And Frank-tall, dark, and somehow handsome, bulky with power, spinning with his own internal dynamo, the American politician (or so Nadia thought of him),  now wrapped around the finger of a neurotic Russian beauty-Frank nodded humbly, and thanked her, looking discouraged.  As well he should.

# # #

Nadia did her best to ignore all that.  But it seemed everything else had turned problematic as well.   Vlad had never approved of how much time they were spending on the surface in the daytime, and now he said,  "We ought to stay under the hill most of the time, and bury all the labs as well.   Outdoors work should be restricted to an hour in the early mornings and another in the late afternoons, when the sun is low."

"I'll be damned if I stay indoors all day," Ann said, and many agreed with her.

"We've got a lot of work to do," Frank pointed out.

"But most of it could be done by teleoperation," Vlad said.  "And it should be.  What we are doing is the equivalent of standing ten kilometers from an atomic explosion-"

"So?" Ann said.  "Soldiers did that-"

"-every six months," Vlad finished, and stared at her.  "Would you do that?"

Even Ann looked subdued.  No ozone layer, no magnetic field to speak of; they were getting fried by radiation almost as badly as if they were in interplanetary space, to the tune of 5 rems per year.

And so Frank and Maya ordered them to ration their time outdoors.  There was a lot of interior work to be done under the hill, getting the last row of chambers finished; and it was possible to dig some cellars below the vaults, giving them some more space protected from radiation.  And many of the tractors were equipped to be teleoperated from indoor stations, their decision algorithms handling the details while the human operators watched screens below.   So it could be done; but no one liked the life that resulted.  Even Sax Russell, who was content to work indoors most of the time, looked a bit perplexed.  In the evenings a number of people began to argue for immediate terraforming efforts, adn they made the case with renewed intensity.

"That's not our decision to make," Frank told them sharply.  "The UN decides that one.  Besides it's a long-term solution, on the scale of centuries at best.  Don't waste time talking about it!"

Ann said, "That's all true, but I don't want to waste my time down here in these caves, either.  We should live our lives the way we want.  We're too old to worry about radiation."

Arguments again, arguments that made Nadia feel as if she had floated off the good solid rock of her planet back into the tense weightless reality of the Ares.  Carping, complaining, arguing; until people got bored, or tired, and went to sleep.  Nadia started leaving the room whenever it began, looking for Hiroko and a chance to discuss something concrete.  But it was hard to avoid these matters, to stop thinking about them.