It was the first time she had thought even momentarily of personal danger in connection with the project, and had no trouble dismissing it from her mind at once. Space is, of course, a dangerous environment for a planetary species, but so is a world for which the organism has not evolved; and Mary Chmenici did belong to a race whose ancestors, only a few generations earlier, had casually accepted manually controlled and individually directed vehicular traffic.

Maybe some other people on watch would have ideas and be willing to discuss them, though for the most part they shared Joe’s ethical standards. At the moment, of course, everyone in the conning room was busy; this included pairs from ten different teams, whose usual membership was four, though her own group had five. She and Joe were the only ones from the Enigma Exercise now on watch.

She keyed a clock onto a corner of her screen. Looking at it directly meant that her translator was no help, and it took several seconds to interpret the dial, even ignoring the sweep-mike needle that was a little too fast for her eyesight, and work the reading into time units in which she could think comfortably. They would be relaxing in a little less than half an hour. She would spend the first ten minutes in her own decently lit cabin, thinking of personal matters like the husband and son she wouldn’t be seeing for several weeks; then she would go to the team’s office and spend some more time persuading Charley and Jenny that geo-chemical dating was really all that had to be done to solve their problem. Charley seemed nearly convinced already, and with luck she could get him to work on Joe, who was oddly hard to persuade. Then—

Then the weight went off. No one had come up with artificial gravity yet; weight on a spacecraft came from real acceleration in real space and its unreal mathematical equivalent in false-space.