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He could feel her tighten up, and he said nothing. She waited stiffly for a time. Gradually she relaxed against him again. “When’s it going to be Monday?” she murmured.

“When’s it going to be Monday where?”

“Here, anywhere, silly!”

He laughed. “When will it be Monday all over the universe?”

She thought for a moment. “Oh. Like time zones. OK, when will it be Monday here?”

“It won’t. We just have periods, hitches, and shifts. Fifty shifts make a hitch, two hitches make a period. A period’s from sunrise to sunrise. Twenty-nine and a half days. But we don’t count days. So I don’t know when it’ll be Monday.”

It seemed to alarm her. She sat up. “Don’t you even have hours?” She looked at her watch and jiggled it, listened to it.

“Sure. Seven hours in a shift. We call them hours, anyhow. Forty-five seconds longer than an Earth hour.”

She looked up through the canopy at the orb of Earth. “When it’s Monday on Earth, it’ll be Monday here too,” she announced flatly.

Relke laughed. “OK, we’ll call it that.”

“So when will it start being Monday on Earth?”

“Well, it’ll start at twenty-four different times, depending on where you are. Maybe more than twenty-four. It’s August. Some places, they set the clocks ahead an hour in Summer.”

She looked really worried.

“You take birthdays pretty seriously?” he asked.

“Only this one. I’ll be—” She broke off and closed her mouth.

“Pick a time zone,” Relke offered, “and I’ll try to figure out how long until Monday starts. Which zone? Where you’d be now, maybe?”

She shook her head.

“Where you were born?”

“That would be—” She stopped again. “Never mind. Forget it.” She sat brooding and watching the moonscape.

Relke turned off the road at the transformer station. He pulled up beside a flat-roofed cubicle the size of a sentrybox. Giselle looked at it in astonishment.

“That’s a building?” she asked.

“That’s an entrance. The ‘building’s’ underground. Come on, let’s seal up.”

“What’s down there?”

“Just a transformer vault and living quarters for a substation man.”

“Somebody lives down there?”

“Not yet. The line’s still being built. They’ll move somebody in when the trolley traffic starts moving.”

“What do we want to go down there for?”

He looked at her forlornly. “You’d rather go back to the ship?”

She seemed to pull herself together professionally. She laughed and put her arms around him and whispered something in French against his ear. She kissed him hard, pressed her forehead against his, and grinned. “C’mon, babee! Let’s go downstairs.”

Relke felt suddenly cold inside. He had wanted to see what it felt like to be alone with a woman again in a quiet place, away from the shouting, howling revelry that had been going on aboard the ship. Now he knew what it was going to feel like. It was going to feel counterfeit. “Christ!” he grunted angrily. “Let’s go back!” He reached roughly around her and cut on the switch again. She recoiled suddenly and gaped at him as he started the motor and turned the bug around.

“Hey!” She was staring at him oddly, as if seeing him for ‘the first time.

Relke kept his face averted and his knuckles were white on the steering bar. She got up on her knees on the seat and put her hands on his shoulders. “Bill. Good Lord, you’re crying!”

He choked out a curse as the bug hit the side of the cut and careened around on the approach to the road. He lost control, and the runabout went off the approach and slid slowly sideways down a gentle slope of crushed-lava fill. A sharp clanking sound came from the floor plates.

“Get your suit sealed!” he yelled. “Get it sealed!”

The runabout lurched to a sudden stop. The cabin pressure stayed up. He sat panting for a moment, then started the motor. He let it inch ahead and tugged at the steering bar. It was locked. The bug crept in an arc, and the clanking resumed. He cut off the motor and sat cursing softly.

“What’s wrong?”

“Broke a link and the tread’s fouled. We’ll have to get out.”

She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. He was glowering. She looked back toward the sentrybox entrance to the substation and smiled thoughtfully.

It was chilly in the vault, and the only light came from the indicator lamps on the control board. The pressure gauge inside the airlock indicated only eight pounds of air. The construction crew had pumped it up to keep some convection currents going around the big transformers, but they hadn’t planned on anyone breathing it soon. He changed the mixture controls, turned the barostat up to twelve pounds, and listened to the compressors start up. When he turned around, Giselle was taking off her suit and beginning to pant.

“Hey, stay in that thing!” he shouted.

His helmet muffled his voice, and she looked at him blankly. “What?” she called. She was gasping and looking around in alarm.

Relke sprinted a few steps to the emergency rack and grabbed a low pressure walk-around bottle. When he got back, she was getting blue and shaking her head drunkenly. He cracked the valve on the bottle and got the hose connection against her mouth. She nodded quickly and sucked on it. He went back to watch the gauges. He found the overhead lighting controls and turned them on. Giselle held her nose and anxiously sipped air from the bottle. He nodded reassuringly at her. The construction crews had left the substation filled with nitrogen-helium mixture, seeing no reason to add rust-producing moisture and oxygen until someone moved into the place; she had been breathing inert gases, nothing more.

When the partial oxygen pressure was up to normal, he left the control panel and went to look for the communicator. He found the equipment, but it was not yet tied into the line. He went back to tell the girl. Still sipping at the bottle, she watched him with attentive brown eyes. It was the gaze of a child, and he wondered about her age. Aboard ship, she and the others had seemed impersonal automata of Eros; painted ornaments and sleekly functional decoys designed to perform stereotyped rituals of enticement and excarnation of desire, swiftly, lest a customer be kept waiting. But here in stronger light, against a neutral background, he noticed suddenly that she was a distinct individual. Her lipstick had smeared. Her dark hair kept spilling out in tangled wisps from beneath a leather cap with fleece ear flaps. She wore a pair of coveralls, several sizes too large and rolled up about the ankles. With too much rouge on her solemnly mischievous face, she looked ready for a role in a girls’ school version of Chanticler.

“You can stop breathing out of the can,” he told her. “The oxygen pressure’s okay now.”

She took the hose from her mouth and sniffed warily. “What was the matter? I was seeing spots.”

“It’s all right now.”

“It’s cold in this place. Are we stuck here?”

“I tried to call Joe, but the set’s not hooked up. He’ll come looking for us.”

“Isn’t there any heat in here? Can’t you start a fire?”

He glanced down at the big 5,000 kva transformers in the pit beyond the safety rail. The noise of corona discharge was very faint, and the purr of thirty-two cycle hum was scarcely audible. With no trucks drawing, power from the trolley, the big pots were cold. Normally, eddy current and hysteresis losses in the transformers would keep the station toast-warm. He glanced at a thermometer. It read slightly under freezing: the ambient temperature of the subsurface rock in that region.