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.With no way to stop quickly, he bypassed his goal, slowing himselfin aseries of jumps, until he came to a stop.He made his way back in little tiptoeing hops, covering twometers at a time.With his earlier acrophobia gone, climbing the structure of the ship was a simple matter of swingingfrom girder to girder, brachiating upward.Soon he was bark on the platform from which he had lookeddown so cautiously before.The two inhabited worksuits saluted him.Their thick, flexible joints segmented the grayish, stove-bellied exoskeletons into small, mostly cylindrical components.Since thesuits had no faceplates, relying on four 3V photorecorder cells mounted at ninety-degree intervals aboutthe helmet canister, he could not distinguish who was inside.A quick look into Shipnet's Status Registerstold him what he wanted to know.Brendan Sealock, still habituated to postures he'd developed on Earth, sat on a structural girder.Krzakwa, used to Lunar conventions, remained on his feet.Despite all the bulk of the suits, they lookedquite comfortable.Krzakwa turned, light on his feet but not fully adjusted to the suit's large moment ofinertia."Well, what can I do?" asked John.Sealock pointed toward the hatch of the airlock."Stay out of the way.Tem and I and the work-packswill handle what needs to be done."John shrugged and said, "OK.I'm going in." He made his way through the airlock hatch and it closedbehind him.Tem watched as the musician was occulted by the vignetting door."I guess we'd better get busy, huh?""Christ!" said Sealock."I thought there'd at least be some craters!""There are a few," said Tem, "small ones, scattered here and there, not to mention the hydro-volcanicstructures in the center of the mare.Haven't you tapped Jana's report?""Sure.What does that have to do with my expectations? I'm just talking about what I wanted tosee here.Hell, if we went on a hike up into the highlands, before you know it we'd be up to our assholesin neonated methane." He laughed softly, to himself."We'd be drowned alive in a mess of phase-changingthat'd drain the thermos in ten minutes.And then there's this parking lot.Some world to conquer, huh?""I read an article about boil gliding once, by some guy living on Pluto.You dive into a pool of volatilematerial with wings strapped to your suit the stuff vaporizes and acts as both atmosphere andpropellant.That would be pretty easy in neon.""Mm.Whatever became of this guy?""Killed, I think, in a boil-gliding accident.""Nice.Sounds like my kind of sport! Anyway, you saw our friend Johnny out there you can fly, aftera fashion.Bouncing around on the ice ought to keep us imbeciles happily occupied for years."Krzakwa laughed."Well, there's lots to screw around with, when the time comes to confront ourultimate sense of boredom.You know as well as I do that these worksuits can be equipped with athermodynamic damper field.We can trudge up into the neon crags if we want to."Sealock sighed heavily."Yeah, yeah.I know all that.I think I'm just having some kind of lazinessattack."Krzakwa thought about it for a moment, realizing that wasn't quite the word for what seemed to be going on."You mean, other-world weariness?""Right." The man laughed.On sudden impulse, he had Shipnet construct an image of Krzakwa's headthrough his suit optics.Processing made it look as if the man's opaque, equipment-packed helmet hadturned to glass.He seemed to be smiling."We might as well be off," he said, "though why I don't know.There's no hurry.""No.This place isn't going to run away." Tem had a sudden, uneasy visualization of the long decadesahead, isolated together."I guess it'd make sense to set up the boom crane first?""Yup." Activating the proper circuits, they made for the downlink channels and submerged in Shipnet'smaze.The basic structure of Deepstar was made of metal-plastic girders that had been extruded by anautomatic industrial beam-builder machine, for over a century the indispensable workhorse of spaceconstruction.The skeleton of the shipwas an inexpensive matrix to which almost anything could beattached, so.There were isostatically stabilized supplies of ion fuel, Hyloxso matrices, a peak-pulsetoroidal astrodyne, a small beam-builder, a bubbleplastic mixer, and a big storage cell for the raw goothat it used.Among the various pressurized modules there was a decorative hydroponic garden, and aterrarium whose genetically tailored creatures could produce certain organic substances for the kitchenmost efficiently.Of necessity, there was the inevitable complexity of a Magnaflux generator.Human beings had evolved across billions of years wrapped in the comforting arms of Earth'smagnetosphere.When space travel came, they began to leave it, and at first there seemed to be no greatproblem.The years flowed into decades and the colonists of the inner Solar System began to complain ofunexplained torpor.Low gravity, the experts said, no exercise, poor diet, even Weltschmerz.Odddiseases and neuroses appeared, and colonies did not do well.Children died or grew up "weird," andpeople had to go home, if they could.The future of space as a human habitat began to look endangered
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