As sexy as that scene was, I felt no real inspiration when I joined Elza in the double bed. I’d sparred for an hour with Dustin and then swum at six knots for an hour. When I got out I sympathized with the poor Martians in all this gravity. I felt like a large animal that had been run into the ground when I fell into bed. Elza seemed tired, too. Maybe that was why she asked for me, the first night with gravity.

“I’ve never seen you swim so much in a gym,” she said sleepily.

“Set the thing for an hour. I was about to get out early, then Carmen came over. I offered to let her have it, but she said no, no, finish your hour. So I was kind of stuck.”

“Stuck showing off your bare ass to a pretty girl.”

“She’s not a girl, not particularly pretty, and I was doing a side-stroke.”

“Okay, showing off your bare side. To the most famous woman on two planets.”

“Well, you know me. I really wanted her autograph.”

“Is that what they call it now?”

I poked her in the ribs. “Where is that off switch?”

“I’ll be good.” She put her head against my shoulder and was asleep in a couple of minutes, her warm breath regular against my skin. So familiar and so unpredictable.

Her jibing made me think about Carmen. I was attracted to her, not because she was The Mars Girl. Probably not a smart course to follow, though I didn’t think it would bother Elza a lot. Carmen’s relationship with Paul was not monogamous on either side. Fly- in-Amber told me that when he was asking about our triune. She “mated” (his word) with several men who stayed in Little Mars waiting to go on to Mars, and he knew from talking with Carmen that it was with Paul’s blessing, and that Paul was casually involved with a couple of women on Mars. This was before the one-gee shuttle, so going between the two planets was a complex affair taking months of zero-gee coasting.

Speaking of complex affairs. Trapped inside this small box together, we all know that the wise course would be to treat one another as friends and not let it go beyond that. But it probably would, even if the mission were prosaic, because it’s so damned long. Add the desperate knowledge that we will all probably die at Wolf 25, or before, and the impulse to be impulsive is hard to resist.