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wave goodbye to Mel, something he feared he might never do. Mel threw him a geebrew; it tumbled through the air and Alex caught it snappily. “You’ll need it where you’re goin’, I guess,” said Mel with a wink.
    “’fraid so.” Alex saluted Mel and pocketed the beer in his flightsuit. As he left he thought of Mel and the Marilyns; their arching eyebrows, pouty lips, and platinum hair, like holograms from an ancient film as they had rubbed past him, one by one, in the cramped corridor. In retrospect they were like omens, clonic replicas, dolls for the pleasure of …? Who, he wondered, was the Corpie god of creation?
    Mary clicked into his mind like a light going on. She was smiling, blowing him a kiss. Alex smiled. “Dingers,” said Alex. “You knew all along, didn’t you?” The corporate guards, each weighing over two hundred pounds, looked blankly at him.
    By the time the shuttle left the hold of the Enceladus and headed toward the Goddard , ten klicks away, Alex had experienced two epiphanies, one intellectual and the other emotional. Perhaps he had no choice, but perhaps it didn’t really matter. Earthcorp respected him as a discoverer and therefore an asset. That meant he had some control of the situation. And now, thanks to Mary and her newly augmented abilities, he knew that she was already a step ahead of them. She had touched him, all the way from Ganymede. For a fleeting moment she had been there with him, so real that he could almost smell her. He wondered why she had bothered with the holo-phone, but he realized that would be telling. She had revealed a special secret, just to him and just for him. She had felt his pain.
    2 Mary’s touch had cheered Alex up immensely. Far from being upset by the message packet Stubbs had sent, he was ‘cool’s salt ice’, as the Gannys put it. He conversed freely with the two guards, hoping to give a general impression of a cooperative attitude. Questions about their mission went unanswered, but when he asked about the Goddard , they seemed more inclined to talk. A guard, the one that looked Asian, moved closer to Alex and pointed to the long pearl colored ship that loomed ahead of them, filling the sky. “She’s goin’ to the stars. My guess is, you are too.”
    The perfect contours of the white surfaced vessel were deceptive. Its featureless perfection fooled the eye and Alex found that he couldn’t estimate their distance from it. Then a seam formed in the hull and an enormous round-cornered rectangular panel jutted outward and slid to the side as if riding on tracks. Inside was another set of huge doors decorated with brightly flashing red lights. At the top and bottom, fixed at either end to the hull, were giant rails supporting the outer doors. The hull itself seemed to be made of thick white plating that sandwiched thousands of white rods fused into a single mass.
    The inner doors, flat sheets of smooth gray metal, opened in the middle and slid to either side, revealing a shuttle bay. Several shuttles of various types were already nested in gantries, but most of the bays were empty. Alex noticed that one of them was lit and open to receive them.
    Their tiny shuttle rotated as it moved into the docking bay and came to a hard stop with a clang as anchoring mechanisms snapped into place. Once the outer doors closed, a rushing sound could be heard as the shuttle bay pressurized. When Goddard control told them it was clear, the shuttle’s hatch opened and the guards told Alex to gather up his gear and leave.
    Outside the airlock hung several straps with hand-sized loops connected to an overhead cable. The cable hauled them and their gear smoothly to an exit, where they detached and floated weightlessly through the door. “This is a shortcut to the meeting room,” said one of the guards. “Get ready for gravity at the end.”
    Behind the exit was a small room that housed the terminus of a large white tube that hung from the ceiling with two handrails