a mile away. It made no great difference if the luggage were scattered along sixty degrees of the satellite's equatorial zone; moving the bundles to the lock by hand would be no great problem where each one weighed about three and a half ounces.

With the last net drifting toward the glistening surface of Raindrop, Weisanen turned to the spaceman.

“What's the best technique to send us after them? Just jump off?” Silbert frowned, though the expression was not obvious through his face plate.

“The best technique, according to the AGT Safety Tables, is to go back to the rim of the station and spend a couple of days getting our personal chemistry back in balance. We've been weightless for nearly ten hours, with only one short break when we ate.”

Weisanen made a gesture of impatience which was much more visible than Silbert's frown.

“Nonsense!” he exclaimed. “People have remained weightless for a couple of weeks at a time without permanent damage.”

“Without having their bones actually turn to rubber, I grant. I don't concede there was no more subtle damage done. I'm no biophysicist, I just believe the tables; they were worked out on the basis of knowledge gained the hard way. I admit they have a big safety factor, and if you consider it really necessary I won't object to staying out for four or five days. But you haven't given us any idea so far why this should be considered an emergency situation.”

“Hmmm. So I haven't. All right, will you stay out long enough to show Brenda and me how to work the locks below, so we can get the stuff inside?”

“Why — of course — if it's that important we'll stay and do the work too. But I didn't…" Silbert fell silent as it dawned on him that Weisanen's choice of words meant that he had no intention of explaining just yet what the “emergency” was. Both newcomers must have read the spaceman's mind quite accurately at that point, since even Bresnahan was able to, but neither of them said anything.

Conversation for the next few minutes consisted entirely of Silbert's instructions for shoving off in the proper direction to reach Raindrop, and how to walk on its not-quite-zero-gravity, jelly-like surface after they reached it. The trip itself was made without incident.

Because fast movement on the surface was impossible, several hours were spent collecting the scattered bundles and stacking them by the lock. The material could not be placed inside, as most of it had to be assembled before it could go under water; so for the moment the lesson in lock management was postponed. Weisanen, after some hesitation, agreed to Silbert's second request that they return to the station for food and rest. He and his wife watched with interest the technique of getting back to it.

With four people instead of two, the velocity-matching problem might have been worse, but this turned out not to be the case. Silbert wondered whether it were strictly luck, or whether the Weisanens actually had the skill to plan their jumps properly. He was beginning to suspect that both of them had had previous space experience, and both were certainly well-coordinated physical specimens.

According to the tables which had been guiding Silbert's life, the party should have remained in the high-weight part of the station for at least eighty hours after their session of zero-gee, but his life was now being run by Weisanen rather than the tables. The group was back on the water twelve hours after leaving it.

Bresnahan still had his feeling of discomfort, with star-studded emptiness on one side and its reflection on the other, but he was given little time to brood about it.

The first material to go into the lock consisted of half a dozen yard-wide plastic bubbles of water. Silbert noted with interest that all contained animal life, ranging from barely visible crustacea to herring-sized fish.

“So we're starting animal life here at last,” remarked the spaceman. “I thought it was a major bone of contention whether we ever would.”

“The question was settled at the first meeting of the new board,” replied Weisanen. “Life forms able to live here — or presumably able to live here — have been ready for several years. Please be careful in putting those in the lock — just the odd-numbered ones first, please. The evens contain predators, and the others should be given a few hours to scatter before they are turned loose.”

“Right. Any special techniques for opening? Or just get the bubbles through the second lock and cut them open?”

“That will do. I assume that a few hours in the currents inside, plus their own swimming abilities, will scatter them through a good part of the drop.”

“It should. I suppose they'll tend to stay pretty close to the skin because of the light; I trust they can take a certain amount of hard radiation.”

“That matter has been considered. There will be some loss, damage, and genetic change, of course, but we think the cultures will gain in spite of that. If they change, it is no great matter. We expect rapid evolution in an environment like this, of course. It's certainly been happening so far.”

Bresnahan helped push the proper spheres into the lock at the vacuum end and out of it at the other, and watched with interest as each was punctured with a knife and squeezed to expel the contents.

“I should have asked about waiting for temperatures to match,” remarked Silbert as the cloud of barely visible, jerkily moving specks spread from the last of the containers, “but it doesn't seem to be bothering them.”

“The containers were lying on Raindrop's surface all night, and the satellite is in radiative equilibrium,” pointed out Bresnahan. “The temperatures shouldn't be very different anyway. Let's get back outside and see what's going on next. Either these water-bugs are all right, or they're beyond our help.”

“Right.” Silbert followed the suggestion, and the newly released animals were left to their own devices.

Outside, another job was under way. The largest single items of cargo had been a set of curved segments of metal, apparently blue-anodized aluminum. In the few minutes that Silbert and Bresnahan had been inside, the Weisanens had sorted these out from the rest of the material and were now fitting them together.

Each section attached to its neighbor by a set of positive-acting snap fasteners which could be set almost instantly, and within a very few minutes it became evident that they formed a sphere some twenty feet in diameter. A transparent dome of smaller radius was set in one pole, and a cylindrical structure with trap doors in the flat ends marked the other. With the assembly complete, the Weisanens carefully sprayed everything, inside and out, from cylinders which Silbert recognized as containing one of the standard fluorocarbon polymers used for sealing unfindable leaks in space ships.

Then both Weisanens went inside.

Either the metallic appearance of the sphere was deceptive or there were antennae concealed in its structure, because orders came through the wall on the suit-radio frequency without noticeable loss. In response to these, Bresnahan and the spaceman began handing the rest of the equipment in through the cylindrical structure, which had now revealed itself as a minute air lock. As each item was received it was snapped down on a spot evidently prepared to receive it, and in less than two hours almost all the loose gear had vanished from the vicinity of Raindrop's entry lock. The little that was left also found a home as Weisanen emerged once more and fastened it to racks on the sphere's outer surface, clustered around the air lock.

The official went back inside, and, at his orders, Silbert and the computerman lifted the whole sphere onto the top of the cylindrical cargo lock of the satellite. Either could have handled the three-pound weight alone, but its shape and size made it awkward to handle and both men felt that it would be inadvisable to roll it.

“Good. Now open this big hatch and let us settle into the lock chamber,” directed Weisanen. “Then close up, and let in the water.”

It was the first time Silbert had caught his boss in a slip, and he was disproportionately pleased. The hatch opened outward, and it was necessary to lift the sphere off again before the order could be obeyed.

Once it was open, the two men had no trouble tossing the big globe into the yawning, nearly dark hole — the sun was just rising locally and did not shine into the chamber — but they had to wait over a minute for Raindrop's feeble gravity to drag the machine entirely inside. They could not push it any faster, because it was not possible to get a good grip on sphere and lock edge simultaneously; and pushing down on the sphere without good anchorage would have done much more to the pusher than to the sphere.

However, it was finally possible to close the big trap. After making sure that it was tightly latched — it was seldom used, and Silbert did not trust its mechanism unreservedly — he and Bresnahan entered the lock through the smaller portal.

“Aren't there special suits for use inside Raindrop, a lot more comfortable than this space armor?” asked Weisanen.

“Yes, sir,” replied the spaceman, “though the relative comfort is a matter of opinion. There are only three, and two of them haven't been used since I came. They'll need a careful checkout.”

“All right. Bring them in here, and then let the water into this lock.” Silbert found the suits and handed them to Bresnahan to carry out the first part of the order, while he went to the controls to execute the second.

“All ready?” he asked.

“All set. Both lock doors here are shut, and the three of us are inside. Let the flood descend.”

“Wrong verb,” muttered Silbert to himself.

He very cautiously cracked the main inner hatch; opening it would have been asking for disaster. Even at a mere quarter atmosphere's pressure the wall of water would have slammed into the evacuated lock violently enough to tear the outer portal away and eject sphere and occupants at a speed well above Raindrop's escape value. There was a small Phoenix rocket in the station for emergency use, but Silbert had no wish to create a genuine excuse for using it. Also, since he was in the lock himself, he would probably be in no condition to get or pilot it.

5

The water sprayed in violently enough through the narrow opening he permitted, bouncing the sphere against the outer hatch and making a deafening clamor even for the spacesuited trio inside. However, nothing gave way, and in a minute it was safe to open the main hatch completely.

Silbert did so. Through the clear dome which formed the sphere's only observation window he could see Weisanen fingering controls inside. Water jets from almost invisible ports in the outer surface came into action, and for the first time it became evident that the sphere was actually a vehicle. It was certainly not built for speed, but showed signs of being one of the most maneuverable ever built.

After watching for a moment as it worked its way out of the lock, Silbert decided that Weisanen had had little chance to practice handling it. But no catastrophe occurred, and finally the globe was hanging in the greenish void outside the weed-grown bulk of the lock. The spaceman closed the big hatch, emerged through the personnel lock himself, and swam over to the vehicle's entrance.

The outer door of the tiny air lock opened manually. Thirty seconds later he was inside the rather crowded sphere removing his helmet — some time during the last few minutes Weisanen had filled the vehicle with air.

The others had already unhelmeted and were examining the “diving” suits which Bresnahan had brought inside. These were simple enough affairs; plastic form-fitting coveralls with an air-cycler on the chest and an outsized, transparent helmet which permitted far more freedom of head movement than most similar gear. Since there was no buoyance in this virtually weight-free environment, the helmet's volume did not create the problem it would have on Earth. Silbert was able to explain everything necessary about the equipment in a minute or two.

Neither of the Weisanens needed to have any point repeated, and if Bresnahan was unsure about anything he failed to admit it.

“All right.” Raindrop's owner nodded briskly as the lesson ended. “We seem to be ready. I started us down as soon as Mr. Silbert came aboard, but it will take the best part of an hour to reach the core. When we get there a regular ecological sampling run will be made. You can do that, Mr. Silbert, using your regular equipment and techniques; the former is aboard, whether you noticed it being loaded or not. Brenda and I will make a physical, and physiographical, examination of the core itself, with a view to finding just what will have to be done to set up living quarters there and where will be the best place to build them.”

Silbert's reaction to this remark may have been expected; both Weisanens had been watching him with slight smiles on their faces. He did not disappoint them.

“Living quarters? That's ridiculous! There's no weight to speak of even at Raindrop's surface, and even less at the core. A person would lose the calcium from his skeleton in a few weeks, and go unbalanced in I don't know how many other chemical ways…"

“Fourteen known so far, Mr. Silbert. We know all about that, or as much as anyone does. It was a shame to tease you, but my husband and I couldn't resist. Also, some of the factors involved are not yet public knowledge, and we have reasons for not wanting them too widely circulated for a while yet.” Brenda Weisanen's interruption was saved from rudeness by the smile on her face. “I would invite you to sit down to listen, but sitting means nothing here — I'll get used to that eventually, no doubt.

“The fact you just mentioned about people leaching calcium out of their skeletons after a few days or weeks of weightlessness was learned long ago — even before long manned space flights had been made; the information was gained from flotation experiments. Strictly speaking, it is not an effect of weightlessness per se, but a feedback phenomenon involving relative muscular effort — something which might have been predicted, and for all I know may actually have been predicted, from the fact that the ankle bones in a growing child ossify much more rapidly than the wrist bones. A very minor genetic factor is involved; after all, animals as similar to us as dolphins which do spend all their time afloat grow perfectly adequate skeletons.

“A much more subtle set of chemical problems were noticed the hard way when manned space stations were set up, as you well know. A lot of work was done on these, as you might expect, and we now are quite sure that all which will produce detectable results in less than five years of continuous weightlessness are known. There are fourteen specific factors — chemical and genetic keys to the log jam, if you like to think of it that way.

“You have the ordinary educated adult's knowledge of gene tailoring, Mr. Silbert. What was the logical thing to do?”

“Since gene tailoring on human beings is flagrantly illegal, for good and sufficient reasons, the logical thing to do was and is to avoid weightlessness,” Silbert replied. “With Phoenix rockets, we can make interplanetary flight at a continuous one-gravity acceleration, while space stations can be and are centrifuged.”

Brenda Weisanen's smile did not change, but her husband looked annoyed. He took up the discussion.

“Illegal or not, for good or bad reasons, it was perfectly reasonable to consider modifying human genetic patterns so that some people at least could live and work normally and indefinitely in a weightless environment. Whether it shocks you or not, the thing was tried over seventy years ago, and over five hundred people now alive have this modification — and are not, as I suppose you would put it, fully human.”

Bresnahan interrupted. “I would not put it that way!” he snapped. “As anyone who has taken work in permutation and combination knows perfectly well, there is no such thing as a fully human being if you define the term relative to some precise, specific idealized gene pattern. Mutations are occurring all the time from radiation, thermal effects, and just plain quantum jumping of protons in the genetic molecules. This sort of phenomenon is used as example material in elementary programming courses, and one of the first things you learn when you run such a problem is that no one is completely without such modifications. If, as I suppose you are about to say, you and Mrs. Weisanen are genetically different enough to take weightlessness, I can't see why it makes you less human. I happen to be immune to four varieties of leukemia virus and sixteen of the organisms usually responsible for the common cold, according to one analysis of my own gene pattern. If Bert's had ever been checked we'd find at least as many peculiarities about his — and I refuse to admit that either of us is less human than anyone else we've ever met.”

“Thank you, Mr. Bresnahan,” Brenda Weisanen took up the thread of the discussion once more. “The usual prejudice against people who are known to be significantly different tends to make some of us a little self-conscious. In any case, my husband and I can stand weightlessness indefinitely, as far as it is now possible to tell, and we plan to stay here permanently. More of us will be coming up later for the same purpose.”

“But why? Not that it's any of my business. I like Raindrop, but it's not the most stimulating environment, and in any case I'm known to be the sort of oddball who prefers being alone with a collection of books to most other activities.”

The woman glanced at her husband before answering. He shrugged.

“You have already touched on the point, Mr. Silbert. Modifying the human genetic pattern involves the same complication which plagued medicine when hormones became available for use in treatment. Any one action is likely to produce several others as an unplanned, and commonly unwanted, byproduct. Our own modification is not without its disadvantages. What our various defects may be I would not presume to list in toto — any more than Mr. Bresnahan would care to list his — but one of them strikes very close to home just now. Aino and I are expecting a child, and about nine times out of ten when a woman of our type remains in normal gravity any child she conceives is lost during the fifth or sixth month. The precise cause is not known; it involves the mother's physique rather than the child's, but that leaves a lot still to be learned. Therefore, I am staying here until my baby is born, at the very least. We expect to live here. We did not ask to be modified to fit space, but if it turns out that we can live better here — so be it.”

“Then Raindrop is going to be turned into a — a—maternity hospital?”

“I think a fairer term would be `colony,' Mr. Silbert,” interjected Weisanen. “There are a good many of us, and most if not all of us are considering making this place our permanent home.”

“Which means that breaking it up according to the original plan to supply farming volume is no longer on the books.”

“Precisely.”

“How do you expect to get away with that? This whole project was planned and paid for as a new source of food.”

“That was when it was a government project. As you know, it became a private concern recently; the government was paid full value for Raindrop, the station, and the shuttle which keeps it supplied. As of course you do not know, over eighty per cent of the stock of that corporation is owned by people like myself. What we propose to do is perfectly legal, however unpopular it may make us with a few people.”

“More than a few, I would say. And how can you afford to be really unpopular, living in something as fragile as Raindrop?” queried Bresnahan. “There are lots of spaceships available. Even if no official action were or could be taken, anyone who happened to have access to one and disliked you sufficiently could wreck the skin of this tank so thoroughly in five minutes that you'd have to start all over again even if you yourselves lived through it. All the life you'd established would freeze before repairs could be made complete enough to stop the water from boiling away.”

“That is true, and is a problem we haven't entirely solved,” admitted the other. “Of course, the nasty laws against the publication of possible mob-rousing statements which were found necessary as Earth's population grew should operate to help us. Nowadays many people react so negatively to any unsupported statement that the word would have trouble getting around. In any case, we don't intend to broadcast the details, and comparatively few people know much about the Raindrop project at all. I don't think that many will feel cheated.”

Silbert's reaction to the last sentence was the urge to cry out, “But they are being cheated!” However, it was beginning to dawn on him that he was not in the best possible position to argue with Weisanen.

He subsided. He himself had been living with the Raindrop project for three years, had become closely identified with it, and the change of policy bothered him for deeper reasons than his intelligence alone could recognize.

Bresnahan was also bothered, though he was not as deeply in love with the project as the spaceman. He was less impressed by Weisanen's conviction that there would be no trouble; but he had nothing useful to say about the matter. He was developing ideas, but they ran along the line of wondering when he could get to a computer keyboard to set the whole situation up as a problem. His background and training had left him with some doubt of any human being's ability — including his own — to handle all facets of a complex problem.

Neither of the Weisanens seemed to have any more to say, either, so the sphere drifted downward in silence.

6

They had quickly passed the limit which sunlight could reach, and were surrounded by blackness, which the sphere's own interior lights seemed only to accentuate.

With neither gravity nor outside reference points, the sphere was of course being navigated by instrument. Sonar equipment kept the pilot informed of the distance to the nearest point of the skin, the distance and direction of the lock through which they had entered, and the distance and direction of the core. Interpretation of the echoes was complicated by the fact that Raindrop's outer skin was so sharply curved, but Weisanen seemed to have that problem well in hand as he drove the vehicle downward.

Pressure, of course, did not change significantly with depth. The thirty per cent increase from skin to core meant nothing to healthy people. There was not even an instrument to register this factor, as far as Silbert could see. He was not too happy about that; his spaceman's prejudices made him feel that there should be independent instrumentation to back up the sonar gear.

As they neared the core, however, instruments proved less necessary than expected.

To the mild surprise of the Weisanens and the blank astonishment of Silbert — Bresnahan knew too little to expect anything, either way — the central region of the satellite was not completely dark. The light was so faint that it would not have been noticed if they had not been turning off the sphere's lamps every few minutes, but it was quite bright enough to be seen, when they were a hundred yards or so from the core, without waiting for eyes to become dark-adapted.

“None of your samples ever included luminous bacteria,” remarked the official. “I wonder why none of them ever got close enough to the skin for you to pick up.”

“I certainly don't know,” replied Silbert. “Are you sure it's caused by bacteria?”

“Not exactly by a long shot; it just seems the best starting guess. I'm certain it's not heat or radioactivity, and offhand I can't think of any other possibilities. Can you?”

“No, I can't. But maybe whatever is producing the light is attached to the core — growing on it, if it's alive. So it wouldn't have reached the surface.”

“That's possible, though I hope you didn't think I was criticizing your sampling techniques. It was one of my friends who planned them, not you. We'll go on down; we're almost in contact with the core now, according to the fathometer.”

Weisanen left the lights off, except for the tiny fluorescent sparks on the controls themselves, so the other three crowded against the bulge of the viewing port to see what was coming. Weightlessness made this easier than it might have been; they didn't have to “stand” at the same spot to have their heads close together.

For a minute or so, nothing was perceptible in the way of motion. There was just the clear, faintly luminous water outside the port. Then a set of slender, tentacular filaments as big around as a human thumb seemed to writhe past the port as the sphere sank by them; and the eyes which followed their length could suddenly see their point of attachment.

“There!” muttered Brenda Weisanen softly. “Slowly, dear — only a few yards.”

“There's no other way this thing can travel,” pointed out her husband. “Don't worry about our hitting anything too hard.”

“I'm not — but look! It's beautiful! Let's get anchored and go outside.”

“In good time. It will stay there, and anyway I'm going out before you do — long enough before to, at least, make reasonably certain it's safe.”

The wife looked for a moment as though she were about to argue this point, if her facial expression could be read accurately in the faint light, but she said nothing. Bresnahan and Silbert had the intelligence to keep quiet as well; more could be learned by looking than by getting into the middle of a husband-wife disagreement, and now there was plenty to look at.

The core was visible for at least two hundred yards in all directions, as the sphere spun slowly under Weisanen's control. The light definitely came from the life forms which matted its surface.

Presumably these were fungi, since photosynthetic forms could hardly have grown in such an environment, but they were fungi which bore little resemblance to their Terrestrial ancestors. Some were ribbon-like, some feather-like, some snaky — even patches of what looked like smoothly mown lawn were visible. The greenish light was evidently not pure color, since other shades were visible; red, purple, and yellow forms stood out here and there in eye-catching contrast to grays and browns. Some forms were even green, though it seemed unlikely that this was due to chlorophyll. Practically all seemed to emit the vague light which bathed the entire scene — so uniformly that outlines would have been hard to distinguish were it not for a few specimens which were much brighter than the others. These types bore what might have been spore pods; brilliantly luminous knobs ranging from fist to grapefruit size, raised “above” the rest of the surface as much as eight or ten feet on slender stalks. These cast shadows which helped distinguish relief.

The woman was right; weird it might be, but the scene was beautiful.

Weisanen cut off the water jets and waited for a minute or two. The vehicle drifted slowly but perceptibly away from the surface; evidently there was some current.

“We'll have to anchor,” he remarked. “Bren, stay inside until we've checked. I'll go out to see what we can fasten ourselves to; there's no information at all on what sort of surface there may be. A fair-sized stony meteoroid — really an asteroid — was used as the original core, but the solids from the comets would be very fine dust. There could be yards of mud too fine to hold any sort of anchor surrounding the solid part. You gentlemen will please get into the other suits and come with me. If nothing has happened to any of us in half an hour, Bren, you may join us.”

“There are only three suits,” his wife pointed out.

“True. Well, your spacesuit will do; or if you prefer, one of us will use his and let you have the diving gear. In any case, that problem is low-priority. If you gentlemen are ready we'll go. I'll start; this is strictly a one-man air lock.”

All three had been climbing out of their spacesuits as Weisanen was talking. The other garments were easy enough to get into, though Bresnahan found the huge helmet unwieldy even with no weight. Weisanen was through the lock before either of the others was ready to follow; Silbert was slowed by his space-born habit of double-checking every bit of the breathing apparatus, and Bresnahan by his inexperience. They could see their employer through the window as they finished, swimming slowly and carefully toward the weedy boundary of Raindrop's core.

Both men stayed where they were for the moment, to see what would happen when he reached it. Brenda Weisanen watched even more closely; there was no obvious reason to be afraid, but her breath was coming unevenly and her fists tightly clenched as her husband approached the plants and reached out to touch the nearest.

Nothing spectacular happened. It yielded to his touch; when he seized it and pulled, it broke.

“Either the plants are awfully fragile or there is fairly firm ground anchoring them,” remarked Silbert. “Let's go outside. You're checked out on the controls of this thing, aren't you, Mrs. Weisanen?”

“Not in great detail,” was the reply, “I know which switches handle lights and main power for the lock pump, and which control bank deals with the jets; but I've had no practice in actually handling it. Aino hadn't, either, until we started this trip an hour ago. Go ahead, though; I won't have to do anything anyway. Aino is anchoring us now.”

She gestured toward the port. Her husband could now be seen through it carrying something, maybe a harpoon, with a length of fine line attached to it. A couple of yards from the surface he poised himself and hurled the object, javelin style — or as nearly to that style as anyone can manage in water — into the mass of vegetation.

The shaft buried itself completely. Weisanen gave a tug on the line, whose far end was attached to the sphere. He seemed satisfied and turned to look at the vehicle. Seeing the men still inside, he gestured impatiently. Bresnahan followed Silbert through the tiny air lock as rapidly as its cycling time would permit, leaving the woman alone in the sphere.

Outside, Weisanen was several yards away, still beckoning imperiously.

“You can talk, sir,” remarked Silbert in ordinary tones. “There's no need for sign language.”

“Oh. Thanks; I didn't see any radio equipment in these helmets.”

“There isn't any. The helmets themselves aren't just molded plastic; they're a multi-layered arrangement that acts as an impedance matcher between the air inside and the water outside. Sound goes through water well enough; it's the air-water interface that makes conversation difficult. This stuff gets the sound across the boundary.”

“All right; good. Let's get to work. If the figures for the size of the original nucleus still mean anything, we have nearly twenty million square feet to check up on. Right now we won't try to do it all; stay in sight of the sphere. Get test rods and plankton gear from that rack by the air lock. Mr. Silbert, use the nets and collectors as you usually do. Mr. Bresnahan, you and I will use the rods; simply poke them into the surface every few yards. The idea is to get general knowledge of the firmness of the underlying surface, and to find the best places to build — or attach — permanent structures. If you should happen to notice any connection between the type of vegetation and the kind of ground it grows on, so much the better; surveying by eye will be a lot faster than by touch. If any sort of trouble comes up, yell. I don't see why there should be any, but I don't want Brenda out here until we're a little more certain.”

The men fell to their rather monotonous tasks. The plant cover, it developed, ranged from an inch or two to over a yard in thickness, not counting the scattered forms which extended their tendrils scores of feet out toward the darkness. At no point was the underlying “ground” visible.

Where the growing cover was pushed or dug away, the core seemed to be made of a stiff, brownish clay, which reached at least as deep as the test prods could be pushed by hand. This rather surprised Silbert, who had expected either solid rock or oozy mud. He was not geochemist enough to guess at the reactions which might have formed what they actually found, and was too sensible to worry about it before actual analyses had been made.

If Weisanen had any opinions, he kept them to himself.

Bresnahan was not worried about the scientific aspect of the situation at all. He simply poked away with his test bar because he had been told to, devoting only a fraction of his attention to the task. His thoughts were elsewhere.

Specifically, he was following through the implications of the information the Weisanens had furnished during the trip down. He admitted to himself that in the others' position he would probably be doing the same thing; but it seemed as though some compromise should be possible which would salvage the original purpose of Raindrop.

Bresnahan did not, of course, expect to eat as well as the average man of mid-twentieth century. He never had, and didn't know what he was missing. He did know, however, that at his present age of twenty-five there was a smaller variety of foodstuffs available than he could remember from his childhood, and he didn't want that process to go any farther. Breaking up Raindrop according to the original plan seemed to him the obvious thing to do. If land and sea farming areas were disappearing under the population flood, the logical answer was farming areas in the sky. This should be as important to the Weisanens as to anyone else.

He felt a little uneasy about bringing the matter up again, however. Somehow, he had a certain awe of Weisanen which he didn't think was entirely due to the fact that the latter was his employer.

Several times their paths came close together as the two plied their test bars, but Bresnahan was unable to wind his courage up to the necessary pitch for some time — not, in fact, until they had been exploring the region uneventfully for over half an hour and Weisanen had finally, with some hesitation, decided that it was safe for his wife to join them.

There was some slight rivalry between Silbert and Bresnahan over who should give up his diving gear to the woman and resume his spacesuit. If Bresnahan had won, a good deal of subsequent trouble might have been avoided; but when all four were finally outside, Silbert was wearing space armor. He had pointed out quite logically that he was the most used to it and would work better than any of the others in its restrictions.

7

The key to the subsequent trouble was that one of the restrictions involved communication. If Silbert had been able to hear clearly, he might have understood what was developing before it had gone too far; but he couldn't. His space helmet lacked the impedance-matching feature of the diving gear, and the latter equipment had no radios.

Some sound did get through his helmet both from and into the water, but not much; for real conversation he had to bring the helmet into physical contact with that of the other party. He therefore knew little of what went on during the next few minutes. He spent them continuing his ecology sample, and paid little attention to anything else.

With Mrs. Weisanen present, some of Bresnahan's unease in her husband's presence left him, and he brought up at last the point which had occurred to him.

“I've been wondering, sir,” he opened, “why it wouldn't be possible to break up Raindrop just as was planned, and still use the smaller drops as homes for people like yourselves. I can't see that it would be very different from your present plan.”

Weisanen did not seem annoyed, but answered in a straightforward fashion. “Aside from the fact that we would prefer to be in a single city rather than a lot of detached houses which would require us to visit our neighbors by spaceship, the smaller drops will have the radiation problem. Here we have nearly five miles of water shielding us.”

“Hmph. I never thought of that.”

“No reason why you should have. It was never your problem.”

“But still — what do we do about food? Conditions on Earth are getting worse all the time. Starting another Raindrop project would take years. Couldn't you at least compromise? Permit the small drops to be skimmed off the surface of this one while you are living here, and while another Raindrop is set up?”

“I don't like the idea. Can you imagine what it will be like here with shock waves from exploding steam bubbles echoing all through the globe every time the skin is opened for a new farm lot?”

“Why should they break the skin? I should think they'd want to draw off the water through the lock, or other locks which might be built, anyway; otherwise there'd be a lot of waste from boiling. I should think…"

Weisanen's annoyance suddenly boiled over, though no sign of it had been visible before.

“Mr. Bresnahan, it matters very little what you think when you forget that Raindrop is now, legally and properly, private property. I dislike to sound selfish and misanthropic, but I belong to a group which has gone to a great deal of thought and labor to get for itself, legally and without violence, an environment which it needs and which no one else — including the people responsible for our existence — was willing to provide. In addition, if you would think with your brain instead of your stomach you'd realize that the whole original project was pure nonsense. The only possible way mankind can keep himself adequately fed is to limit his population. If you'll pardon the pun, the whole idiotic project was a drop in the bucket. It might have put the day of reckoning back five years, conceivably ten or fifteen, but then we'd have been right back where we started. Even with fusion energy there's a limit to the number of space farms which could be built in a given time, and the way Earth's population grows it would soon be impossible just to make new farms fast enough, let alone operate them. Cheating people? Nonsense! We're doing the rest of mankind a favor by forcing them to face facts while there are a few billion less of them to argue with each other. One group has had to exercise the same sort of control the rest of mankind should be using for a good half century. We didn't dare have children except when it was practicable to keep the mother in orbit for the best part of a year. Why should we be particularly sympathetic with the rest of you?”

“I see your point,” admitted Bresnahan, “but you've forgotten one other thing. The food problem is yours, too. What will you do as your food supply shrinks like everyone else's? Or worse, when people decide not to send any food at all up here, since you won't send any down? Raindrop is a long way yet from being self-supporting, you know.”

A grin, clearly visible in the light from a nearby plant knob, appeared on Weisanen's face; but his irritation remained.

“Slight mistake, my young friend. There is another minor modification in our structure; our saliva glands produce an enzyme you lack. We can digest cellulose.” He waved his hand at the plants around them.

“How do you know these plants contain cellulose?”

“All plants do; but that's a side issue. The weeds near the surface were analyzed long ago, and proved to contain all the essentials for human life — in a form which we can extract with our own digestive apparatus. Raindrop, as it now is, could support all of us there are now and there are likely to be for a couple of generations. Now, please get back to checking this little world of ours. Brenda and I want to decide where to build our house.”

Bresnahan was silent, but made no move to get back to work. He floated for a minute or so, thinking furiously; Weisanen made no effort to repeat or enforce his order.

At last the computerman spoke slowly — and made his worst mistake.

“You may be right in your legal standing. You may be right in your opinion about the value of Raindrop and what the rest of the human race should do — personally, I want a family some day. You may even be right about your safety from general attack because the communication laws will keep down the number of people who know about the business. But, right or wrong, if even a single person with access to a spaceship does find out, then you — and your wife — and your baby — are all in danger. Doesn't that suggest to you that some sort of compromise is in order?”

Weisanen's expression darkened and his muscles tensed. His wife, looking at him, opened her mouth and made a little gesture of protest even before he started to speak; but if she made a sound it was drowned out.

“It certainly suggests something, young fellow,” snapped the official. “I was hoping the matter wouldn't descend to this level, but remember that while we can live here indefinitely, you cannot. A few weeks of weightlessness will do damage which your bodies can never repair. There is no regular food down here. And we control the transportation back to the station and weight.”

“Aino — no!” His wife laid a hand on his arm and spoke urgently. “Wait, dear. If you threaten at all, it's too close to a threat of death. I don't want to kill anyone, and don't want to think of your doing so. It wouldn't be worth it.”

“You and the little one are worth it. Worth anything! I won't listen to argument on that.”

“But argument isn't needed. There is time. Mr. Bresnahan and his friend will certainly wait and think before risking the consequences of a mob-raising rumor. He wants a compromise, not…"

“His compromise endangers you and the others. I won't have it. Mr. Bresnahan, I will not ask you for a promise to keep quiet; you might be the idealistic type which can justify breaking its word for what it considers a good cause. Also, I will not endanger your life and health more than I can help. Brenda is right to some extent; I don't want a killing on my conscience either, regardless of the cause. Therefore, you and Mr. Silbert will remain here at the core until Brenda and I have returned to the station and made sure that no communication gear will function without our knowledge and consent. That may be a few days, which may be more than your health should risk. I'm sorry, but I'm balancing that risk to you against one to us.”

“Why should it take days? An hour to the surface, a few minutes to the station…"

“And Heaven knows how long to find and take care of all the radios. Neither of us is an expert in that field, and we'll be a long time making sure we have left no loopholes.”

“Will you at least stop to find out whether the air renewers in these diving suits are indefinite-time ones, like the spacesuit equipment? And if they aren't, let me change back into my spacesuit?”

“Of course. Change anyway. It will save my trying to get the sub-stance of this conversation across to Mr. Silbert. You can tell him on radio while we are on the way. Come with me back to the sphere and change. Brenda, stay here.”

“But, dearest — this isn't right. You know…"

“I know what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. I'm willing to follow your lead in a lot of things, Bren, but this is not one of them.” “But…"

“No buts. Come, Mr. Bresnahan. Follow me.”

The wife fell silent, but her gaze was troubled as she watched the two men vanish through the tiny lock. Bresnahan wondered what she would do. It was because he felt sure she would do something that he hadn't simply defied Weisanen.

The woman's face was no happier when the computerman emerged alone and swam back to a point beside her. Her husband was visible through the port, outsized helmet removed, beckoning to her.

For a moment Bresnahan had the hope that she would refuse to go. This faded as she swam slowly toward the sphere, occasionally looking back, removed the anchor in response to a gesture from the man inside, and disappeared through the lock. The vehicle began to drift upward, vegetation near it swirling in the water jets. Within a minute it had faded from view into the darkness.

“Just what's going on here?” Silbert's voice was clear enough; the suit radios carried for a short distance through water. “Where are they going, and why?”

“You didn't hear any of my talk with Weisanen?”

“No. I was busy, and it's hard to get sound through this helmet any-way. What happened? Did you argue with him?”

“In a way.” Bresnahan gave the story as concisely as he could. His friend's whistle sounded eerily in the confines of his helmet.

“This — is — really — something. Just for the record, young pal, we are in a serious jam, I hope you realize.”

“I don't think so. His wife is against the idea, and he'll let himself get talked out of it — he's a little afraid of the results already.”

“Not the point. It doesn't matter if the whole thing was a practical joke on his part. They're out of sight, in a medium where no current charts exist and the only navigation aids are that sphere's own sonar units. He could find his way back to the core, but how could he find us?”

“Aren't we right under the lock and the station? We came straight down.”

“Don't bet on that. I told you — there are currents. If we made a straight track on the trip down here I'll be the most surprised man inside Luna's orbit. There are twenty million square feet on this mudball. We'd be visible from a radius of maybe two hundred — visible and recognizable, that is, with our lights on. That means they have something like two hundred search blocks, if my mental arithmetic is right, without even a means of knowing when they cover a given one a second time. There is a chance they'd find us, but not a good one — not a good enough one so that we should bet your chance of dodging a couple of weeks of weightlessness on it. When that nut went out of sight, he disposed of us once and for all.”

“I wouldn't call him a nut,” Bresnahan said.

“Why not? Anyone who would leave a couple of people to starve or get loaded with zero-gee symptoms on the odd chance that they might blab his favorite scheme to the public…"

“He's a little unbalanced at the moment, but not a real nut. I'm sure he didn't realize he'd passed the point of no return. Make allowances, Bert; I can. Some of my best friends are married, and I've seen 'em when they first learned a kid was on the way. It's just that they don't usually have this good a chance to get other people in trouble; they're all off the beam for a little while.”

“You're the most tolerant and civilized character I've met, and you've just convinced me that there can be too much of even the best of things. For my money the guy is a raving nut. More to the point, unless we can get ourselves out of the jam he's dropped us into, we're worse than nuts. We're dead.”

“Maybe he'll realize the situation and go back to the station and call for help.”

“There can be such a thing as too much optimism, too. My young friend, he's not going to get to the station.”

“What? Why not?”

“Because the only laser tube not already in the station able to trigger the cobweb launchers is right here on my equipment clip. That's another reason I think he's a nut. He should have thought of that and pried it away from me somehow.”

“Maybe it just means he wasn't serious about the whole thing.”

“Never mind what it means about him. Whatever his intentions, I'd be willing to wait for him to come back to us with his tail between his legs if I thought he could find us. Since I don't think he can, we'd better get going ourselves.”

“Huh? How?”

“Swim. How else?”

“But how do we navigate? Once we're out of sight of the core we'd be there in the dark with absolutely nothing to guide us. These little lights on our suits aren't…"

“I know they aren't. That wasn't the idea. Don't worry; I may not be able to swim in a straight line, but I can get us to the surface eventually. Come on; five miles is a long swim.”

Silbert started away from the glow, and Bresnahan followed uneasily. He was not happy at the prospect of weightlessness and darkness combined; the doses on the trip down, when at least the sphere had been present for some sort of orientation, had been more than sufficient.

The glow of the core faded slowly behind them, but before it was too difficult to see Silbert stopped.

“All right, put your light on. I'll do the same; stay close to me.” Bresnahan obeyed both orders gladly. “Now, watch.”

The spaceman manipulated valves on his suit, and carefully ejected a bubble of air about two feet in diameter. “You noticed that waste gas from the electrolyzers in the diving suits didn't stay with us to be a nuisance. The bubbles drifted away, even when we were at the core,” he pointed out. Bresnahan hadn't noticed, since he wasn't used to paying attention to the fate of the air he exhaled, but was able to remember the fact once it was mentioned.

“That of course, was not due to buoyancy, so close to the core. The regular convection currents started by solar heat at the skin must be responsible. Therefore, those currents must extend all the way between skin and core. We'll follow this bubble.”

“If the current goes all the way, why not just drift?”

“For two reasons. One is that the currents are slow — judging by their speed near the skin, the cycle must take over a day. Once we get away from the core, the buoyancy of this bubble will help; we can swim after it.

“The other reason is that if we simply drift we might start down again with the current before we got close enough to the skin to see daylight.

“Another trick we might try if this takes too long is to have one of us drift while the other follows the bubble to the limit of vision. That would establish the up-down line, and we could swim in that direction for a while and then repeat. I'm afraid we probably couldn't hold swimming direction for long enough to be useful, though, and it would be hard on the reserve air supply. We'd have to make a new bubble each time we checked. These suits have recyclers, but a spacesuit isn't built to get its oxygen from the surrounding water the way that diving gear is.”

“Let's just follow this bubble,” Bresnahan said fervently.

At first, of course, the two merely drifted. There simply was no detectable buoyancy near the core. However, in a surprisingly short time the shimmering globule of gas began to show a tendency to drift away from them.

The direction of drift was seldom the one which Bresnahan was thinking of as “up” at the moment, but the spaceman nodded approval and carefully followed their only guide. Bresnahan wished that his training had given him more confidence in instrument readings as opposed to his own senses, but followed Silbert hopefully.

8

The fourteen hours he spent drifting weightless in the dark made an experience Bresnahan was never to forget, and his friends were never to ignore. He always liked crowds afterward, and preferred to be in cities or at least buildings where straight, clearly outlined walls, windows, and doors marked an unequivocal up-and-down direction.

Even Silbert was bothered. He was more used to weightlessness, but the darkness he was used to seeing around him at such times was normally pocked with stars which provided orientation. The depths of Rain-drop provided nothing. Both men were almost too far gone to believe their senses when they finally realized that the bubble they were still following could be seen by a glow not from their suits' lights.

It was a faintly blue-green illumination, still impossible to define as to source, but unmistakably sunlight filtered through hundreds of feet of water. Only minutes later their helmets met the tough, elastic skin of the satellite.

It took Silbert only a few moments to orient himself. The sun and the station were both visible — at least they had not come out on the opposite side of the satellite — and he knew the time. The first and last factors were merely checks; all that was really necessary to find the lock was to swim toward the point under the orbiting station.

“I don't want to use the sonar locator unless I have to,” he pointed out. “There is sonar gear on the sphere. I should be able to get us close enough by sighting on the station so that the magnetic compass will work. Judging by where the station seems to be, we have four or five miles to swim. Let's get going.”

“And let's follow the great circle course,” added Bresnahan. “Never mind cutting across inside just because it's shorter. I've had all I ever want of swimming in the dark.”

“My feeling exactly. Come on.”

The distance was considerably greater than Silbert had estimated, since he was not used to doing his sighting from under water and had not allowed for refraction; but finally the needle of the gimballed compass showed signs of making up its mind, and with nothing wrong that food and sleep would not repair the two men came at last in sight of the big lock cylinder.

For a moment, Silbert wondered whether they should try to make their approach secretly. Then he decided that if the Weisanens were there waiting for them the effort would be impractical, and if they weren't it would be futile.

He simply swam up to the small hatch followed by Bresnahan, and they entered the big chamber together. It proved to be full of water, but the sphere was nowhere in sight. With no words they headed for the outer personnel lock, entered it, pumped back the water, and emerged on Raindrop's surface. Silbert used his laser, and ten minutes later they were inside the station. Bresnahan's jump had been a little more skillful than before.

“Now let's get on the radio!” snapped Silbert as he shed his space helmet.

“Why? Whom would you call, and what would you tell them? Remember that our normal Earth-end contacts are part of the same group the Weisanens belong to, and you can't issue a general broadcast to the universe at large screaming about a plot against mankind in the hope that someone will take you seriously. Someone might.”

“But…"

“My turn, Bert. You've turned what I still think was just a potentially tragic mistake of Weisanen's into something almost funny, and incidentally saved both our lives. Now will you follow my lead? Things could still be serious if we don't follow up properly.”

“But what are you going to do?”

“You'll see. Take it from me, compromise is still possible. It will take a little time; Aino Weisanen will have to learn something I can't teach him myself. Tell me, is there any way to monitor what goes on in Raindrop? For example, can you tell from here when the lock down there is opened, so we would know when they come back?”

“No.”

“Then we'll just have to watch for them. I assume that if we see them, we can call them from here on regular radio.”

“Of course.”

“Then let's eat, sleep, and wait. They'll be back after a while, and when they come Aino will listen to reason, believe me. But we can sleep right now, I'm sure; it will be a while yet before they show up. They should still be looking for us — getting more worried by the minute.”

“Why should they appear at all? They must have found out long ago that they can't get back to the station on their own. They obviously haven't found us, and won't. Maybe they've simply decided they're already fugitive murderers and have settled down to a permanent life in Raindrop.”

“That's possible, I suppose. Well, if we don't see them in a couple of weeks, we can go back down and give them a call in some fashion. I'd rather they came to us, though, and not too soon.

“But let's forget that; I'm starved. What's in your culture tanks besides liver?”

9

It did not take two weeks. Nine days and eight hours after the men had returned to the station, Silbert saw two spacesuited figures standing on the lock half a mile away, and called his companion's attention to them.

“They must be desperate by this time,” remarked Bresnahan. “We'd better call them before they decide to risk the jump anyway.” He activated the transmitter which Silbert indicated, and spoke.

“Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Weisanen. Do you want us to send the cobweb down?”

The voice that answered was female.

“Thank God you're there! Yes, please. We'd like to come up for a while.” Silbert expected some qualifying remarks from her husband, but none were forthcoming. At Bresnahan's gesture, he activated the spring gun which launched the web toward the satellite.

“Maybe you'd better suit up and go meet them,” suggested the computerman. “I don't suppose either of them is very good at folding the web, to say nothing of killing angular speed.”

“I'm not sure I care whether they go off on their own orbit anyway,” growled the spaceman, rising with some reluctance to his feet.

“Still bitter? And both of them?” queried Bresnahan.

“Well — I suppose not. And it would take forever to repair the web if it hit the station unfolded. I'll be back.” Silbert vanished toward the hub, and the younger man turned back to watch his employers make the leap from Raindrop. He was not too surprised to see them hold hands as they did so, with the natural result that they spun madly on the way to the web and came close to missing it altogether.

When his own stomach had stopped whirling in sympathy, he decided that maybe the incident was for the best. Anything which tended to cut down Weisanen's self-assurance should be helpful, even though there was good reason to suspect that the battle was already won. He wondered whether he should summon the pair to his and Silbert's quarters for the interview which was about to ensue, but decided that there was such a thing as going too far.

He awaited the invitation to the Weisanens' rooms with eagerness.

It came within minutes of the couple's arrival at the air lock. When Bresnahan arrived he found Silbert already in the room where they had first reported on their brief visit to Raindrop. All three were still in spacesuits; they had removed only the helmets.

“We're going back down as soon as possible, Mr. Bresnahan,” Weisanen began without preliminary. “I have a rather lengthy set of messages here which I would like you and Mr. Silbert to transmit as soon as possible. You will note that they contain my urgent recommendation for a policy change. Your suggestion of starting construction of smaller farms from Raindrop's outer layers is sound, and I think the Company will follow it. I am also advising that material be collected from the vicinity of the giant planets — Saturn's rings seem a likely source — for constructing additional satellites like Raindrop as private undertakings. Financing can be worked out. There should be enough profit from the farms, and that's the logical direction for some of it to flow.

“Once other sources of farm material are available, Raindrop will not be used further for the purpose. It will serve as Company headquarters — it will be more convenient to have that in orbit anyway. The closest possible commercial relations are to be maintained with Earth.”

“I'm glad you feel that way, sir,” replied Bresnahan. “We'll get the messages off as soon as possible. I take it that more of the Company's officials will be coming up here to live, then?”

“Probably all of them, within the next two years or so. Brenda and I will go back and resume surveying now, as soon as we stock up with some food. I'll be back occasionally, but I'd rather she kept away from high weight for the next few months, as you know.”

“Yes, sir.” Bresnahan managed, by a heroic effort, to control his smile — almost. Weisanen saw the flicker of his lip, and froze for a moment. Then his own sober features loosened into a broad grin.

“Maybe another hour won't hurt Brenda,” he remarked. “Let's have a meal together before we go back.”

He paused, and added almost diffidently, “Sorry about what happened. We're human, you know.”

“I know,” replied Bresnahan. “That's what I was counting on.”

“And that,” remarked Silbert as he shed his helmet, “is that. They're aboard and bound for the core again, happy as clams. And speaking of clams, if you don't tell me why that stubborn Finn changed his mind, and why you were so sure he'd do it, there'll be mayhem around here. Don't try to make me believe that he got scared about what he'd nearly done to us. I know his wife was on our side, basically, but she wasn't about to wage open war for us. She was as worried about their kid as he was. Come on; make with the words, chum.”

“Simple enough. Didn't you notice what he wanted before going back to Raindrop?”

“Not particularly — oh; food. So what? He could live on the food down there — or couldn't he? Don't you believe what he said?”

“Sure I believe him. He and his wife can digest cellulose, Heaven help them, and they can live off Raindrop's seaweed. As I remarked to him, though — you heard me, and he understood me — they're human. I can digest kale and cauliflower, too, and could probably live off them as well as that pair could live off the weeds. But did you ever stop to think what the stuff must taste like? Neither did they. I knew they'd be back with open mouths — and open minds. Let's eat — anything but liver!”