me a thing I didn't know?"

I nodded.

"I'm sorry. I'd almost hoped you might know some way out that I haven't been around long enough to pick up."

I didn't answer. I didn't have to. I'd said enough for a month already, and we both knew it.

My speech left an odd feeling in the pit of my stomach. Space crews are not selected for their talkativeness. In space, there is next to nothing to talk about, and a large part of pre-space training consists of developing the ability to be silent. Another part consists of eliminating as much as possible of the remaining necessity for talking.

So many words, meaning so little, amounted almost to blasphemy, but somehow the situation had seemed to call for them.

It was not a situation normally encountered by space crews.

The sounds behind me said that she was unfolding the beds, inflating the mattresses, and then slowly stripping off the three layers of her spacesuit "skin." I waited until I heard the peculiar "snap" she always made when she removed the inner layer, then turned and began removing my own spacesuit.

Space crews are normally nude when the situation does not require spacesuits. It saves weight.

I watched her closely as she hung up the suit and crawled slowly between the covers, and tried to feel something remotely resembling passion. I remained as cold as the thin Martian air on the other side of the rubber-fabric envelope around us.

I gave up the attempt and tried to convince myself that desire would come later, when we got things organized better and the shock wore off. After all, that had also been included in our training.

I shrugged off the rest of my suit and hung it up carefully, strictly from force of habit, and slid into the bunk below hers.

I couldn't sleep. I could relax a little, but I couldn't sleep.

I've been in space a long time.

Eleven years. And five years in training before that. I flew the third ship around the moon and the second to land on it. I flew one-sixth of the materials that built Ley, the first "stepping stone" satellite, and one-twentieth of those that went into Goddard, the second. I didn't bother keeping track of how much of Luna City got there in my ship. I 

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