This Old Rock Read Free

of alignment. And that ’s assuming it was accurate in the first
place, which, from what I’ve seen so far would be asking a lot. Look, what you
have to do is clear the gap between the wheel and the well walls, float the
whole assembly out, check the tension on the wires that run around it, pull the
bearings apart, nanoplane them, and repack them. Take you a day.”
     Inspector McCarthy raised her hands and put them down again
in a clear gesture of disgust. “All right, Wigner, I’ve already seen enough to
spoil my appetite, but let’s go out to your ship anyway.”
    “No,” Sasha sent on their private line, “not like that. Calm
her down first. I don’t want her to scare Tina.”
    “Sasha...” Dolph pleaded. The last thing he wanted to do was
insult the testy Inspector. Maybe.
    “No argument on this: my call, darling.”
    Dolph took a deep breath. “Uh, Ms. McCarthy?”
    The woman turned to him. “ Well ? What is it?”
    “We, uh, have a three-year-old girl with us. Uh, her name is
Tina. Angry people frighten her. Could you…?” Leave the shouting act for the
adults, he wanted to say—but he choked that back. Temper, grace.
    “You what ?” Inspector McCarthy sounded shocked and
confused. “What is a child that age doing out here? Why wasn’t this in my
briefing?”
    Dolph closed his eyes and counted to ten again. “Inspector,
she’s in our records. Born at L4 Von Braun station. The Hopper is family
rated.”
    “For transportation! Not as a nursery! Why didn’t you leave
her with her grandparents or something? Until this job is done?”
    Was there any way, he wondered, that he could space this
screaming harridan and get away with it? His past, and their problems with
their parents, were none of her damn business. Since when did a habitat
inspection become an excuse to cross-examine someone’s life? Or was this an
attempt to provoke him, make him do something like what he was supposed to have
done on the moon that would let some big Belt corporation step in and take the
asteroid that was all they owned.
    “We wanted her with us and nothing in the IPA rules said we
couldn’t take her.”
    “You didn’t ask?” The inspector sounded incredulous.
    “Ms. McCarthy, one of the reasons we came out to the Belt
was to get away from having to ask. About everything.”
    Eileen McCarthy rotated to face him, a silent cipher behind
a shiny faceplate.
    “One of the reasons? What did they do to you kids to make
you risk this ? No,” she held up a hand. “You’re right about that. I don’t
need to know your past. The kid’s out here now and we’ll just have to deal with
it. Some would say that it’s maybe better that way, if the whole family goes at
once. Let’s go down to your ship.” She got in the Tram cage for the two and a
half kilometer ride out to the Hopper .
    ∞±∞
    Out of her helmet, Inspector Eileen McCarthy looked as
formidable as she sounded. Her curly hair was as steel gray as her manner. Her
slight excess mass softened her face to a degree, and the one-sixth gee of the
tethered spacecraft did not tug the features down as much as they would on her
native Earth. Otherwise, Dolph thought, the hooknose and downturned lips would
have evoked some costumer’s idea of a witch. He tried to imagine her as someone’s
lover, once upon a time, and failed.
    She wrinkled that large nose as soon as her helmet came off
as she emerged from the airlock into their bedroom/wardroom, “Child,” she said
to Sasha, “you need to take the lenses off the air cleaning lasers and polish
them occasionally. The automatic systems you have can’t get at them, and, in
this low gravity, they develop a film that blocks some of the most effective
frequencies. Surface tension effect—take a microscope to them some day and see
what I mean.”
    “Ms. McCarthy—” Sasha began, a note of outrage in her voice.
Dolph held up a hand and shook his head vigorously. Too much was at stake to
risk offending the offensive.