Sand grimaced and shook his head. "That'll make me pretty heavy—might affect the results." Samshow set the plate down beside him and glanced at the gravimeters, spaced in a triangle in two corners and the middle of the opposite bulkhead.

"Wouldn't want to ruin an incredible evening," Sand murmured. He tapped a few keys intently, nodded at the display, and applied a fork to the beets.

"That good?"

"Damned near perfect," Sand said. "I'll eat and you can spell me in an hour."

"Your eyeballs are going to fall right out on the floor," Samshow warned.

"I'm young," Sand said. "I'll grow another pair."

Samshow grinned, returned to the ladder, and ascended through the maze of corridors and hatches to the deck. The Pacific lay around the ship as thick and slow as syrup, rippling iridescent silver and velvet black. The air was unusually dry and clear. From horizon to horizon the sky was filled with stars to within a few degrees of a fresh sliver of moon, a tiny thing lost in the yawn of night. Samshow rested his feet on the anchor chain near the bow and sighed in contentment. The week's work had been long and he was tired in a way he enjoyed, contented, deep in the mellowness brought on only by satisfactory results.

He glanced at his pocket navigator, tied in to a Navstar signal. The first approximation on the illuminated display read, >E142°32'10" N30°45'20"<, which put the Discoverer about 130 kilometers east of Toru Island. In four more hours, they would swing around again for a seventh pass.

He belched contentedly and began to whistle "String of Pearls."

Samshow had outlived one wife after thirty years of stormy, blissful marriage, the true love of his life, and now had two fine women who doted on him when he was ashore, about seven months out of the year. One was in La Jolia, a plump rich widow, and another was in Manila, a black-haired Filipina thirty years younger than he, distantly related to the long-gone and lamented President Magsaysay.

It was a warm, strange dry night, quiet and still, a night for deep thinking and old memories. He felt a sudden onslaught of laziness; the hell with science, the hell with perfect results and plus or minus two milligals. He'd rather be walking some beach watching breakers explode with phosphorescence. The feeling passed but left its mark; it was one of the few ways his body told him he was getting old. He turned and stepped over the chain, then froze, catching something odd in the upper half of his vision.