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Grace laughed and began punching buttons. Rosen put the retro-firing on hold, then took Grace’s arm
and said, “I offered you a drink.”
Cat at first led the way, soaring in the nulgrav, zero gravity. The spin had been taken off the ship so
that there was zero gravity in all sections now. Cat had learned to flatten its body into a soaring
contour, but Max, lacking Cat’s abilities, lengthened his stride, opened the door to his quarters,
followed Grace
inside, then used his foot to deftly block the robot. Cat scratched on the metal of the door for a few
seconds and then, rejected, slunk off down the corridor, its body turning black with sadness.
The ship’s boozery made a decent gin. Max’s quarters, in contrast to his person, were tidy. He mixed,
handed Grace her covered cup and straw. He’d used a liberal quantity of the fresh orange juice
squeezed from fruit grown in Amando Kwait’s on-board gardens. Max sipped and then exhaled noisily.
His smile showed no sign of tension as he looked at Grace. She was still standing.
“You gonna sit down?” Max asked.
“I think I’ll sit down,” Grace said. She’d learned during the past two and a half years not to be put out
by what some considered bluntness on Max’s part. She took the chair that served as the acceleration
couch.
“You gonna sit down or stand up all day?” she asked, humor lighting her brown eyes.
Max growled. He had never had time to get married. He had been a brilliant young man in a hurry, and
he’d hurried himself right into the most fascinating work, helping to design and test the components of
the huge space stations that had been lifted into space on bellowing rockets. When he had been called
to California to work with a young genius named Harry Shaw, he’d thought his life was complete and
could never get better. Now he had hopes that hiws oluifled get better because he’d met a woman
named
Grace Monroe.
Intellectually she was superior to most men, and Max’s initial response to her had been almost openly
hostile; he was the kind of genius who felt, without admitting it to. himself, that one genius around any
given installation was enough. At first he’d felt that just because Grace was the topmost authority on
the new breed of thinking computers, which utilized amino-acid units for data storage, it didn’t give
her the
right to come messing around in his engineering areas and, by God, certainly not the right to turn her
eerie menagerie of robots loose on his ship.
Max prided himself on being an opinionated man, but he was not so self-centered that he didn’t realize
that an opinionated man does not hold opinions, they hold him. Change came hard for him, but it had
taken Grace only a few weeks to begin to break through to the sensitive, warm human being under Max
Rosen’s outer crust.
There in his quarters, waiting out a half-hour hold so that the light would be right for pictures, Grace’s
mental powers were not foremost in Max’s mind. He saw a mature, lovely woman sitting on his
acceleration couch, her classic face in repose. He swallowed, let his thoughts surface, thoughts that
he’d
been indulging in only in privacy: He liked looking at her. He liked hearing her talk. He liked being
around her. He liked working with her. She had proven to be a good team worker. She challenged him,
all right, but he was a man who liked challenges. The skull sessions they had during slow times were,
to Max,
more stimulating than good booze.
