mind about whether I wanted to discuss Tscharka, the Corsair , the fuel pods—and Rannulf Enderman—with her. As we were drinking a nightcap after the show she brought it up herself.
"I guess Corsair will be leaving soon," she said, meaning that she wanted to know if I'd heard anything.
I hadn't; it wasn't yet on my worklog. "Kept you busy making the stuff, has it?" I asked; that was Alma's job at Lederman, guiding the particle beams through the accelerator rings, and she knew better than I how much antimatter was being manufactured for what purpose.
She didn't answer the question, except with another question—a trait I've never approved of. "I wonder what they want with all that antimatter."
Well, Tscharka had told me his answer to that—true or not, I didn't know—so I repeated it for her. She didn't look impressed. "They're going to do more exploration around Delta Pavonis? What for? So they can set up more colonies? I don't see the point."
That was another trait in Alma Vendette that I hadn't entirely enjoyed in recent days. She'd seemed down. I don't mean clinically depressed—no, that was my own specialty—but more abstracted than I liked. I didn't want to think that it was because Rannulf was on his way to another star, but I took the chance of asking. "What's the matter? Is something worrying you?"
She considered. "Nothing specific, I think," she said at last. "It's just that nothing we do seems to be particularly important."
"You mean here at Lederman? But we are important. If we didn't make the fuel the colonies would just die."
She shrugged. That was even more displeasing; I wondered how much Millenarism was still in the back of her mind. "What I'm looking for, hon, is some kind of meaning. The way life was in the old days, when work meant something, and people got together and had babies and—listen, Barry, don't be shocked, but the other day I even thought of having the contraceptive implant taken out."
That straightened me right up. And that, at last, made her smile. In fact, she laughed out loud. "Oh, hon," she said, "don't be silly. I wasn't serious."
But maybe she was, I thought. And maybe that was my cue to ask the question that had been on the tip of my tongue to ask for weeks now, and maybe I would have. But I didn't get the chance, because just then the factory emergency alarms went off—beepity-beepity- beeeeep , over and over again, coming out of every audio point in the Lederman works and community.
When you live and work in the Lederman colony that is a sound that freezes your blood. I knew it was only a drill this time—I could be pretty sure of that, because both Alma and I were still alive—but the rules are that you have to act as though the drill is real, and both of us were very faithful in following those rules. We both snapped our pocket screen on and began to search our dedicated bands for data and instructions.
Any operation that's as critical as the antimatter factory at Lederman needs to keep its damage-control procedures up to speed. To make sure of that, the master controls are programmed to invent a simulated emergency at random intervals—they average fifteen or twenty a year—and when those beepers go off every one of us drops whatever he's doing and gets to work trying to deal with whatever that day's simulation had chosen to simulate.
As a fuelmaster crew chief my criticality-zone damage-control job was to make an eyeball inspection of potential danger areas. If I had been in the factory area, I would have grabbed my radiation readers and run to my first checkpoint. Since I wasn't, I simply logged on to the duty chief, Warren Bellick, and watched to make sure he was doing what I would have done.
He was. The beeping had stopped by the time he got there and the computer voice was identifying the problem. It told us that the exercise the computer had devised to entertain us this day was a (make-believe) misalignment of the particle beam, so that
"I guess Corsair will be leaving soon," she said, meaning that she wanted to know if I'd heard anything.
I hadn't; it wasn't yet on my worklog. "Kept you busy making the stuff, has it?" I asked; that was Alma's job at Lederman, guiding the particle beams through the accelerator rings, and she knew better than I how much antimatter was being manufactured for what purpose.
She didn't answer the question, except with another question—a trait I've never approved of. "I wonder what they want with all that antimatter."
Well, Tscharka had told me his answer to that—true or not, I didn't know—so I repeated it for her. She didn't look impressed. "They're going to do more exploration around Delta Pavonis? What for? So they can set up more colonies? I don't see the point."
That was another trait in Alma Vendette that I hadn't entirely enjoyed in recent days. She'd seemed down. I don't mean clinically depressed—no, that was my own specialty—but more abstracted than I liked. I didn't want to think that it was because Rannulf was on his way to another star, but I took the chance of asking. "What's the matter? Is something worrying you?"
She considered. "Nothing specific, I think," she said at last. "It's just that nothing we do seems to be particularly important."
"You mean here at Lederman? But we are important. If we didn't make the fuel the colonies would just die."
She shrugged. That was even more displeasing; I wondered how much Millenarism was still in the back of her mind. "What I'm looking for, hon, is some kind of meaning. The way life was in the old days, when work meant something, and people got together and had babies and—listen, Barry, don't be shocked, but the other day I even thought of having the contraceptive implant taken out."
That straightened me right up. And that, at last, made her smile. In fact, she laughed out loud. "Oh, hon," she said, "don't be silly. I wasn't serious."
But maybe she was, I thought. And maybe that was my cue to ask the question that had been on the tip of my tongue to ask for weeks now, and maybe I would have. But I didn't get the chance, because just then the factory emergency alarms went off—beepity-beepity- beeeeep , over and over again, coming out of every audio point in the Lederman works and community.
When you live and work in the Lederman colony that is a sound that freezes your blood. I knew it was only a drill this time—I could be pretty sure of that, because both Alma and I were still alive—but the rules are that you have to act as though the drill is real, and both of us were very faithful in following those rules. We both snapped our pocket screen on and began to search our dedicated bands for data and instructions.
Any operation that's as critical as the antimatter factory at Lederman needs to keep its damage-control procedures up to speed. To make sure of that, the master controls are programmed to invent a simulated emergency at random intervals—they average fifteen or twenty a year—and when those beepers go off every one of us drops whatever he's doing and gets to work trying to deal with whatever that day's simulation had chosen to simulate.
As a fuelmaster crew chief my criticality-zone damage-control job was to make an eyeball inspection of potential danger areas. If I had been in the factory area, I would have grabbed my radiation readers and run to my first checkpoint. Since I wasn't, I simply logged on to the duty chief, Warren Bellick, and watched to make sure he was doing what I would have done.
He was. The beeping had stopped by the time he got there and the computer voice was identifying the problem. It told us that the exercise the computer had devised to entertain us this day was a (make-believe) misalignment of the particle beam, so that
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