Cold as Ice Read Online Free PDF Page B

between them had grown high. When Tim finally announced that he knew she was having affairs with half a dozen others at the center, that he could stand her rejection no longer, and that he was taking an assignment back on Earth, Camille had felt true sorrow . . . and vast relief.
    Don't let that happen again.
    "We won't have more than a day or two." David's voice intruded on her thoughts. "Then they'll realize that the whole of DOS is performing to spec. So we'd better make the most of it. Andromeda's all right for the media, but let's get on with some real targets. Something a decent distance away."
    And here it comes, thought Camille. She would have preferred to avoid David's look, but she forced herself to swivel her chair and face him.
    "I already did that. DOS is set for a target eleven billion light-years out." She hurried on, knowing that her next words would halt his nod of approval. "It's going to observe the proto-stellar cloud that I found on last year's test run."
    "Star formation! That's low energy, and it's useless science. We shouldn't waste a millisecond on crap like that."
    "Just because your own interests happen to be quasars—"
    "Intense energy sources —that's where you learn something new. Not in proto-stellar clouds. It's a crime to take the whole capability of DOS and piss it away for twenty-four hours on something you could see just as well close-up using a different instrument—"
    "Bullshit! You know that's not true as well as I do. If we're ever going to understand the anomalous fusion cross sections we measure right here in our own solar system, we need DOS. We have to look at stellar fusion and star formation way back in time, before supernovas did element seeding and changed the rules of the game. We have to look ten and eleven and twelve billion light-years out."
    Even while Camille argued as hotly as David—and enjoyed it, that was the amazing thing—she suspected that it was a waste of time. They had recognized for years that this day was coming. While the Distributed Observation System was performing sporadically or not at all, creeping back into operation after its partial destruction during the war, she and David had sneaked in ample observing time in pursuit of their own separate interests. But with the return of DOS to full service—and they could not hide that fact—guest observers would swarm in from all over the system. They would demand access. Their programs would have priority over the needs of a couple of recent graduates. She and David, both cocky and opinionated, would be forced to fight over scraps and slivers of observing time.
    And they would fight. They agreed on the distance of good targets, but on nothing else. He was interested in observations of a certain class of quasars as a tool to answer cosmological questions. She found cosmology too speculative, too akin to theology. The questions she wanted to answer on fusion processes would lead to new experiments in the Vesta labs, and they in turn would suggest new observations. In her view, physics experiments and DOS observations should feed on each other through the intermediary of computer models and drive each other along. But the information flow from David's work, in her opinion, was all one-way.
    "You don't have any method of finding out when you're wrong ," she had said to him often enough. "It's the curse of astronomy. You have no way to perform an experiment , here or in the Belt, and then say, 'Well, this result shows that my theory is nothing but piffle, but it also suggests this different theory that I can test.' "
    Camille stood up. It was the old argument. She did not want to sit and repeat it when there were more productive things to do.
    "Where are you going?" He stood up too.
    "It will be at least five hours before observations begin to come in. I'm going to take another look at the Super-DOS configurations."
    It was not wholly a lie. Only a week ago she and David had finished their design for a