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projection of plasma flow in the booster’s energy converter, she became aware that someone was standing behind her. She glanced over her shoulder to discovered Ben Tallen’s lanky form.
    “Ben!” she cried with a start. “Make some noise the next time so you don’t scare me out of ten years growth.”
    “Sorry,” he said. “You were into it pretty deeply there. I didn’t want to interrupt something important.”
    “When did you get in?”
    “I arrived on the evening ferry and came right over. Have you eaten?”
    She shook her head, suddenly aware of the emptiness in her stomach.
    “How about showing me where one can get fed around here.”
    She rubbed her tired eyes and said, “I really shouldn’t. I’ve got four computer alarms to check this evening before I call it a night.”
    “You’ve got to eat sometime.”
    “Right. Give me ten minutes to see if anything else is going to pop up on this run.”
    “What are you doing?” he asked, gesturing at the diagram on the screen.
    “I’m changing the bus timing on the booster control feeds to accommodate Austria ’s data links. I have to check to see if I messed anything up when I made the changes.”
    “And did you?”
    “Hundreds of things,” she replied. “That’s the problem with this damned software. Everything affects everything else.”
    “Aren’t the modifications going well?”
    “They’re not going badly. You just have to be damned careful about introducing problems, especially in the fuel feed system. Think of it as messing with your own genetic code.”
    He nodded and studied the schematic drawing she had displayed on the screen. It was obvious that he had no idea what he was looking at.
    “ Starhopper ’s fuel feed circuits and controls,” she explained, “plus a bit of the engine control circuitry.”
    “What does it do?”
    “It aligns the antimatter before injecting it into the reaction chamber where the proton-antiproton annihilation reaction takes place.”
    “I’ll take your word for it,” he said with a laugh.
    Tory cleared her screen and accessed another schematic diagram — one used for briefing visiting politicians and university presidents. It showed generic drawings of the interstellar probe’s antimatter torus, reaction mass tanks, and the various engine circuits. She spent the ten minutes explaining the operation of the booster to him, after which, she guided him to the deserted project cafeteria.
    “How much of that explanation did you understand?” she asked after gulping down half a sandwich.
    “About a tenth,” he said.
    “Before getting this job, I thought plasma physics was difficult, too. Now I find I speak this strange language that people can’t understand.”
    Ben put down a drinking bulb of coffee and nodded. “I know what you mean. I never understood politics before I signed on with the science ministry. Now it’s all so clear to me.”
    She shrugged. “You can have it. Politics involve people and people ain’t logical.”
    He laughed. “You want to know who I feel sorry for?”
    “Who?”
    “Those poor bastards riding that light sail. If we have trouble figuring ourselves out, just think of the trouble they’ll have understanding us.”
    “Or we will have understanding them,” she said.
    #
    “All personnel! Final warning. Stand clear of the landing area. Monitors, report status.”
    Katherine Claridge, M.D., stood in her vacsuit on a small hillock at one end of Phobos and listened to the ground controller issue final instructions for the landing of the Starhopper booster. She was not alone. Around her were Garth Van Zandt, Tory Bronson, and most of the project personnel on Phobos who could be spared from their other duties.
    Kit Claridge was a short blonde woman who had to work to keep her weight down. Despite this, she was in exceptional shape for her age (50 standard years). She was assistant chairman of the medical school at the University of Olympus, also the occupant of the