I was able to buy a flask of apple juice—which would still be rare for a couple of years—and two small cakes made with wheat flour, one soaked with honey and the other with “rhum,” a mixture of boo and some brown chemical. Sandra ate most of the honey cake. Dan took one bite of the other and asked for a straw. (It was so saturated that a deep breath of it made you giddy; I think it would have burned if you lit it.)

Evy got off shift an hour early, 1900, and brought Sandra a present, a bracelet she had woven out of three different colors of wire. That impressed her a lot more than my gift of food and drink, though after an exuberant hug and kiss, she restrained her enthusiasm—whether through shyness or childish calculation, I’m not sure. She was fascinated with Evy’s springy hair. Three of the creche mothers and two of the fathers are black, but they wear their hair cropped fashionably short.

Sandra had appropriated a well-worn deck of cards from Creche and taught us all how to play Planets. It was a surprisingly complex trading game, in which the first person to collect a whole Epsilon System wins. She displayed a good memory for other people’s hands. Talking to her afterward, I found that she hadn’t used any mnemonic device, but just has very solid native powers of concentration and retention. She amused John and Dan by reciting the value of pi to fifteen places; as far as I knew, she could have been bluffing for the last thirteen.

She was disappointed to find out, from John, that the actual planets probably wouldn’t look much like the pictures on the cards. We knew how big the planets were and something about their atmospheres, but would have to be a lot closer before we could take actual pictures of them. I wondered whether her teachers knew that.

I had never dealt cards in quarter gee before. With five people, you can easily go around more than twice before the first card hits the bed. This led to an obvious game, Sandra and Evy and I seeing how long we could keep a card afloat nohands, blowing it back and forth, while John and Dan kept out of the way and carried on a conversation in differential equations or something. It turns out you can keep the card going until the smallest member of the team becomes giddy from hyperventilation.

She went from giddiness to drooping in about thirty seconds, so I passed her around to kiss everybody goodnight, and we tottered up toward the Boston lift.