“I haven’t decided yet. When are you leaving?”

They’d be taking off tomorrow morning from the East End. That gave me time to make up my mind.

After dinner I went back to my room, feeling depressed. Carlos was going, that was clear enough. Hardly my fault…but he was here on Jinx because he’d done me and Sharrol a large favor. If he was killed going home…

A tape from Sharrol was waiting in my room. There were pictures of the children, Tanya and Louis, and shots of the apartment she’d found us in the Twin Peaks arcology, and much more.

I ran through it three times. Then I called Ausfaller’s room. It had been just too futzy long.

I circled Jinx once on the way out. I’ve always done that, even back when I was flying for Nakamura Lines, and no passenger has ever objected.

Jinx is the close moon of a gas giant planet more massive than Jupiter and smaller than Jupiter because its core has been compressed to degenerate matter. A billion years ago Jinx and Primary were even closer, before tidal drag moved them apart. This same tidal force had earlier locked Jinx’s rotation to Primary and forced the moon into an egg shape, a prolate spheroid. When the moon moved outward, its shape became more nearly spherical, but the cold rock surface resisted change.

That is why the ocean of Jinx rings its waist, beneath an atmosphere too compressed and too hot to breathe, whereas the points nearest to and farthest from Primary, the East and West Ends, actually rise out of the atmosphere.

From space Jinx looks like God’s Own Easter Egg: the Ends bone white tinged with yellow, then the brighter glare from rings of glittering ice fields at the limits of the atmosphere, then the varying blues of an Earthlike world, increasingly overlaid with the white frosting of cloud as the eyes move inward, until the waist of the planet/moon is girdled with pure white. The ocean never shows at all.

I took us once around and out.

Sirius has its own share of floating miscellaneous matter cluttering the path to interstellar space. I stayed at the controls for most of five days for that reason and because I wanted to get the feel of an unfamiliar ship.

Hobo Kelly was a belly-landing job, three hundred feet long, of triangular cross section. Beneath an uptilted, forward-thrusting nose were big clamshell doors for cargo. She had adequate belly jets, and a much larger fusion motor at the tail, and a line of windows indicating cabins. Certainly she looked harmless enough, and certainly there was deception involved. The cabin should have held forty or fifty, but there was room only for four. The rest of what should have been cabin space was only windows with holograph projections in them.