"Tom! Tom, can you hear me?"
He turned away from the port and flicked a switch on the radio console.
"Hello Ruth. I can hear you."
A hubbub of excitement crackled through the radio receiver, then the girl's voice: "Are you all right? Is everything...."
"Everything's fine," Tom said flatly. He could picture the scene back at the station—dozens of people clustered around the jury-rigged radio, Ruth working the controls, trying hard to stay calm when it was impossible to, brushing back that permanently displaced wisp of brown hair that stubbornly fell over her forehead.
"Jason will be here in a minute," she said. "He's in the tracking shack, helping to calculate your orbit."
Of course Jason will be here, Tom thought. Aloud he said, "He needn't bother. I can see the satellite packages; they're only a couple of hundred yards from the ship."
Even through the radio he could sense the stir that went through them.
Don't get your hopes up, he warned silently. Remember, I'm no engineer. Engineers are too valuable to risk on this job. I'm just a tool, a mindless screwdriver sent here to assemble this glorified tinkertoy. I'm the muscle, Arnoldsson is the nerve link, and Jason is the brain.