The lock door opened. John Boone floated in, saw her, grabbed the door handle to stop himself. "Oh, sorry. Mind if I join you?"

"No." Maya sniffed and rubbed her eyes. "What gets you up at this hour?"

"I'm often up early. And you?"

"Bad dreams."

"Of what?"

"I can't remember," she said, seeing the face in her mind.

He pushed off, floated past her to the dome. "I can never remember my dreams."

"Never?"

"Well, rarely. If something wakes me up in the middle of one, and I have time to think about it, then I might remember it, for a little while anyway."

"That's normal. But it's a bad sign if you never remember your dreams at all."

"Really? What's it a symptom of?"

"Of extreme repression, I seem to recall." She had drifted to the side of the dome; she pushed off through the air, stopped herself against the dome next to him. "But that may be Freudianism."

"In other words something like the theory of phlogiston."

She laughed. "Exactly."

They looked out at Mars, pointed out features to each other. Talked. Maya glanced at him as he spoke. Such bland, happy good looks; he really was not her type. In fact she had taken his cheeriness for a kind of stupidity, back at the beginning. But over the course of the voyage she had seen that he was not stupid.

"What do you think of all the arguments about what we should do up there?" she asked, gesturing at the red stone ahead of them.

"I don't know."

"I think Phyllis makes a lot of good points."

He shrugged. "I don't think that matters."

"What do you mean?"

"The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims, with any number of points. But when their listeners remember the discussion, what matters is simply that X believes a and Y believes b. People then form their judgement on what they think of X and Y."

"But we're scientists! We're trained to weigh the evidence."

John nodded. "True. In fact, since I like you, I concede the point."

She laughed and pushed him, and they tumbled down the sides of the dome away from each other.

Maya, surprised at herself, arrested her motion against the floor. She turned and saw John coming to a halt across the dome, landing against the floor. He looked at her with a smile, caught a rail and launched himself into the air, across the domed space on a course aimed at her.

Instantly Maya understood, and forgetting completely her resolution to avoid this kind of thing, she pushed off to intercept him. They flew directly at each other, and to avoid a painful collision had to catch and twist in mid-air, as if dancing. They spun, hands clasped, spiraling up slowly toward the dome. It was a dance, with a clear and obvious end to it, there to reach whenever they liked: whew! Maya's pulse raced, and her breath was ragged in her throat. As they spun they tensed their biceps and pulled together, as slowly as docking spacecraft, and kissed.