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Nelsen looked out from his sundeck, and saw dangerous contrasts. The worst, perhaps, was a spherical bubble of stellene. Inside it was a great globe of water surrounded by air a colossal dewdrop. Within it, a man and two small boys no doubt father and sons from Pallastown, were swimming, horsing around, having a swell time only a few feet from nothing. Nelsen spoke softly into his radio-phone.
After Nelsen's arrival, his memory of the interval of acute emergency could have been broken down into a series of pictures, in which he was often active. First, the wreckage, which he helped to pick up, like any of the others. Pallastown had been like froth on a stone, a castle on a floating, golden crag.
"Meanwhile, to keep from feeling regimented by civilization, you could take your rocket launcher and join the perimeter watchers that range out a thousand miles..." Nance Codiss arrived a week later, with a group of recent Pallastown convalescents.
Jig Hollins, the guy who had played it safe, was just as dead. Eileen Sands was a celebrity in Serene, in Pallastown and the whole Belt. Mex Ramos of the flapping squirrel tails on an old motor scooter now belonged to the history of exploration, though he no longer had real hands or feet, and, very likely, was now dead, somewhere out toward interstellar space.
Space is still nice and empty ahead, toward the Kuzaks and Pallastown. That condition might not last... Gimp, are you honest-to-gosh set on going down to this dried-up, museum-world?" "Umhmm. See you soon, though," Gimp answered, grinning. "I'll leave my bubb and my load of supplies up here on Phobos. Be back for it probably in a week.
But how could he tell her that and make sense? Not much made sense to him anymore. It seemed that he had to get away from everybody that he had ever seen in space. Fifty hours before his departure with a returning bubb caravan that had brought more Earth-emigrants, Nelsen acquired a travelling companion who had arrived from Pallastown with a small caravan bringing machinery.
Then he pronounced a few cuss words, laughed at himself for getting so serious, shrugged, and with the casualness of hopper with his pockets loaded, moved toward the rec area, which was some distance off. It was night over this part of rapidly growing Pallastown. Moving along a lighted causeway, he saw the man with the shovel teeth. Glory, had he managed to survive so long?
You'll be around Pallastown for a while, helping out with this end of the Twin's enterprises, won't you, Gimp?" Hines grinned. "Probably. Glad you slobs got memories. Glad to be of assistance, anytime. Les is no louse he'll help old friends. I'll bring him the camera, out of the safe at my hotel, as soon as we leave here..." Lester smiled doubtfully, and then happily.
"It's the life of Reilly, Paul," Ramos was beaming back to Jarviston, Minnesota, not many hours after Frank Nelsen, Gimp Hines and he started out from the Moon, with their ultimate destination after the delivery of their loads of supplies to the Kuzaks tentatively marked in their minds as Pallastown on Pallas, the Golden Asteroid.
Nelsen wasn't allowed to touch another helicopter. During that month, between brief but violent seizures of the fever, he was employed as a maintenance mechanic. Then the news came. There had been an emergency call from Pallastown. Rescue units were to be organized, and rocketed out in high-velocity U.N.S.F. and U.S.S.F bubbs. There had been sabotage, violence.
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