"I agree." said Garvin, tossing his wrapper down the trash chute.
After one last trip to the bathroom they entered the laundry room, and Nancy stood in front of the far door. She held her gun out, and Garvin had his at the ready, covering her from the side. You never knew what lay behind a closed door on an alien ship. She pulled it open quickly and stepped to the side. A white metal catwalk greeted them, just wide enough for two people to travel abreast. Guard rails lined the path, about chest high. Heat poured into the room, like opening the front door on a hot summer day. "Apparently the living quarters are air conditioned." concluded Garvin. "We just didn't know it." He took a reading. "The atmospheric composition is the same, but it's about 105 degrees out there. I think we can cope with that; just make sure the door doesn't lock behind us."
Nancy stepped out onto the catwalk, closed the door, and opened it again, to make sure Garvin's prediction didn't come true. "It opens easily from the outside - let's go." Garvin and Dan joined her on the catwalk and let the door close behind them. "I imagine it gets even hotter out here when the engines are running." Nancy continued. "Remember the top of the generator - the waste heat flowing into the shell? Well that's the inside of the shell right there." She pointed towards the ceiling. They looked up to see the same metallic gray forming a curved roof overhead. Lights hung from the ceiling, illuminating their narrow path. To the left and right the gray ceiling faded into a dull red, for reasons that would soon become clear.
Dan was the first to approach the guardrail and look down. "What the hell is that?" It looked like a large red star floating in the center of the probe. The apparent size was that of a basketball held at arm's length. The edges, which were blurry and indistinct at best, moved in and out, like a red ball at the bottom of a swimming pool. It reminded Dan of a living monster, breathing and pulsating with evil fury.
"That's the core." said Garvin. "When a white dwarf is formed, it is 100,000 degrees. A neutron star is even hotter. Of course it cools down with time, but that can take a billion years. As an alternative, they might have created this thing from scratch, by imploding a natural satellite, but that too produces some serious heat through gravitational collapse. Either way, the Arcots are dealing with some pretty hot realestate." He watched the wavy, fragmented boundary of the red sphere below. "Heat is being transferred from the core to the bottom of the atmosphere. The hot air rises, and is replaced with cool air, creating convection currents that keep this entire structure warm."
"Hot is more like it." declared Nancy, wiping the sweat from her eyes. She could only look at the core for a few minutes, with its radiant heat baking her face, then she had to back away. "And I suppose those convection currents cause the image to wiggle about?"
"Right. Simple refraction bends the red light as it moves through hot and cool air, the way your friend's face is distorted when you look at him across a hot campfire."
"There has to be a lot of turbulence, with the heat source at the bottom of a deep gravity well."
"I suppose. But the gravity is intense at the core, and the atmospheric pressure is extremely high. You can think of the air as a fluid, thicker than water. It may be rather sluggish. Conduction dominates at the lower levels. Convection comes into play later on, at the middle layers, when the air behaves more like a gas." Indeed, as they looked about they could see clouds tinted red from below, and whirling vortices that resembled little red tornadoes.
"Do those formations ever come up this high?" Nancy asked, pointing to a funnel cloud off in the distance.
"I doubt it. The roof keeps things at a near constant temperature up here. Not a lot of wind or activity. In fact there's not so much as a gentle breeze."
The catwalk curved around to the right and ran parallel to the living quarters. They followed the path for nearly 100 yards, when Dan looked over the side again. A white column, 100 feet across, supported the living quarters, and extended down as far as the eye could see. "What is that?"
"That's one of the structural supports." said Garvin. "I suppose it goes all the way down to the core." Dan tried to follow Garvin's gaze. The column shrank as his eyes traveled down its length, until it looked like a fragile stick of uncooked pasta poking into the red star below.
"Is each of the four stations supported by such a column?"
"I think so." replied Garvin. "And you'd need more than that. At least two more supports are required, front and back, for engineering stability. Otherwise the slightest acceleration would snap these equatorial columns like twigs. In fact, I'm willing to bet that the engines are directly behind the core, at the back of the ship. You couldn't apply force to the sides of the ship, where we are standing, and transfer it through these columns to pull the core along. The structure would break."
"So you think there are six columns joining the core with the shell?" summarized Nancy. "One under each of the four living quarters and one heading to the front and one joining the back?"
"There may be more. I'm only looking at one data point. But you need at least those six to provide a measure of stability. And the columns front and back are probably thicker than this one, since they are used to transfer force to the core as the ship accelerates and decelerates." He paused for a moment. "I wonder what these columns are made of."
"It's not the same material as the shell." noted Dan. "At least it doesn't look the same."
"No - it would have to be even stronger than the shell, at least under compression. Perhaps under sheer as well." Garvin wanted to reach out and touch the column, but that was impossible. He couldn't even get close enough for a spectral analysis. He would have to settle for what his eyes could see, and NASA would have to settle for the same information, courtesy of his head-cam.
Nancy looked again at the red star below, but this time it called to her, like the song of the siren. She wanted to jump; she needed to jump. Falling and falling, as the red sphere grew beneath her, and the under side of the catwalk faded into the gray surface above. Feeling the wind rush past as she tumbled towards her fate, the hot gases embracing her, consuming her. There was nothing but death. Her akathisia was triggered by the combination of a great height, and the overwhelming agent of destruction below her feet. She leaned out over the guardrail and stared at the beast below, her arms stretched out as if to touch it - to hold it - to become one with the tremendous forces that ruled the stars.
Suddenly Garvin pulled her back from the brink. "What are you doing?"
Off balance, she stumbled and fell, with Garvin's strong arms easing her descent under the higher than normal gravity. He carried both of them through a tuck and roll, thus avoiding any injuries.
"I," she began, "I, I'm sorry, it was compelling. I just couldn't resist the urge to..."
"I know - that's not an unusual reaction."
She sat quietly, catching her breath. "Thank you."
"Listen, I suggest you don't look down any more."
"That's good advice." She sat for several minutes, imagining herself making love to the man who had just saved her life, right there on the catwalk, in an alien world. But that would have to wait.
Garvin assumed she was still preoccupied with the swirling images below. "It's just a rock, very hot and very dense. And if we don't do something about it..."
"I know." She stood up and forced her mind back to reality. It was time to take command. She motioned her team forward. "Let's go."
They walked for another hundred yards and the edge of the complex came into view. "There's the hatch that we came in." said Nancy, pointing up and to the right. It couldn't be seen of course; she was extrapolating, assuming the room to their right was the entryway that held their supplies. "And I'd say our ship is about there." She pointed to a patch of ceiling beyond the complex.
Just ahead, their path merged into a wider bridge, about the size of a two lane highway. It too was suspended from the ceiling by cables at regular intervals, though the cables were thicker, as one might expect. Along the road, a set of continuous rails defined each lane, left and right, with plenty of room on either side for pedestrians. Garvin knelt down and studied one of the rails. "Captain, the technology is foreign, but I think it's a magnetic guideway. Some kind of car rides along these rails, held up by magnets. It might not use wheels at all. And since this road is perfectly straight, the car can probably attain a speed of several hundred miles per hour." He pulled out his electrometer and gently tapped into the electrical system beneath the rail. "727 volts DC." he announced. "Exactly 4 times the residential voltage. And captain, if I place my leads some distance apart along these wires, I measure no resistivity. Absolutely none."
"Superconducting wires? At these temperatures?"
"So it would seem."
"Try to get a chemical analysis of that wire."
Garvin pulled his neutron spectrometer out of his pack and aimed it at the wire. "Vanadium, germanium, carbon, and a few other elements. I don't see anything special here, but obviously the mix is just right." He held the spectrometer out in front of him so that Houston could see the display through his head -cam. "Hope you metallurgists on the ground can make sense of this information."
Garvin sat up, put his instruments away, and rubbed his back. "Any cars coming?" he joked.
Dan looked up and down the track. It curved away, along with the roof, so you could only see for a couple miles. This was no joke, really. If a high speed car suddenly appeared on the horizon, Garvin would have less than 20 seconds to get out of the way. And that assumes somebody was watching. "Just to ease my mind, why don't you come over here with us." suggested Nancy.
Garvin crawled over the magnetic rail and sat on the side with his friends, their backs against the side wall. They were not anxious to stand and walk in this heat, but they weren't accomplishing anything just sitting there, and there wasn't much point in going back. After several minutes Nancy stood up and looked ahead. "That looks like an intersection. Let's go."
The intersection included a large pivoting segment of track, where a train might change direction, turning 90 or 180 degrees. Garvin inspected the time-honored mechanism, as old as train travel itself, while Dan studied a call panel embedded in the right guardrail. He provided a rough translation.
"Car 2. Car 4. Car 6. Emergency assistance."
"Shall we call for a cab?" asked Nancy. Receiving no answer, she made an executive decision. "Dan, press the second button. I assume that means a car for four people."
"I assume." Dan pressed the button and the transport system selected the nearest car, which was parked in a garage on the far side of their complex. It merged onto the road and drove the short distance to their location, stopping in the center of the intersection, where it was free to travel in any direction.
"Road trip?" asked Nancy.
"We don't have a lot of supplies with us." warned Dan. "Just some water, some food, our guns, our communicators, and Garvin's traveling laboratory." He pointed to Garvin's backpack with its assorted scientific instruments.
"It will have to do. In this gravity and heat, we have to travel light."
They approached the car and opened the doors, as though it were a traditional automobile. Dan slid into the driver's seat, but there was no steering wheel, no gear shift, no peddles - just a dashboard with a touchscreen. "Station - I think the word is station - I'm not really sure how to translate it. Station 1, station 2, station 3, station 4, station front, station back, manual."
"Don't press manual," advised Nancy, "you don't have a license."
"Right."
"I think we want station front, that's probably the front of the ship."
He touched the icon and the car gently rose a fraction of an inch above its guideway and slid forward. They leaned back as the car accelerated. Fans hummed, bringing the temperature down in the cab.
"Air conditioning." shouted Garvin as he moved his head towards the vent. "Hallelujah!"
Nancy sat in the back seat, her long legs angled to the side. "We've got a message from Earth. You guys just lean back and I'll play it."
Andrew Brown, capcom for the second shift, appeared on the screen. He had short black hair and dark eyes hidden behind wire rim glasses. "Nancy, this is Mission Control. Looks like you've made yourselves to home. A bathroom, a kitchen, and a pretty nice bedroom suite. Don't eat too many of those Arcot bars - they weren't made for you. You're getting ready for bed now, and we really don't have much more to add. Amy is standing by, ready to take the third shift. Keep your cam open, and we'll see you tomorrow morning. Over and out."
Nancy spoke into her communicator. "Houston, we just got your last message, and I've only got a few minutes before this car takes us out of range. We're headed to the front of the ship. I don't know what we'll find there. I hope we can find the bridge, or some other control center. The head-cam will record all our activities. When we return, it will transmit the accumulated audio and video. However, as you know, it only has a capacity of 30 hours, and I don't know how long we're going to be, so I will probably turn it off from time to time. For example, you don't need to watch us ride in a car for the next two hours, so I'm going to shut it off as soon as I finish this message. I'll turn it back on when we reach our destination. Wish us luck. Over and out."
Following her directions, Garvin unstrapped the head-cam, turned it off, and placed it in his pack with the rest of his instruments. They sat quietly, enjoying the smooth ride and the cool air. As the car reached its cruising speed of 240 mph, the overhead lights formed a continuous blur, and the supporting cables raced by like a picket fence. Nancy found the flickering patterns disconcerting, so she closed her eyes. They sat in silence for the next two hours as the car cruised along. Eventually the car decelerated, and with no seatbelts to restrain them, the passengers braced themselves with hands and feet as the blur outside slowed to a series of recognizable features. The car stopped in the middle of the intersection and shut down, as though someone had pulled the plug.
"Looks like we're here." said Dan, opening the car door and stepping outside. Nancy was close behind. Garvin was still fumbling about in his pack, looking for the head-cam. He found it, turned it on, placed it on his head, and joined the others on the roadway. When he closed his door, the car, having no occupants, sped off automatically, headed for some unseen garage.
"There's the complex," said Nancy, "but how do we get in?"
They could see a corner of the structure, but there were no doors, no windows, and no signs. Garvin looked at one wall, and then the other. "I assume it is like the complex we just left. These would be the living quarters, and if it is oriented the same way, then the entrance should be straight ahead. We'll see it in a hundred yards or so, and if we don't, we'll come back here and take a left."
"Sounds like a plan." agreed Nancy. "Lead the way."
As they came along side the structure Garvin looked down at the white column descending into the red star below. "We were right -it's a lot wider." Indeed, it was almost 6 times as wide; almost as wide as the structure itself. Nancy watch the huge column shrink to a thin white line in the distance, then she watched the red core pulsate with life, its edges jumping in and out. Dozens of red tinged clouds and vortices surrounded it, like so many worker bees protecting the hive.
"Are you all right?" Garvin put his hand on her arm.
"Yes, I'm fine. I don't know what came over me earlier, but it's gone now. I'm just watching - trying to comprehend the scope of this thing that we must somehow defeat."
"We'll find a way." He allowed her to look for several minutes, but he kept a firm grip on her arm.
They walked on, and as expected, a narrow path split off from the main road, curved around, and led to a door at the side of the building. Garvin opened it and found a small laundry room, much like the one they left behind. They eagerly stepped into the air conditioned comfort of their home away from home, away from home, away from home. They discovered the same hallway with the same blue carpeting, the bathroom and kitchen on one side, and the bedrooms on the other. They took advantage of the bathroom first, then went across to their strangely familiar bedroom.
"Same sleeping arrangements?" Dan asked.
"Only if we have to spend the night." grumbled Nancy. Without her air mattress, she would have to settle for a short bed.
They unpacked some of their items and went down the hall, looking for something new. The kitchen seemed like a clone of the one they left behind, including the deep freezer filled with nutrabars. However, several boxes were missing from the top shelf. Once again Nancy wondered why the kitchen was stocked, and who ate the missing bars. After eating their own bars they went on to the power room. The same double glass tank greeted them, with a thin layer of liquid antinitrogen at the bottom. A complete circumnavigation revealed the same equipment at the far end: the nitrogen separator, the generator, and the power conditioner. Dan was careful to avoid the fuel line running along the floor. They saw no additional doors, no windows, no secret passages. Nancy put their thoughts into words.
"If there's a control center, they have it well hidden."
As they were walking back to their bedroom Dan came up with the obvious answer. "Captain, there's no hatch. There's no way in from above, and no entryway. So - what's behind the door at the far end of the hall?"
"Of course." said Nancy as they quickened their pace. She opened the door and stepped into a small room that was both familiar and unfamiliar. The blue carpeting and the brown walls were the same, but the ladder was missing, and there was no hatch overhead. Instead, the right wall contained a single door. The room was nothing more than a passage from one wing of the complex into another. Nancy waited for her friends to get in position, guns at the ready. Prior to this they had kept their guard down, but this was new territory. Anything, or anyone, could be on the other side of that door. Nancy pulled it open and stepped back, trying to see around the corner. The room was spacious, and free of Arcots, as best they could tell, so she stepped inside. Her eyes swept the room from corner to corner, and she motioned the others in. The floor was covered in the same blue carpeting, and the walls were a light brown, similar to the entryway. A large screen dominated the far wall, and a large red chair sat in the center of the room in front of the big screen. A keyboard, complete with joystick, sat on a small table in front of the chair. More chairs and couches lined the walls.
"I think this is it." Nancy barely spoke above a whisper. "I think this is the control center for the ship." The others merely nodded. She sat down on the couch in the far back and waved Dan towards the central chair.
"Oh no, I'm not the captain." he protested.
"And I can't read a word on that screen - so you're in charge. Just let me know what you're doing before you do it."
Dan sat down and put the keyboard in his lap. It was a standard keyboard, if you lived on Arcot. Dan was familiar with the letters, but he was hardly a touch typist. He looked back up at the screen, which reminded him of a desktop, with a status line above and several icons below. "Global Monitor." he read aloud. "Not sure about the global part, but I think it's a ship-wide monitor. And the first row of icons are the same as the ones in the car, stations 1 2 3 and 4. Shall I activate one of them and see if I'm right?"
"Go for it. And Dan, you don't have to ask permission for each and every action; just check with me before you hit the self-destruct button."
"Right." He used the joystick to position the cursor over station 1, and pressed the button at the top of the handle. The screen was replaced with more icons. "It's hierarchical."
"I expected that." said Garvin. "That's the only practical way an intelligent race can organize and access reams of data."
"Entryway, main hallway, bedroom 1, bedroom 2, and so on, bathroom, laundry, kitchen, power. It's presenting the rooms in the complex." He clicked on the first icon and an image of the entryway appeared. The ladder was plainly visible, as though the camera were over the door.
"Very nice." commented Nancy.
Dan bumped the joystick just a bit and the view shifted to the left. He moved the stick around and the screen presented each of the four walls in turn.
"How are you doing that?" asked Garvin.
"Just move the joystick around. The interface is pretty intuitive." He tipped up to look at the hatch above, then down to the floor. "They must have cameras everywhere, in every corner of the room. The computer constructs the view based on my virtual location and all those different images."
"Ok, how do you get out of the room?"
There were no icons - nothing that indicated exit or back. Dan looked down at the keyboard and found a likely candidate. A key next to the joystick said back. He pressed it and the previous screen returned. He then clicked on bathroom, and the sinks appeared, as though he was ready to wash his hands. He moved about, and even found a way to zoom in and out.
"You're right," said Nancy, "the Arcots aren't big on privacy."
"No." chuckled Dan, as he zoomed in on one of the showers. "I suppose they're not. Do you want me to look at more rooms?"
"No. The entryway was empty. I want to know what station we came in at. There was probably a sign over the door, but nobody bothered to look. We'll need to know, if we want to get back home."
Dan hit back twice, then moved over to station 2. He brought the entryway into view, and it was filled with their supplies. "That's it." he announced. "Station 2. Remember that when we take a car back home." He stepped through all the rooms in the complex, and each was as they remembered it, with their personal effects scattered about.
When Dan moved into the kitchen Garvin asked him to stop for a moment. He wondered if the images on the screen were being faithfully recorded by his head-cam. In the worst case, both units could run at the same frequency, with a phase shift between them. So every time his cam snapped a picture, the big screen showed black, as it flickered between images. NASA might see nothing but black. The cam was designed to detect this, and shift its phase or frequency accordingly, and it worked well with Earthly displays, but this was alien technology. "I want to make sure we're getting all this." He rewound the cam, just a few seconds, and played the images back on a tiny screen embedded in the unit. The kitchen popped into view, just like the one he saw on the big screen. "It looks good." He strapped it back on his head. "You can continue."
Dan took them on a virtual tour of the power room, then returned to the global monitor. "Do you want to see the other stations?"
"What else you got?" asked Nancy.
"Front station, back station, roads, core, outside - I guess that's it."
"Let's see the core."
The background was red, and gave the illusion of curvature, as though you were inside a red ball. A blue sphere floated in the middle, taking up half the screen. Several lines extended from the sphere to the edges of the screen. They were blue near the sphere, changing to green, yellow, orange, and finally red as you traveled away from the sphere. A message appeared at the bottom, remained for ten seconds, then disappeared. Dan gave an approximate translation.
"False colors - something about the spectrum from red to xrays - use the cursor for temperature. That's all I got before it disappeared."
"I don't see a cursor." noted Nancy.
"Neither do I." He looked at the keys around the joystick. The key below the back key had an icon that looked like the cursor he had seen on other screens. He pressed it and a cursor appeared in the center of the screen. He pressed it again and the cursor went away. Bringing the cursor back, he pushed the button on the joystick and the temperature appeared at the bottom of the screen for five seconds, then disappeared. Dan thought for a moment, trying to remember the conversion between Arcot degrees and degrees kalvin. "Somewhere around 32,000 degrees." he concluded.
"32,000 degrees!" Garvin practically shouted it out. "The Arcots are handling stellar material that is 32,000 degrees?"
"Yes, if this computer display is accurate, and if I'm interpreting it properly. Remember, they've got a 3 million year technological head start on us."
"Dan, can you check the temperature along one of those lines extending from the sphere?"
"Will do, Captain." He had to zoom in on one of the lines, so that it was thicker than the cursor. Near the sphere, the temperature was still 30,000. As he moved out, away from the sphere, the temperature dropped to 25,000, 20,000, 15,000, 10,000, 5,000, and finally 1,200.
"The colors correspond to temperature." observed Garvin. "From red to blue runs from cold to hot, where cold is already hot enough to melt most metals, and hot is hotter than the surface of our sun."
"But what are those lines?" Dan asked.
"Back up a bit, so I can see the big picture." Dan pulled back so that the line, which looked as thick as a pencil, joined the blue sphere to the red background. "I think this is the base of one of the six columns that runs all the way out to the shell. We saw the top of the column just beneath the living quarters. This is the structure that keeps everything together. And naturally, heat flows up the column by conduction. The base has the same temperature as the core, and it cools off from there as you move up the column."
Dan tried to move up the column, beyond the orange/red end, but the image would not advance. "There seems to be a red wall that I can't get past."
"It looks like an inner shell." speculated Garvin. "The core is surrounded by a red hot inner shell, with a vacuum in between to isolate the heat. The atmosphere rests on this inner shell, extending all the way up to the outer shell."
"That's a lot of pressure on the inner shell."
"Yes, well, I'm sure it's a perfect sphere, and it's made of that same fancy material as the outer shell. But the columns, they have to be made of stellar material, at least near the base. That means the Arcots can mold and shape stellar material, at 30,000 degrees. I don't have a clue how they could do that."
"I need scale." demanded Nancy, getting back to business. "How dense is that core? Is it white dwarf or neutron star? We need to know."
Dan pulled back, then went all the way around the core, like a bird flying about in a cage. He turned and looked at the inner shell, then at the columns, then back to the core. "There's nothing here that would indicate scale. Just by visual estimates, the inner shell is twice the diameter of the core. If we could measure the inner shell, we'd have a pretty good handle on the core."
Nancy turned towards Garvin. "Can you do that by laser?"
"I think so. But the frequency has to be just right. I need to send a pulse through an ocean of air, have it bounce off the inner shell, and return to me. The shell reflects a lot of wave lengths, so that's good - but there's really a lot of air down there, at high pressure, so I have to choose a color that sails through nitrogen with virtually no absorption. And Nans, there's another problem. I'm bouncing the signal off a near perfect sphere, and nothing is more stealthy than a sphere. If we're not perfectly vertical, the beam will bounce off in another direction. We have to aim straight down."
"I think we can do that."
"Ok, the laser distometer is in my pack in the bedroom."
They rose in unison, left the control room, stopped by the bedroom to pick up the distometer, and went out onto the catwalk. Garvin spent several minutes setting up the unit. "I don't have the ship's computer for reference, so I can only guess at the optimal frequency. Let's hope this one does the trick." He hit enter, then went on to configure the pulse. "I'll be sending out 10 pulses per second, and, assuming we get an echo, distance will appear on the screen. I'm assuming air at 50 times atmospheric pressure. That's a good average." Nancy nodded.
He leaned over the guardrail and pointed the unit straight down. Receiving no response, he adjusted it slightly to the left, then back. After ten minutes Nancy volunteered. "May I give it a try?" He handed her the device and she leaned over the rail. "It's just a target," she thought to herself, " a big red target. Aim right for the center - straight down the middle." She placed her eye above the barrel of the device, as though it had a scope. After some fine adjustments, a soft beep indicated a return pulse. She straightened up, stretched, and handed the device back to Garvin.
"Ok - 310 miles - 280 miles leaves 30 miles. The inner shell has a radius of 30 miles, give or take, and Dan, if you're right, the core has a radius of 15 miles. That's not nearly compact enough to be a neutron star. It has to be a white dwarf."
Nancy sat down on the catwalk, her back to the wall. "That's bad news for Earth. But not surprising - even the Arcots aren't capable of manipulating neutron stars or black holes." She spoke into her communicator, hoping her words would eventually be relayed back to Houston. "If we fail, the Martian colony is your only hope. You'd better build a clean room over there in the next two years. They'll need to manufacture their own chips, and maintain their own computers. They need to be self sufficient in every way." She paused for a moment, staring at the blank screen. "For now, that's all I can suggest. Over and out."
Taking the hint, Garvin turned off his head-cam. "Nans, except for the lunch break, we've been going non-stop since this morning. I'd like to take a shower and call it a day."
"I agree - it's been a long day."
They placed the instruments back in the bedroom, took off their clothes, and took their first Arcotian shower. After setting the temperature, Nancy sat down on the floor. She had had enough of standing in 2 G's, and she didn't want to slip and fall on the tile. The others followed her lead. The warm water ran through her hair, and it felt wonderful. Then she realized they didn't bring any soap from station 2. The others came to the same realization at almost the same time. "We're going to have to make due with Arcot soap." she complained, reaching for the dispenser. But it was up near the showerhead, just out of reach. She muttered under her breath, got back up, and pushed the button a dozen times. "I'm getting a big handful, so I don't have to stand up again." she explained. Once again the others followed her lead. Nancy sat back down just outside the stream and started rubbing the soap all over her body, but it was rather unsatisfying. It didn't lather up at all. In fact it reminded her of a very mild dish detergent, highly dilute - the kind of solution you use to clean the leaves of house plants. Indeed, Arcot skin was more like a plant than an animal, so this made sense. Furthermore, the Arcots had no hair, so there was nothing resembling shampoo. She rubbed the last of the Arcot soap into her hair, but again, the results were less than satisfactory.
"Next time we bring our own soap." grumbled Dan, trying to wash himself.
Garvin was not concerned with the chemical properties of Arcot soap; he had his mind on other things. His eyes returned again and again to Nancy, as the thin soap ran through her long blonde hair and down onto her breasts. He wanted very much to touch her. Some of this was a natural attraction towards a friend that he liked and admired, and some of it, he knew, was born of desperation. History books described soldiers in a war zone, who would make love to just about anybody, to displace, temporarily, the fear that had been woven into their being. Some even fell in love, if there was a partner nearby who was short-term compatible, though these relationships did not always stand the test of time. Garvin wasn't in love with her, he knew that, and she knew it too, but at the same time, this was much more than a simple escape from the frightening prospect of a doomed planet. Nancy was attractive, physically, intellectually, and emotionally - and after seven months in space, he definitely wanted her.
Although her glances were much more subtle than his overt stares, Nancy was ready as well, and later that night, when Dan was asleep, they went off into a separate bedroom and removed their night clothes. The traditional positions were impractical, even dangerous, under the high gravity. Furthermore, an Arcot bed could hardly hold Nancy, much less the two of them. For several minutes they sat on the bed, side by side, uncertain how to proceed. Finally Garvin moved to the floor and told Nancy to lie on her back with her legs apart. He took his time, starting and stopping, starting and stopping, while she massaged her breasts. She wanted to moan, and scream, but Dan was asleep in the next room, and the walls were thin, so she kept it all inside. Her climax seemed to go on and on. Finally she collapsed on the bed exhausted. After she recovered they switched positions, and with her help, Garvin reached a state of ecstasy. He closed his eyes and wondered why they had waited so long to touch each other.
As Garvin was about to leave, Nancy stopped him and kissed him on the cheek. "Thank you."
"Do you think that was a mistake?" he asked, recalling their earlier conversation, when he approached her on the ship.
"No. I don't think so."
"Good. Because I thought it was wonderful!"