very handsome gentleman, mused Chastity to herself. Reminds me of Mr. Sulu. It’ll be a pleasure sharing watches with him!
“This is Seichi Takeo, Chass,” Rod said, doing the introductions. “And Seichi, this is our pilot, Chastity Blaze.”
“I’m glad you’re going to be part of the crew, Seichi!” said Chastity cheerfully. Wanting to get things off to a friendly start, she pulled him over by their handshake, and touching his cheek with her long-nailed beflagged and bejeweled left hand, she gave him a peck on the other cheek. Seichi grinned widely in obvious pleasure and started to blush.
“I have read much about you, Miss Blaze,” said Seichi eagerly, giving another bow. “You did the pioneering work on magnoshielded engines.”
Rod turned to look at Chastity. “You did? I didn’t know that,” he said in surprise.
“I’m trying to forget it,” replied Chastity grimly. “Just causes me ulcers. It was for my master’s thesis. I came up with a design for an externally applied picket-fence magnetic field geometry that prevents a high-temperature plasma from reaching the walls of a reaction chamber or nozzle bell. That was in the days before meta. The only use for a magnoshielded engine at that time was handling the plasma from a fusion rocket, but no one had any good ideas for making a fusion rocket work— still don’t. MIT didn’t think it would be worth the money to patent the magnoshield concept, and I didn’t have the money to do it myself. Two months later, a worldwide patent was filed in Japan under the first-to-file rule. What really jerks me is that large chunks of technical detail—even the drawings!— were taken directly from my thesis, which was available at the MIT library, but not yet published in the open literature.”
“That doesn’t sound fair ...” said Rod.
“Fair or not, it’s legal,” said Chastity. “At least that’s what the MIT lawyers said, pointing out that “improvements” had been made on my original ideas. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. How is one little person going to fight a big corporation like Mitsubishi?”
There was a long pause as Rod looked anxiously at Seichi. The pleased smile that had been on Seichi’s face faded away.
“Seichi!” cried Chastity, concerned. “What’s the matter?”
“Seichi is an employee of Mitsubishi,” said Rod.
Chastity couldn’t help herself—a frown flickered over her face. “What!?” she exclaimed angrily. She quickly tried to get herself under control. Certainly, Seichi would not have been involved in the piracy of her idea. But when Seichi saw the frown on her face and heard the angry tone in her voice, he stiffened and buckled himself back into the chair.
“It has been a pleasure meeting you, Miss Blaze,” he said, swiveling away from them to face the console screen, “but Jeeves and I must now return to our task of checking out the reactor.”
Chastity didn’t know what to do or say next. She and Rod stayed silent and watched over Seichi’s back at the holoviewport as Seichi’s supple fingers played over the icons on the touchscreen. The image coming from the holoviewport was obviously not the direct view to the stars outside; instead, it was a close-up view of a cylinder about the size and shape of a large oil drum with a number of pipes and cables coming out of it. One end was connected through a flexible metal hose to another object about the same size, but instead of being a compact cylinder, this was obviously a rolled-up heat-pipe radiator array. Moving around among the plumbing was a small maintenance robot, looking like a metallic six-legged Manx cat with three-pronged flexible pincers for feet. It had the name tabby painted on its back.
“Have Tabby remove the safety pin on the reactor controller, Jeeves,” said Seichi.
“Very well, sir,” said the voice persona of the ship’s computer. The front paw of