"Dull." Durrance spooned some sort of vegetable pudding into his mouth.

"Ah." Leo glanced around. "Is Ti with you?"

Durrance snorted. "Not likely. He's downside, on ice. He's appealing." A twisted grimace and raised eyebrows pointed up the double meaning. "Not, you understand, from my point of view. I got a reprimand on my record because of that damn tadpole. If it had been his first screw-up, he might have been able to duck getting fired, but now I don't think he has a chance. Your Van Atta wants his pelt riveted to the airlock doors."

"He's not my Van Atta," Leo denied strenuously. "If he was, I'd trade him for a dog—"

"—and shoot the dog," finished Durrance. His mouth twitched, not quite a grin. "Van Atta. That's all right. If the rumor I heard is true, he may not have so long to strut either."

"Ah?" Leo's ears pricked in hope.

"I was talking yesterday to the jump pilot from the weekly personnel ship from Orient IV—he'd just finished his month's gravity leave there—listen up to this one. He swears the Betan embassy there is demonstrating an artificial gravity device."

"What! How—?"

"Piping it in from wormhole space for all I know. You bet Beta Colony is sitting on the math of it, till they make their initial killing in the marketplace and recoup their R&D costs. It's apparently been kept under wraps by their military for a couple of years already, till they got their head start, damn 'em. GalacTech and everybody else will be on the scramble to catch up. Every other R&D project in the company is going to have to kiss their budget goodbye for a couple of years, you watch."

"My God." Leo glanced up the length of the cafeteria module, crowded with quaddies. My God . . .

Durrance scratched his chin reflectively. "If it's true, do you have any idea what it's going to do to the space transport industry? The jump pilot claims the Betans got the damned thing there in two months—from Beta Colony!—boosting at fifteen gees and insulating the crew from the acceleration using it. There'll be no limit to acceleration now but fuel costs. It probably won't affect bulk cargoes much for that very reason, but the passenger trade'll be revolutionized. The speed news travels, which'll affect the rate of exchange between planetary currencies—military transport, where they don't care what they spend on fuel—and you can bet that'll affect interplanetary politics—it's a whole new game all around."

Durrance finished scraping the last globs of food out of the pockets of his lunch tray. "Damn the colonials. Good old conservative Earth-based GalacTech left in the lurch again. You know, I'm really tempted to emigrate out to the farther end of the wormhole nexus sometimes. The wife's got family on Earth, though, so I don't suppose we ever will . . ."