Ferry sat at his console, slightly drunk, dreaming of Hali Ekel.

He waited to shift to the next spy sensor until he could no longer make out the details of Hali’s small, firm hips tight against her jumpsuit. What luscious hips! As he switched sensors to the one ahead of them, he forgot to change focus. The two were a blur as they approached the sensor’s forward field limit. Ferry fumbled with the controls and lost them.

“Damn!” he whispered, and his old surgeon’s hands were shaking like a wihi in a flare.

He touched the screen to steady himself, touched Hali’s image blurring past the sensor and into a treedome.

“Enjoy, enjoy, my dears.” He spoke aloud, his words absorbed by the piled confusion around him. Everyone knew why young couples went into the treedome. He checked to see that the holo was on record and that sound levels were satisfactory. Lewis and Oakes would want to see this, and Ferry anticipated making a special copy for himself.

“Give it to her, young fellow! Give it to her!”

He felt a pleasant swelling at his crotch and wondered if he could get away to visit Rachel Demarest.

“Get something on that poet,” Lewis had ordered, and he’d had five liters of the new Pandoran wine delivered to Ferry’s office from groundside by Rachel—a double gift. One of the empties lay across his mazed hookup to the Biocomputer. Another empty was still on the deck of the cubby temporarily occupied by Rachel. She was a clone (one of the better ones) and wine was the treasure to her that Ferry was not. Rachel was the treasure to him that Ekel was not.

Ferry watched the small touches between Panille and Ekel, imagining every one of them to be his own.

Perhaps with a little wine . . . he thought, and he leered at the faint, half-imagined nipples pressing her suit, shouting him out of her conversation with Panille.

Are they going to couple?

He was beginning to doubt it. Panille was not reacting correctly. I should’ve told them about Panille’s groundside orders sooner. That was always a good lever for sex. “I’m going groundside soon, dear one. You know what the dangers are down there?”

“Go ahead, do it, fellow!”

Ferry wanted to watch Hali slip out of her singlesuit, wanted her to desire a horny old surgeon with that desire she had in her eyes for Panille.

“So you want to know about the kelp,” Ferry slurred to Panille’s reclining image in the viewscreen. “Well, you’ll know it all soon enough, fellow. And Hali . . .” His clammy fingers caressed the screen. “. . . perhaps Lewis can see to it that you are assigned to us here at Classification and Processing. Yesss.” And the yes was a feverish hiss through his yellow teeth.

Suddenly, the conversation on the screen jarred him out of his daydream. He was sure he had heard correctly. Panille had told Hali Ekel that the kelp was sentient.