Steve Podalski swung his legs into view and slid carelessly down the dull metal roundness of tube fourteen, like a boy on a barrel. His magnetic boots thunked onto tube thirteen and took hold. He gave Rhiannon a look compounded of acid and pity. "Go to hell with your noise."
Off at the other end of Bed 52 a gong sounded its invitation to cease work and relax for a while. The twelve Navy spaceboats in 52, lined hip to hip like reclining madames on their slanting cradles, seemed suddenly to begin to shed their skins as a solid parasitica of out-ship workers melted in streams toward the upthrust frameworks of the lifts.
"I comin gout." A small cabbagelike Asteroidal came out of the smudgy darkness of the tube, a scraping-ray in each flat tentacle. "I knockin goff." Without a break in its fluid motion it climbed onto Rhiannon's arm and couched itself in the angle of his elbow.
"Yeah, me too. Coming, Stevie?"
Podalski shook his head.
He stood and watched Rhiannon and Tweety—Tieu-tuiey was its given name, but to pronounce it correctly always sounded a little gay—make their way toward the lift. He shook his head again. Once a pilot, he thought, not necessarily always a pilot. Space did rotten things to men who got careless with their radiation screens. It blotched their minds, tossed up fences around memory and intelligence.
A most brilliant crystal—that's what Rhiannon had once been.
Sixty feet away and four stories above the concrete floor of Bed 52, a man stood by the curving window of Karrin's office and watched Rhiannon descend in the lift. He was a small, padded man with the sly look of the lower Mars suburbs about him.
"Tubemonkey," he said, curling his lips over the word.