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It’s meaningless.”
    “And John Kelly tonight?”
    “Look, Mo was going on and on. All that about his damned souvenir pebble—he plays cute a good deal, you know. The kids he
     teaches eat it up, but it gets pretty tiresome in committee. If John cut him off, he asked for it.”
    They were at the door of their unit. It looked like the door of a New England frame house, though it hissed open sideways
     when Ike touched the doorbell.
    Esther had gone to her cube, of course. Lately she spent as little time as possible with them in the livingcube. Noah and
     Jason had spread their diagrams, printouts, workbooks, a tri-di checkerboard all over the builtins and the floor, and sat
     in the middle of it eating prochips and chattering away. “Tom’s sister says she saw her in the O.R.,” Jason was saying. “Hi,
     Ike, hi, Susan. I don’t know, you can’t believe something some six-year-old says.”
    “Yeah, she’s probably just imitating what Linda said, trying to get attention. Hi, Mom, hi, Dad. Hey, did you hear about this
     burned woman Linda Jones and Treese Gerlack say they saw?”
    “What do you mean, a burned woman?”
    “Over by school in C-1 Corridor. They were going along, going to some girls’ meeting thing—”
    “Dahncing clahss,” Jason interjected, striking a pose somewhere between a dying swan and a vomiting twelve-year-old.
    “—and they claim they saw this woman they’d never seen before, how about that? How could there be anybody in Spes they’d never
     even seen? And she was like burned all over, and sort of lurking along the side of the corridor like she was afraid of being
     seen. And they sayshe went down C-3 just before they got there, and when they did they couldn’t see her. And she wasn’t in any of the cubes
     along C-3. And then Tom Fort’s little sister says she saw her in the O.R., Jason says, but she’s probably just trying to get
     attention too.”
    “She said she had white eyes,” Jason said, rolling his own blue ones. “Really gutwrenching.”
    “Did the girls report this to anybody?” Ike asked.
    “Treese and Linda? I don’t know,” Noah said, losing interest. “So, are we going to get more hands-on time with the Schoenfeldt?”
    “I requested it,” Ike said. He was upset, disturbed. Esther’s unjustifiable anger, Susan’s lack of sympathy, and now Noah
     and Jason telling ghost stories, quoting hysterical little girls about white-eyed phantoms: it was discouraging.
    He went into his studycube and got to work projecting designs for the second ship, following Levaitis’s proposals. No fake
     scenery, no props; the curves and angles of the structure exposed. The structural elements were rationally beautiful in their
     necessity. Form follows function. Instead of an illusion like the Common, the major space in each quadrant would be just that,
     a big space; call it the quad, maybe. Ten meters high, two hundred across, the arches of the hull reaching across it magnificently.
     He sketched it out on the holo, viewed it from different angles, walked around it. … It was past three when he went to bed,
     excited and satisfied by his work. Susan was fast asleep. He lay by her inert warmth and looked back on the events of the
     evening; his mind was clearer in the dark. There was no anti-Semitism in Spes. Look how many of the colonists were Jews. He
     was going to count, but found that he didn’t have to; the number seventeen was ready in his mind. It seemed less somehow than
     he had thought. He ran through the names and came out with seventeen. Not as many as it might have been, out of eight hundred,
     but a lot better than some other groups. There had been no problem recruiting people of Asiatic ancestry, in fact it seemedthe reverse, but the lack of African-ancestry colonists had caused long and bitter struggles of conscience over policy, back
     in the Union. But there had been no way around the fact that in a closed community of only eight hundred, every