The side jets spat steam and the ship started a slow rotation about the shell. The shell followed it. In thirty minutes, they were a gigantic bolo spinning in emptiness. Long checked the Ephemeris for the position of Deimos.
At a precisely calculated moment, the cables released their magnetic field and the shell went streaking off tangentially in a trajectory that would, in a day or so, bring it within pronging distance of the shell stores on the Martian satellite.
Rioz watched it go. He felt good. He turned to Long. “This is one fine day for us.”
“What about Hilder’s speech?” asked Long.
“What? Who? Oh, that. Listen, if I had to worry about everything some damned Grounder said, I’d never get any sleep. Forget it.”
“I don’t think we should forget it.”
“You’re nuts. Don’t bother me about it, will you? Get some sleep instead.”
4
Ted Long found the breadth and height of the city’s main thoroughfare exhilarating. It had been two months since the Commissioner had declared a moratorium on scavenging and had pulled all ships out of space, but this feeling of a stretched-out vista had not stopped thrilling Long. Even the thought that the moratorium was called pending a decision on the part of Earth to enforce its new insistence on water economy, by deciding upon a ration limit for scavenging, did not cast him entirely down.
The roof of the avenue was painted a luminous light blue, perhaps as an old-fashioned imitation of Earth’s sky. Ted wasn’t sure. The walls were lit with the store windows that pierced it.