"Rocky, would you take a look at this?"

"That's Capn Jones to you. Show me in the morning." "It's sort of important."

Cirocco was at her wash basin, her face covered in soap. She groped for a towel and wiped the greenish goop away. It was the only kind of soap the recyclers would eat.

She squinted at the two pictures Gaby handed her. "What is it?"

'Just the twelfth satellite of Saturn." Gaby was not entirely successful at hiding her excitement.

"No fooling?" Cirocco frowned from one picture to the other. "Just a lot of little black dots to me."

"Well, yeah. You can't see anything without the comparometer. That's it right there." She indicated an area with her little %er.

"Let's go take a look."

Cirocco rummaged through her locker and found a pea-green shipsuit that smelled as good as any of them. Most of the handy velcro patches were peeling.

Her room was at the bottom of the carousel, midway between

ladders three and four. She followed Gaby around the curving floor, then pursued her up the ladder.

Each rung was a little easier than the last until, at the hub, they were weightless. They pushed off from the slowly rotating ring and drifted down the central corridor to the science module. SCIMOD in NASA-ese. It was kept dark to make the instruments easier to read, and was as colourful as the inside of a juke- box. Cirocco liked it. Green lights blinked and banks of television screens hissed white noise through confetti clouds of snow. Ugene Springfield and the Polo sisters floated around the central holo tank. Their faces were bathed in the red glow.

Gaby handed the plates to the computer, punched up an image-intensifying program, and indicated the screen Cirocco should watch. The pictures were sharpened, combined, then rapidly alternated. Two miniscule dots blinked, not far from each other.