"Maybe it's your thyroid," I said. "Shut up."
"I'm twenty-seven," said Red. "Too old to have thyroids."
"You mean adenoids."
Red growled and shut off the razor. He ran his hand over his face. "I've got a face like a school-kid's," he said. "If there was only a girl on this god-forsaken piece of rock to see it."
There were no girls on Asteroid 57GM. This place didn't have anything excepting a lonely shack with paper-thin walls made of special heat-insulating material. There wasn't a blade of grass; not a puff of wind; no soil for violets; not even a symmetrical shape, it was lopsided like a beaten-up baseball. Or at least that was what I thought until something happened to the balance scales.
The idea of sending Jay Hayling, which is me, and ruddy Red Brewer to Asteroid 57GM, was simply to check up on some figures which said that this little 10-mile chunk of rock didn't have the right mass. Twice it had been clocked on near passages to Jupiter and twice it had behaved differently, as if it had suddenly lost some of its mass. So Red and I had been sentenced to fifteen months alone in space on an asteroid just to find out that somebody had made a mistake in arithmetic.
The sonar equipment showed what kind of rock it was—iron and basalt. And I'd made borings which checked. We'd tested the speed of escape which was a good push so we had to be careful, and its force of gravity, which wasn't much. And then I'd discovered that the balance in the lab had a habit of being 25 per cent wrong one way or the other every time I tried to use it.
Red put away his razor and went through the little door leading to the living quarters. The partition was crystal clear plastic so I could see him pulling himself along by the hand rail toward the bookcase. I knew he would presently find himself something to read while I worked.
We seldom walked in the laboratory. Our muscles, conditioned by terrestrial gravity, were too strong for walking. We'd have bumped our heads on the ceiling at every step and possibly we might even have punched a hole in the roof, losing our air. So we sort of pulled ourselves along by a system of hand rails on all of the anchored desks, furniture and walls. It was like pulling yourself along the bottom of the ocean by hanging onto rocks, since the air in the lab was dense enough to support our almost weightless bodies.