Sometimes a monkey has more sense than a man.

Especially a man who looks so raggedy, Gerald thought. A chance glimpse of his reflection revealed how stained his elastic garment had become-from spilled drinks and maintenance fluids. His grizzled cheeks looked gaunt. Infested, even haunted, by bushy, unkempt eyebrows.

If I go home to Houston like this, the family won’t even let me in our house. Though, with all my accumulated flight pay…

Come on, focus!

Grimly, Gerald clicked down twice on his lower left premolar and three times on the right. His suit responded with another jolt of Slow Juice through a vein in his thigh. Coolness, a lassitude that should help clear thinking, spread through his body-

– and time seemed to crawl.

Feedback signals from the distant bola now had time to catch up. He felt more a part of the thirty kilometer strand, as it whirled ponderously in a higher orbit. Pulsing electric currents that throbbed up there were translated as a faint tingle down here, running from Gerald’s wrist, along his arm and shoulder, slanting across his back and then down to his left big toe, where they seemed to dig for leverage. When he pushed, the faraway cable-satellite responded, applying force against the planet’s magnetic field.

Tele-operation. In an era of ever more sophisticated artificial intelligence, some tasks still needed an old-fashioned human pilot. Even one who floated in a bubble, far below the real action.

Let’s increase the current a bit. To notch down our rate of turn. A tingle in his toe represented several hundred amps of electricity, spewing from one end of the whirling tether, increasing magnetic drag. The great cable rotated across the stars a bit slower.

Hachi-linked-in nearby-hooted querulously from his own web of support fibers. This was better, though the capuchin still needed convincing.