He leaned back and stared speculatively at the curving tip of the Lunar Rockies that ended in one of the largest craters on the far side of Luna. His eyes squinted slightly and there was a crease between them, as if he spent much time peering into instruments. There were deeper lines beside his mouth, but the thin lips and pointed chin neutralized that evidence of frequent smiling.
"Are we nearly there?"
Dudley's brown eyes opened so wide that the whites gleamed in the dim light from his instruments. Then he shut them tightly and shook his head quickly.
He had thought he heard a woman's voice, and of course he couldn't have. Freight rockets were checked out of Terran spaceports with only a pilot aboard. A lonely job for a man, but it was really only a way of keeping in practice. He made six round trips to Luna a year, but the big one was the three-month kick to Mars.
Then he smelled the perfume, so out of place in the machine-crowded compartment. He turned around slowly.
She stood with one hand gripping the lead of a computing machine to keep her feet on the deck. Dudley stared her up and down two or three times before he realized his mouth hung open.
Slim and about five-feet-four, she looked like a nice little girl making her first disastrous experiments with adult make-up. The slack suit of deep blue, revealing a soft white blouse at the neck of the jacket, was in the best of taste, but her heavy application of lipstick was crude.
And her hair isn't naturally ash-blonde, Dudley thought. Yet she looks like such a kid. Not pretty, but she might be in a few years.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded harshly.
For a second, her eyes were scared. Then the expression was supplanted by a hard, make-believe confidence, leaving him merely with a fading sense of shame at his tone.