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Morality informer. Now he's certain that I'm one.
    He almost laughed as he shook Tavalera's hand in a final goodbye.
    Almost. Then he realized that he actually was a New Morality informer. At least, that's what the NM expected him to be.

Chapter 7 - 'Welcome to the Gulag'
    Grant at last got a look at the orbiting research station, a glimpse, nothing more, as he ducked through the transfer tube that had been set up to connect the station's docking hub with
Roberts'
airlock.
    That brief glimpse disturbed him even more.
    He was silently offering a prayer of thanksgiving at his safe arrival, and a supplication to 'make me worthy, O Lord, of the task You have given me.'
    As he looked up through the transfer tube's overhead window, the curving surface of the station looked huge, mammoth, a gigantic looming structure that filled the observation port like a colossal arch of gray metal, dulled and pitted from long years of exposure to radiation and infalling cosmic dust.
    A childhood memory flashed through Grant's mind: the time his parents had taken him to San Francisco and they had somehow gotten themselves lost in a seedy, dangerous part of the city near the enormous dirt-encrusted supporting buttresses of the Bay Bridge. Grant's breath had caught in his throat; for a moment he had imagined the entire weight of that immense bridge crashing down on him, crushing him and his parents in their flimsy open-topped automobile in a thundering tangle of steel girders and ponderous blocks of stone.
    As he made his solitary way through the slightly flexible transfer tube, he got that same sudden feeling: this enormous thick wheel of a station was going to come crashing down upon him any moment now. Again, his breath caught and for just a heartbeat of an instant he felt very small, very vulnerable, very close to death.
    The instant passed. Grant finished his prayer as he strode on alone through the tube; he was the only person transferring from the freighter to the research station. The flooring felt soft and spongy beneath his boots, especially after so many months of the freighter's steel decks. Everything's fine, he told himself. He remembered that the instant he stepped through the hatch at the far end of the tube he was officially engaged in his Public Service duty; every second would count toward his four-year commitment. Every second would bring him closer to Marjorie, to home, to the life he wanted.
    But he had seen something in that brief glimpse of the station, something that should not have been there. Grant had memorized the station's layout after months of studying it during the long trip out to Jupiter. Research Station
Gold
was a massive, fat doughnut of a structure, more than five kilometers in diameter. It rotated once every two minutes to give its interior a spin-induced artificial gravity of almost exactly one
g
, so that its inhabitants would feel a comfortable Earth gravity inside the station.
    Grant had seen an additional structure sticking out from the doughnut shape, a metallic lenticular section, round and flattened like a discus, connected to the station by a single slender tube, literally poking out from the main body of the station like a sore thumb. It should not have been there. Grant knew the schematics of Station
Gold
by heart; he had pored over its design details and operations manuals for months. There was no extra section hanging out on one side of the doughnut. There couldn't be. It would unbalance the station's spin and inevitably destabilize it so badly that it would shake the structure apart.
    It could not be there, Grant knew. Yet he had seen it. He was certain of that.
    He felt puzzled, almost worried, as he took the few steps that brought him to the end of the transfer tunnel. Grant had to duck slightly to get through the hatch that connected with the station itself. As he stepped through, he found himself in a small, bare chamber. Its metal walls were scuffed, dull; its flooring was metal gridwork.