"What do they use it for now, Joanna?" she murmured.
"Nothing," the girl said with a trace of scorn.
Lynne knew she should have known about that. She recalled now a vidar newscast in which the abandonment of the last of the space-stations had been mentioned. In the years before A-engines were finally perfected space-stations were vitally necessary as change-over stops for interplanetary rocket flights. But once fuel ceased to be a problem they had been used merely as meteor-warning points and weather stations.
In the first function they had proved useless—in fact one of them had been destroyed by a large space-missile—and weather forecasting and control were practised far more efficiently by electronic mastery of the Heaviside Layer. Lynne shouldn't have forgotten—but when she heard it the matter of space-stations had been utterly unimportant in her life.
A steward in space-black bolo and clout offered them vari-flavored colafizzes from a rack strapped about his waist. Lynne wondered at this mode of serving the drinks while she sipped hers but decided not to ask Joanna. She didn't want to appear a total numbskull to a girl whose whole life had consisted of conditioning for Mars.
She found out soon enough when Rolf Marcein walked into the saloon before she had finished sipping her drink. She rose to greet him, to haul him off somewhere so they could talk alone—and as she did so she automatically dropped her colafizz in the receptacle ready to receive it in one arm of her plastolounge.
Joanna made a grab for it as it bounced off and rose lazily in the air and turned slowly over. The African girl caught it before it released any of the liquid remaining in it, pushed it firmly down into the hollow space reserved for it, where it was magnetically held.
But Lynne was not paying much attention. She was having enough trouble holding herself upright as her feet displayed an astonishing reluctance to keep on the floor while the rest of her wanted to describe a lazy parabola across the saloon. She did an off-to-Buffalo and wound up against Rolf's chest with his arms about her.
Embarrassed she whispered fiercely, "Put me down, you marlet!"
He grinned at her infuriatingly, replied, "I'm no marlet—that's a very nasty word on Mars and most of these people understand it. Don't you know you're in space?"