ow, he reflected with grim humor as he walked into the
shadow of the main building. Neither Blalok's nor Jordan's frequent
visits bothered him. Both men were creatures of habit and both were
married. They stayed home at night--and it was nighttime that he worked
on the spacer. The project afforded him a perfect cover and it was only
minutes by jeep away from the crater.

Even so, the double duty was an appalling task. And it would have been
impossible if it wasn't for Copper. Her quick fingers, keen eyesight,
and uncanny memory made the work seem simple, and neither the
tediousness of repairing miles of circuitry nor the depressing
environment of Olympus Station seemed to bother her. While he worked
with the men on the project she restored and reassembled circuits in
his quarters and at night they replaced them in the old ship. And the
God-Egg was rapidly becoming operational.

Kennon wondered what it was about Copper that made her so different from
the rest. Olympus didn't bother her at all. In fact she seemed to thrive
on the depressing atmosphere that filled the Station. Perhaps it was
because she had violated the tabu about the God-Egg so often that
ordinary superstition had no effect upon her. He shrugged. He had
troubles enough without worrying about Copper's motivations, and not the
least of these was taking the God-Egg into space.

Kennon looked forward to blast-off with distinct misgivings. There was
too much about the ancient spacer that was strange--and too much that
was terrifying.

Basically the ship was an ion-jet job with atomic primaries and a
spindizzy converter that might possibly take her up as high as middle
yellow Cth--far enough to give her a good turn of speed, but not enough
to compensate for timelag. Her screens were monstrosities, double
polyphase lattices that looked about as spacetight as so many sieves.
There were no acceleration dampers, no temporal compensators, no
autopilot, no four-space computer, and the primaries operated on nuclear
rather than binding energy. The control chairs weren't equipped with
forcefields, but instead had incredibly primitive safety webs that held
one in place by sheer tensile strength. Taking a ship like that into
space was an open invitation to suicide. A man needed a combination of
foolhardy bravery and incredible fatalism to blast off in a can like
this. He had the stimulus, but the knowledge of what he would face
troubled him more than he cared to admit