"Just a minute," I said. "There was something strange up ahead. I want to see if short-range radar can get through our electrogravitational jamming here."
I took a sighting. My helmet set projected the pattern on the cornea. Sweetness building up to a stab of pure salt—those were the blips.
Beside me, there was a thin thread of violet. Quade had whistled. He was reading the map too.
The slope fell away sharply in front of us, becoming a deep gorge. There was something broken and twisted at the bottom, something we had known for an instant as a streak of spice.
"There's one free-fall," I said, "where you wouldn't live long enough to get used to it."
He said nothing on the route back to the spacer.
"I know all about this sort of thing, Gav," First Officer Nagurski said expansively. He was rubbing the well-worn ears of our beagle mascot, Bruce. A heavy tail thudded on the steel deck from time to time.
My finger could barely get in the chafing band of my regulation collar. I was hot and tired, fresh—in only the chronological sense—from a pressure suit.
"What do you know all about, Nagurski? Dogs? Spacemen? Women? Transphasia?"