Maggie, sitting alone now with a wrinkled paper and its mass of scrawled circuits. Alone and hollow with grief and needing help. Ben's throat tightened. Damn it, he didn't want to think about that.
What was it the little big-eared man had said? I've made copies for our own ships and for the brass in Hoover City.
Why had he said that? Why would renegades give their secrets to the Space Corps? The Corps would incorporate the discoveries in their ships. With them, they'd reach the asteroids. Jacob's group would be pushed even further outward.
Ben stopped, the wind whipping at his suit and buffeting his helmet—but not as hard as the answer he had found.
Jacob and his men had an existence to justify, a debt to pay. They justified that existence and paid that debt by helping humanity in its starward advance.
Maggie had said, We carry cargoes of almost pure uranium and tungsten and all the stuff that's getting scarce on Earth and Mars and Venus. If we want to risk our lives getting it, that's our business.... The dome we're in now was designed and built by us a few years ago. We lost a few men in the construction, but with almost every advance in space, someone dies.
The wind pressed Ben back. The coldness of the Venusian night was seeping into his suit. It was as if his body were bathed, at once, in flame and ice.
He slipped, fell, his face turned toward the sandy ground. He did not try to rise.
Yet his mind seemed to soar above the pain, to carry him into a wondrous valley of new awareness.