Free Boundary 2: Threshold by Eric Flint, Ryk Spoor Page A

some rather nonprofessional thoughts about my mentor, too, from time to time."
    "Dr. Glendale? Can't fault your taste there , even if you seem to have gone downhill since." Helen snorted. "But . . ." Jackie looked pensive.
    "What?"
    "Oh, I don't know. I suppose I'm still looking for that perfect guy, as silly as it sounds." She looked dubious.
    Helen tried not to look dubious herself. "I'm sure there's just such a guy out there, waiting for you."
    "Well, he'd better not wait too long," Jackie said emphatically. "Or I'll end up marrying this ship, and Nobel just never talks to me."
     

Chapter 9
    "You found something, A.J.?" Bruce asked, floating quickly up. "Bloody hell, mate, you look awful."
    "Huh? Oh, just a little tired, I guess." The blond sensor expert's eyes had dark circles, visible even behind the VRD glasses, and he spoke with the heavy tones of someone almost asleep on his feet. "Found something, yeah. Larry made the suggestion, after I hadn't found anything in the past couple of days, to look for really deep straight holes."
    "You haven't been up for five days straight, have you?"
    "No, no, I slept a full eight hours last night."
    "The hell you did," Helen said, concern in her voice. "A.J., it's Tuesday evening."
    "Uh? Oh." A.J. gave a jaw-cracking yawn. "Um, yeah, that'd mean I slept, umm, two and a half days ago. No problem . . ." He turned back to the console. "Anyway, Larry gets credit. I was wrong. They did get creamed, just not with a big rock. Something hit hard with a lot of smaller things, made holes that looked"—he yawned again—"um, looked like a lot of the other craters, so it didn't stand out. Punched straight down. Found 'em because they were all in a pretty close group, and so they made parallel holes right around the target area."
    "And can you show us where that is, exactly?"
    "Oh, yeah, stupid of me . . . right here." The larger image of Ceres on the main screen suddenly ballooned upward as though Nobel were plummeting straight toward the surface of the miniature planet, then halted. A pattern of little circles in bright green suddenly appeared in the center of the screen, with a brilliant red X to the left and below the middle of the pattern. "X marks the spot I think you'd best land at. . . . Looks to have slightly higher, um . . . what the hell is it, I can't think . . . Oh, higher water readings."
    He's practically dead on his feet, Jackie thought, and moved forward. "That's it, A.J., you're going to bed. Jesus, you're going to make yourself sick. You're not twenty anymore. In fact, you've seen the other side of thirty already."
    "Not thirty, refuse to believe it." Helen helped A.J., still mumbling in a disjointed way, out of the control room, while the others watched.
    "Right," said Bruce as the doors closed. "Time to plan the landing."
    Jackie nodded. The reason that they hadn't landed anyone on Ceres yet was simple: they wanted there to be absolutely no chance of any creative interpretation of the Buckley Addendum that would remove the Cererian Bemmie base from the control of the joint IRI-Ares mission. Unless the Addendum was interpreted very broadly, they wouldn't be awarded the leasehold on the entire miniature planet, any more than Ares had gotten all, or even a majority, of Mars.
    The Addendum and its current interpretation, of course, was very clear: the claim would be based on the location of the first person to "set foot"—i.e., land and leave the landing vehicle—on the object in question. Thus, they had to wait until they could determine exactly where the Bemmie base was, and land directly above it. If another ship, like Nike , Amaterasu , or Odin had gotten close, the crew of Nobel might have had to just go for it anyway. But now, fortunately, it wouldn't be necessary.
    "A.J. won't be available for a while, obviously," Bruce said. "Still, I don't see it should be a problem. I'll be flyin', of course, so me, you, Larry, Jane, and Jake are doing the