"All right," he said. "I owe you a ruin, I guess. Citric, sugar and the other stuff are in the locker ... you know where it is. Shotcans are there, too."

The girl shut the door and sat down on the bunk, with a free litheness that was almost grace, but with a determination which, Helmuth knew, meant that she had just decided to do something silly for all the right reasons.

"I don't need a drink," she said. "As a matter-of-fact, I've been turning my luxR's back to the common pool. I suppose you did that for me by showing me what a mind looks like that's hiding from itself."

"Evita, stop sounding like a tract. Obviously you're advanced to a higher, more Jovian plane of existence, but won't you still need your metabolism? Or have you decided that vitamins are all-in-the-mind?"

"Now you're being superior. Anyhow, alcohol isn't a vitamin. And I didn't come to talk about that I came to tell you something I think you ought to know."

"Which is?"

She said: "Bob, I mean to have a child here."

A bark of laughter, part sheer hysteria and part exasperation, jackknifed Helmuth into a sitting position. A red arrow bloomed on the far wall, obediently marking the' paragraph which, supposedly, he had reached in his reading. Eva twisted to look at it, but the page was already dimming and vanishing.

"Women!" Helmuth said, when he could get his breath back. "Really, Evita, you make me feel much better. No environment can change a human being much, after all."

"Why should it?" she said suspiciously, looking back at him. "I don't see the joke. Shouldn't a woman want to have a child?"

"Of course she should," he said, settling back. The pages began to flip across the wall again. "It's quite ordinary. All women want to have children. All women dream of the day they can turn a child out to play in an airless rock garden like Jupiter V, to pluck fossils and make dustcastles and get quaintly starburned. How cozy to tuck the blue little body back into its corner that night, and give it its oxygen bottle, promptly as the sound of the trick change bell! Why it's as natural as Jupiter light, as Western as freeze-dried apple pie."

He turned his head casually away. "Congratulations. As for me, though, Eva, I'd much prefer that you take your ghostly little pretext out of here."

Eva surged to her feet in one furious motion. Her fingers grasped him by the beard and jerked his head painfully around again.

"You reedy male platitude!" she said, in a low grinding voice. "How you could see almost the whole point, and make so little of it. Women, is it? So you think I came creeping in here, full of humbleness, to settle our technical differences in bed!"