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bring ’em back to Earth for a week just because he or she was getting a little bored. As stated in the fine print on the job contract, only a death in the family or a severe medical problem could get you sent temporarily back to Earth. Some of the guys with two-year contracts didn’t even bother to take their vacations; it just wasn’t worth having to go through readjusting to low-gravity life, with the usual recurrence of spacesickness that went along with it.
    So there were one hundred and thirty of us aboard that wheel in the sky: building the powersats, putting up with the boredom and cramped quarters, making money the hard way to support families or start small businesses like restaurants or game parlors when we got back home. Working, eating, sleeping, working. Getting bored.
    People started doing strange things after a while.

4
Virgin Bruce
    A FEW MINUTES AFTER Popeye Hooker, in an even more funky mood than before his visit to Meteorology, floated up the hub’s central shaft to the Docks, a crewman on the Command deck stared at his console’s main CRT and murmured, “What the hell?”
    His screen displayed the whereabouts of all spacecraft in a three-dimensional region of space around Olympus Station and Vulcan Station. Although the screen was two-dimensional, computer graphics depicted the spacecraft as existing in a sphere sixty miles in diameter. Each blip on the screen was designated with a different color according to its type. Small print above each blip showed the craft’s location and trajectory on the X, Y, and Z axes.
    What the space traffic controller noticed was a craft enroute from the construction shack to the main station. This was not unusual in itself; at least a dozen ships made the fifty-mile trip between Vulcan and Olympus each day. What was odd was that this craft was a construction pod, and they never—absolutely never—made trips between the two stations.
    If one of the beamjacks at the powersat needed to return to Olympus, he never rode over in one of the OTVs that served as interorbital ferries. The construction pods were difficult to pilot; most of the guys who were trained to operate them preferred not to make the delicate docking maneuver more than they had to during a work shift.
    More importantly, though, the pods’ fuel supplies were limited. Someone attempting to make a run back to Skycan in a pod ran a high risk of running out of fuel on the way over. Being set adrift was more of a nuisance than it was a danger. It just meant that someone else had to drop what he was doing to go out in another spacecraft to tow the unlucky pod back to Vulcan Station. But because this meant lost time and productivity, using construction pods for commutes between Vulcan and Olympus was strictly against regulations. With the exception of a single pod that was kept at Skycan for maintenance jobs around the station, most of the pods remained in the vicinity of Vulcan Station and SPS-1.
    Yet, there one was. The white blip on the controller’s screen was a Vulcan construction pod, and its coordinates and bearing showed it to be heading for Skycan.
    The controller raised his headset mike to lip level and touched a button on his intercom. “Communications? Joni? This is Rick at TC.”
    Communications was located a half-level below Traffic Control. If the controller glanced over his shoulder and down, he could have looked through the open-grid metal flooring and seen the radio deck, about fifteen feet away. More than once, he wished his station could have been closer to Joni’s station. In fact, having her sitting in his lap would have been just close enough.
    Communications. What ’ s up , Anderson ? Joni’s throaty voice responded in his earphones. A lovely voice, Anderson reflected. The kind you could fantasize about hearing at night, in your bed. He just loved to talk to Communications when she was on duty.
    “Ah, I have a construction pod on my screen, bearing nine, three, three, on course