She yawned, and rubbed against my arm for a moment. "If we're through with sex," she decided, "I want something to eat before I go to sleep. Come on up to the Blue Hell with me and I'll treat."

Plant Maintenance was, actually, the maintenance of plants: specifically, the ivy plants that help keep Gateway livable. I reported for duty and, surprise -- in fact, nice surprise -- my crew boss turned out to be my legless neighbor, Shikitei Bakin.

He greeted me with what seemed like real pleasure. "How nice of you to join us, Robinette," he said. "I expected you would ship out at once."

"I will, Shicky, pretty soon. When I see the right launch listed on the board, I'll know it."

"Of course." He left it at that, and introduced me to the other plant maintainers. I didn't get them straight, except that the girl had had some sort of connection with Professor Hegramet, the hotshot Heecheeologist back home, and the two men had each had a couple of missions already. I didn't really need to get them straight. We all understood the essential fact about each other without discussion. None of us was quite ready to put our names on the launch roster.

I wasn't even quite ready to let myself think out why.

Plant Maintenance would have been a good place for thought, though. Shicky put me to work right away, fastening brackets to the Heechee-metal walls with tacky-gunk. That was some kind of specially designed adhesive. It would hold to both the Heechee metal and the ribbed foil of plant boxes, and it did not contain any solvent that would evaporate and contaminate the air. It was supposed to be very expensive. If you got it on you, you just learned to live with it, at least until the skin it was on died and flaked off. If you tried to get it off any other way, you drew blood.

When the day's quota of brackets were up, we all trooped down to the sewage plant, where we picked up boxes filled with sludge and covered with cellulose film. We settled them onto the brackets, twisted the self-locking nuts to hold them in place, and fitted them with watering tanks. The boxes probably would have weighed a hundred kilos each on Earth, but on Gateway that simply wasn't a consideration; even the foil they were made of was enough to support them rigidly against the brackets. Then, when we were all done, Shicky himself filled the trays with seedlings, while we went on to the next batch of brackets. It was funny to watch him. He carried trays of the infant ivy plants on straps around his neck, like a cigarette girl's stock. He held himself at tray level with one hand, and poked seedlings through the film into the sludge with the other.

It was a low-pressure job, it served a useful function (I guess) and it passed the time. Shicky didn't make us work any too hard. He had set a quota in his mind for a day's work. As long as we got sixty brackets installed and filled he didn't care if we goofed off, provided we were inconspicuous about it. Klara would come by to pass the time of day now and then, sometimes with the little girl, and we had plenty of other visitors. And when times were slack and there wasn't anybody interesting to talk to, one at a time we could wander off for an hour or so. I explored a lot of Gateway I hadn't seen before, and each day decision was postponed.