"Yeah," he agreed, and she could hear the sympathy in his voice. She held her pose, waiting for him to flip his mental coin... "Well, look, I guess it'd be okay, just this once. Come on—I'll give you a quick tour."

She gushed some appropriate words of thanks and then shut up, letting him do all the talking as he led her around the room, pointing out this and that and gabbing about a lot of stuff that made no sense whatsoever. But that was okay. Every word he said was going into her general mental grab bag of useful information, maybe to be pulled out someday.

"—but since they decay within a few microseconds, we have to keep making new ones," he commented as they passed an untended console. "The actual equipment is a little further forward, but we've got a monitor here to keep tabs on it." He pointed to a free-standing display a few meters away.

"I see," Chandris said; but her eyes were on the console right beside her. Lying on top of it, looking as if it had been casually dropped there by someone with more urgent things on his mind, was a flat plate that looked like a hand computer. Worth maybe a couple hundred on the open market... and she was going to be hitting Lorelei flat broke. "Which one of those lines is the actual production rate?" she asked her guide, gesturing toward the distant display.

"The blue one on top is flux rate," he said, pointing. "Red is particle temperature, green is interface transfer, and that heavy black line shows the confinement profile. Now, this thing over here..."

Taking her upper arm in a big-brotherly sort of way, he led her toward yet another giant incomprehensible machine. It was, Chandris reflected, just as well she hadn't tried a sexual approach on this one. A hand around her waist, instead of on her arm, would hardly have failed to notice the hard lump that had suddenly appeared hidden beneath the waistband of her skirt.