"Well, no. But that doesn't mean I couldn't have. I was just too busy with the women on the outworlds—"
I looked at Clair and Clair looked at me. "4270," we said together, and when Clair checked the charts again she found that its present orbital position was just a few degrees off to the left.
"Two hours," I grunted. "Maybe three. If we're lucky, she'll be deserted...."
Clair smiled. "Two domes there, Jerry. Hah—a winter home and a summer home."
"Ain't no seasons on an asteroid," Gramps said very seriously. "Of course, if you two kids want, you can have one dome and I can have the other. Might be a good idea at that."
Clair told him not to be silly, that we couldn't get along without his guitar playing anyway, and then I was busy turning us the few degrees which would bring us into orbital conjunction with 4270. Ahead and all around us the little sparks which were spaceships fanned out in all directions, hurtling for their homesteads out here beyond Mars. It was nice to know that in just a few hours—if luck held—we'd be setting up home, living in our own place instead of the crowded barracks they set up for transient workers back on Earth. Nice? Hell, that's all we'd been thinking about since the announcement came through six months ago.
You really feel a small turn in an old Karden Cruiser rocketing outward at top speed. I could feel the gravity slamming me back down against the right-hand cushions of the pilot-chair, and I heard Gramps muttering something under his breath. With Clair, he had remained out of his bunk so that he could watch us blast in toward the asteroid, and now I could picture each of them grasping stanchions for all they were worth, peering out of the port.
I couldn't turn around to watch, of course. This landing on a tiny asteroid is tricky business. You can't just come in and set her down as easy as all that, floating in on the cushion of a five-hundred mile atmosphere.
The Karden came in slowly, at right angles to the orbit, and I saw that 4270 was an amorphous hunk of greenish rock, craggy and mountainous, if you call a ponderously turning rough-hewn slab of stone less than three thousand feet across mountainous.