He sat swinging and talking, reminiscing about "the growing up of young Adam," as he put it. The agent had made himself at home on the front steps, listening. The doctor's comments were little short of being an eulogy.
He finished and was silent, tapping a black briar pipe against his hand while he contemplated the agent with eyes which had long since ceased to see.
"One other thing," he added finally. "Adam was sure a heller with the girls."
The agent started to comment that Crag's dossier looked like the roll call of a girl's dormitory but refrained. He didn't want to prejudice the testimony.
Zero hour on the plains of Arzachel. The sun, an intolerably brilliant ball pasted against the ebony sky, had started its drop toward the horizon. The shadows on the plain were lengthening, harbingers of the bitter two-weeks-long night to come. They crept out from the sheer wall of the crater, reaching to engulf Pickering Base with icy fingers.
Crag and Prochaska were alone, now, in the stripped cabin of the Aztec. Nagel and Richter, under Larkwell's command, had departed for Bandit an hour earlier with the last of their supplies. Crag disliked splitting the crew but saw no alternative. He had to gamble. The element of certainty, the ability to predict, the expectations of logic—all these had vanished, swept away by the vagaries of chance. They could do only so much. Beyond that their fate was pawn to the chaotic cross fires of human elements pitted against the architecture of the cosmos. They were puppets in the last lottery of probability.
Prochaska broke the silence: "It's going to be close."
Crag's eyes remained riveted to the instruments. Drone Charlie and Red Dog were plunging through space separated by a scant half-hour's flight time. Despite the drone's long launch lead, the gap between the two rockets had been narrowed to a perilous point. Drone Charlie was decelerating rapidly, her braking rockets flaring spasmodically to slow her headlong flight.
"We'd better get into our suits," Crag said finally. "We want to get out of this baby the second Charlie lets down."