She sighed. "Do you think I don't know that?" Then she tensed and sat up. "Who's that?"

Somebody was scrabbling at the door. It wasn't locked; we never did that. But nobody ever came in without being invited, either, and this time someone did.

"Sterling!" Klara said, surprised. She remembered her manners: "Rob, this is Sterling Francis, Kathy's father. Rob Broadhead."

"Hello," he said. He was much older than I'd thought that little girl's father would be, at least fifty, and looking very much older and more weary than seemed natural. "Klara," he said, "I'm taking Kathy back home on the next ship. I think I'll take her tonight, if you don't mind. I don't want her to hear from somebody else."

Klara reached out for my hand without looking at me. "Hear what?"

"About her mother." Francis rubbed his eyes, then said, "Oh, didn't you know? Jan's dead. Her ship came back a few hours ago. All four of them in the lander got into some kind of fungus; they swelled up and died. I saw her body. She looks--" He stopped. "The one I'm really sorry for," he said, "is Annalee. She stayed in orbit while the others went down, and she brought Jan's body back. I guess she was kind of crazy. Why bother? It was too late to matter to Jan. . . . Well, anyway. She could only bring two of them, that was all the room in the freezer, and of course her rations--" He stopped again, and this time he didn't seem able to talk anymore.

So I sat on the edge of the bed while Klara helped him wake the child and bundle her up to take her back to his own rooms. While they were out, I dialed a couple of displays on the PV, and studied them very carefully. By the time Klara came back I had turned off the PV and was sitting cross-legged on the bed, thinking hard.

"Christ," she said glumly. "If this night isn't a bummer." She sat down at the far corner of the bed. "I'm not sleepy after all," she said. "Maybe I'll go up and win a few bucks at the roulette table."

"Let's not," I said. I'd sat next to her for three hours the night before, while she first won ten thousand dollars and then lost twenty. "I have a better idea. Let's ship out."

She turned full around to look at me, so quickly that she floated up off the bed for a moment. "What?"

"Let's ship out."

She closed her eyes for a moment and, without opening them, said, "When?"

"Launch 29-40. It's a Five, and there's a good crew: Sam Kahane and his buddies. They're all recovered now, and they need two more to fill the ship."

She stroked her eyelids with her fingertips, then opened them and looked at me. "Well, Rob," she said, "you do have interesting suggestions." There were shades over the Heechee-metal walls to cut down the light for sleeping, and I had drawn them; but even in the filtered dimness I could see how she looked. Frightened. Still, what she said was: "They're not bad guys. How do you get along with gays?"