This Old Rock Read Free Page A

Sasha, fortunately, caught the hint. “We’ve been
a bit busy. I’ll get to it before you come back. Anyway, you’re welcome to
share a meal with us.”
    It wasn’t much—a plate of protein biscuits and three narrow-necked,
low-gee water glasses.
    Inspector McCarthy ignored it. “You want to live out here
all alone? You learn to be very careful. Yes, you’re in the Pallas Association,
but most of the time, you’ll still be a week or two away from any physical help.
Hell, most of the time you kids will be too many light minutes away for anyone
to even use your computer’s motiles interactively. We may have retroviruses to
make our genes radiation tolerant, but the bugs and viruses we take with us
have no such luck. They mutate. Cleanliness is a survival skill. While I’m at
it, my briefing said you’re going to mount your A.I. on an Opticor 721. Tell me
it’s not so! You ought to have one of ICA’s double N thirty-sixes.”
    Sasha shook her head. “We could get three 721s for
the price of one of those…”
    Inspector McCarthy scowled.
    Sasha smiled. “So we did.”
    McCarthy looked surprised and almost smiled—at least Dolph
thought he could detect some movement in the deep crevasses that emanated from
the corners of her mouth. Then, without saying anything more, she sat down,
reached for a protein biscuit, took a bite, and chewed. It was so quiet that
Dolph could hear her crunch the flavor nuts between her teeth.
    Finally she swallowed, lifted her glass of water, watched it
slosh around a bit, drank, and nodded. “I’ll give you a marginal pass on that. I
like redundancy, excess capacity, and graceful degradation. Mind you, three
double N thirty-sixes would have been better.”
    Tina chose that time to come out of her compartment,
swinging from the handholds, as was her custom, so that she could look adults
in the eye. They kept her hair short, for convenience and her favorite nighty
was a brown flannel jumper—nothing really abnormal, but the total effect could,
Dolph realized all too late, be distinctly simian.
    She also needed a changing, but before he could do anything,
Tina swung over to the wardroom ceiling above and in front of Inspector
McCarthy, directly over her plate, and shyly mumbled “Hi.”
    What was most noticeable in the following seconds was the
growing color in Inspector McCarthy’s hitherto pale cheeks as the smell wafted
about. “Do you,” she choked out at length, “ever discipline this child? What
exactly are… her behavioral limits?”
    “Hi?” Tina repeated in a small, uncertain voice. McCarthy
had used, Dolph realized, at least two words that were not often used in the
Wigner family. He and Sasha were determined to be as not like their own parents
as they could.
    “Tina,” Sasha began, conversationally, “hasn’t mastered low
gravity toilets yet, but she’s working on it, at her own pace. Aren’t you,
darling?”
    Tina pouted. “I’m Tina , not darling.”
    Sasha beamed indulgently. “Tina, this is Inspector McCarthy,
who will be helping us get our new house ready.”
    “Hi?” Tina repeated. “Are you a witch?”
    Inspector Eileen McCarthy wrinkled her nose, took a deep
breath. “Hello, Tina.” Then she reached up and pulled the child from her
handhold.
    “Let me go, you witch!” Tina protested.
    Inspector McCarthy had handed her off to her mother with a
suffering look. Then she turned to Dolph. “When you are both working on the
habitat, where is she?”
    “She comes with us,” he replied. “We modified a rescue
bubble into a sort of nursery, which she used until we pressurized and—”
    “Let me,” McCarthy groaned, “see if I understand this. She’s
allowed to float around wild in a habitat under construction among the motile
spiders, laser welders, nanoplaners, and so on? And she’s still alive ?”
    “We have a net around her,” Dolph snapped. “It works fine.”
    McCarthy shook her head. “Did it ever occur to you dear
young people to