"Well, yes, of course." There was a defiant look on her face, but Jon Kane was grinning. Saturn hulked far to their starboard side, now, and the ship's automatics were bringing them in dead on Titan. The planetoid was growing visibly bigger by the minute, and the other Ring of its primary was casting the interior of the spacetender in weird, vari-colored shadow.
"If you were out there in a suit and somebody else was holding your oxytank, controlling just how much air you could have, how would you feel about him? Would you feel like thanking him for letting you have air to breathe?"
"Well, I—"
"You'd keep a damned close eye on him. And if he started telling you what to do and when to do it or he'd suffocate you, you'd get to hating his guts even if he behaved like the spirit of Christ Himself!"
"Who taught you all this, Master Kane? Who is this Christ?"
"Look, Deanne, a grown man should be capable of thinking for himself! But before you go getting sore at me again, just answer this one about the guy holding your oxytank—suppose, somehow, he forgot, little by little, how to work the valve—and realized that there was a chance you might find out about it? He wouldn't be in the pilot's seat anymore, would he?"
"He wouldn't be able to shut me off, if that's what you mean," she said quickly, going along now with his analogy. "But he wouldn't be able to give me more air in a hurry if I needed it, either!"
"And so then what happens?"
The girl's face was suddenly grim. For a long moment, Kane could see, she was thinking, and thinking hard. And then she said at length, "Is that where you come in?"
"If I can give you back your tank of air, I guess it is."