"But he wasn't. Instead he turns up on this crucial mission."
He busied himself with frequency adjustment on his portable transmitter. With it he would be able to tell, soon after landing, whether the Operations Co-ordinator could still be reached orally through its command discriminator circuit.
He flicked on the power switch, positioned the microphone comfortably against his larynx and sharply intoned a series of numerals. An oscilloscope faithfully traced the amplitude pattern, verifying effective transmission.
Down the companionway in the pilot's compartment, he could see McAllister anchored in his acceleration couch. He was drifting back and forth between padding and slack restraining straps, vicariously lost in the blood-and-guts action of a dramatape feeding into the view slot of his helmet.
Stewart read the label on the empty container—"The Kowalski Bros. in the Korean War."
"Always has his head buried in one of those escapist tapes, hasn't he?" Carol observed, still staring out the port.
"I don't think he ever grew up," Stewart agreed. But, again, even the Bureau seemed to contain its share of coasters who had never quite reached maturity, he remembered.
"Even in the Bureau," Carol observed thoughtfully, "you'll find coasters who've never reached maturity."
Intuitively, he tensed. Was it just coincidence that she had repeated, almost word for word, his own thoughts?