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don’t have time to argue about it. But if you want me because I can supposedly handle violence, you didn’t read that record very thoroughly. That’s why I was in therapy.”
    “All I personally know is what’s on this piece of paper. That you’ve carried guns and fired them—”
    “No plural. Once. I carried a gun once, in my lap, trying to get to the Cape when the war started. I also fired it only once.”
    “That’s one more time than the rest of us.”
    She looked back at the cube. “You mainly want people who’ve been on Earth.”
    “That’s right; the more recently, the better. There won’t be any time to get accustomed to it.” He paused and leaned forward.
    “You fit other criteria: we need people who are young and physically strong, who have experience working in spacesuits. And people without children.”
    “That’s encouraging.” She returned to the chair and slumped into it. “I suppose you also want people who are relatively useless, who won’t be missed.”
    He shook his head. “That’s not a factor at all. In fact,the expedition’s leader is the Engineering Coordinator.”
    “That’s not very smart.”
    “It was her decision.” He crumpled up the piece of paper with O’Hara’s data on it and tossed it into the recycler. “What’s yours?”
    “Oh…I suppose I have to do it.”
    “No one’s forcing you.”
    “That’s not exactly what I mean.”
    3
    She wasn’t even allowed to say good-bye. They taped a message for her to leave for Daniel and John, that she and several others were going back into isolation, but not to worry, it wasn’t the plague.
    The lift to the hub was empty. O’Hara put on her sticky slippers and pushed the middle button, marked “0.”
    The sensation of weight decreased as the lift rose, or fell, toward the hub. When it stopped she was weightless, which of course was no novelty. The doors slid open and a man walked in upside-down and stood on the ceiling, also with Velcro slippers. They nodded and O’Hara walked down the short corridor, making a little ripping sound each time she lifted a foot. A sign saidit would be more natural to use handholds and float through the corridor, but you were liable to collide with somebody coming around a corner or through a door.
    She went into the locker room and checked out the spacesuit she’d been assigned last year, and a bundle of those damned diapers, and floated into the Operations Room.
    There were four men there, her age or younger, and one woman, Coordinator Sandra Berrigan. Their space-suits were hanging in midair by the opposite wall; O’Hara pushed hers gently in that direction.
    O’Hara swam over and introduced herself. She alreadyknew one of them, Ahmed Ten, but hadn’t recognized him at first. A short black man, back on Earth he’d worn his gray hair long, in a huge frizzy cloud; now he was shaven bald. It made him look younger.
    “Two more to come,” Berrigan told her. “We’ll hold off the actual briefing until we’re aboard the shuttle. Good-man, you want to show O’Hara how the guns work?” She’d wondered about that; by statute, there were no weapons in New New.
    Goodman was a beefy youngster with a quick grin. He beckoned for O’Hara to follow him through the airlock door.
    The shuttle floated huge in the pressurized bay. There was a strange smell in the air, burnt metal, like the smell around a welder.
    “What they done,” Goodman said, “was take an oxy gun and put a fuel feed on her, then put a sparker at the nozzle. Fuel’s a mixture of vegetable oil and powdered aluminum.” He brought her an oxy gun with an extra tank and a ceramic extension on the nozzle. “Point her down there and give the trigger a quick one.”
    She aimed down the long dimension of the bay and pinched the trigger. A squirt of bright flame roared out twenty or thirty meters, orange shot through with blinding blue-white. The noise of it echoed around the chamber. Recoil from the blast pushed O’Hara