A helmeted figure riding a little platform on the inside of one of the clamshells turned a series of knobs, climbed down, and rapped on the ship’s entrance port.
Ross opened it diffidently, and almost strangled in the antiseptic fumes. Helena choked and wheezed behind him as the figure threw back its helmet and said, “Where’s the captain?”
“I am he,” said Ross meticulously. “I would like to be put in touch with the Cavallo Machine-Tool Company of Novj Grad.”
The figure shook its long hair loose, which provided Ross with the necessary clue: it was a woman. Not a very attractive-looking woman, for she wore no makeup; but by the hair, by the brows and by the smoothness of her chin, a woman all the same. She said coldly, “If you’re the captain, who’s that?”
Helena said in a small voice, “I’m Helena, from Junior Unit Twenty-Three.”
“Indeed.” Suddenly the woman smiled. “Well, come ashore, dear,” she said. “You must be tired from your trip. Both of you come ashore,” she added graciously.
She led the way out of the clamshells to a waiting closed car. Azor’s sun had an unpleasant bluish cast to it, not a type-G at all; Ross thought that the lighting made the woman look uglier than she really had to be. Even Helena looked pinched and bloodless, which he knew well was not the case at all.
All around them was activity. Whatever this planet’s faults, it was not a stagnant home for graybeards. Ross, craning, saw nothing that was shoddy, nothing that would have looked out of place in the best-equipped port of Halsey’s Planet. And the reception lounge, or whatever it was, that the woman took them to was a handsome and prettily furnished construction. “Some lunch?” the woman asked, directing her attention to Helena. “A cup of tribrew, maybe? Let me have the boy bring some.” Helena looked to Ross for signals, and Ross, gritting his teeth, nodded to her to agree. Too young the last time, too male this time; was there ever going to be a planet where he mattered to anyone?
He said desperately, “Madam, forgive my interruption, but this lady and myself need urgently to get in touch with the Cavallo company. Is this Novj Grad?”
The woman’s pale brows arched. She said, with an effort, “No, it is not.”