"Hey," Fisher called after him, "that redhead, Eileen, told me to ask if you're taking her out tonight."
Dudley paused. He ran a hand over his face. "Yeah, I guess so," he said.
He went out, thinking, I should have taken her. The hell with regulations and Jack's theories about her being born too soon to be useful on Mars. She might have straightened out.
He headed for the tunnel that led to the loading domes.
Ericsson was a large crater, over a hundred miles across and with a beautifully intact ringwall, so it took him some hours, even with the tractor he borrowed, to go as far as the edge of the crater. Jack Fisher was waiting for him in the surface dome when he returned hours later.
"Welcome back," he said, chewing nervously on his cigar. "I was wondering if we'd have to go looking for you." He looked relieved.
"How did she look?" he asked casually, as Dudley climbed out of his space suit in the locker room.
Dudley peeled off the one-piece suit he had worn under the heating pads. He sniffed.
"Chee-rist, I need a shower after that.... She looked all right. Pretty cute, in a way. Like she was happy here on Luna."
He picked up towel and soap. "So I fixed it so she could stay," he added.