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have called from the Low Earth Orbit Facility.”
“SRI pays you enough to afford trans-lunar connections?”
    Yes , she thought. She shrugged. “You’re right.”
    “I’ve got good news,” her mother beamed. “Akio’s home.”
    Bente didn’t groan like she wanted to. She didn’t even roll her eyes.
    Dinner at the Naguchi residence was always an unusual combination of Japanese and German tainted by the lack of meat and by the abundance of vegetables available from the NESA farms. Akio deftly put the sauerkraut into his mouth with chopsticks. Mr. Naguchi had developed a taste for the putrid vegetable, but it seemed to him his wife thought it was a staple.
    “Is the development of the lunar-equatorial accelerator going well?” he asked Akio.
    “Yes,” Bente’s younger brother replied. “We hope to start digging the tunnel by next year. I hope I’m alive to see its completion.”
“Are you still having financial problems?” Mr. Naguchi asked.
“It’s getting better. Even the American government is putting in money–almost as much as the Russian Federation.”
“What energies do you hope to obtain?” Mr. Naguchi asked as if reading from a script.
“Near primordial energies: About ten to the minus one hundred seconds after the big-bang,” he said proudly.
“And, Bente,” Mr. Naguchi chided. “What do you do? You go off to make money. You mine asteroids.”
“I’m a navigator, Father,” Bente said patiently. “And I don’t do it for money.”
    “Then why would you throw your education away on SRI? You could be working with your brother on the accelerator, or on some other research project.”
    “Father, research is fine,” Bente replied. “But it takes money. Akio? How much was SRI’s contribution to the accelerator?”
    “About five billion euro,” Akio admitted reluctantly.
    “You see,” Bente said. “The reason I joined SRI is that they’re doing something other than sitting around theorizing. They have a manned outpost on Europa, for heaven’s sake. They’ve gone farther into space than any government. They’re moving man into the frontier. Sure it’s for profit, but in history that’s why all the new lands were explored. It was only in the twentieth century that ‘profit’ became a dirty word.”
    “Yes,” Mr. Naguchi retorted. “But SRI was started by NESA; a multi-government research agency.”
    “And then NESA sold SRI to the stockholders and made enough to afford to bring more research scientists to the Moon. Like you and Mother.”
Mr. Naguchi looked at his daughter. “Do they teach you disrespect at SRI?” he asked quietly.
“No, Father.”
“Then where did you learn it?”
“I’m sorry, Father. I meant no disrespect.”
The rest of the meal was unusually quiet.
    ***
    Griffin woke from a light sleep and exited the closet-sized captain’s quarters. He climbed the ladder that put him on the deck with the galley and bridge. Knecht was sitting in front of her computer. The ship was small and most of it was devoted to equipment, not living space.
    “How’s it going?” he asked.
    Knecht literally jumped a foot off the chair in the low gravity. She turned and a short yet lethal-looking knife was in her hand. She didn’t relax until she saw Griffin, and that he was a good, long ways away.
“What do you want?” she asked, more than just a little suspicious.
Griffin spread his hands in supplication. “I couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d check on how things are going.”
“You need to sleep,” Knecht stated flatly. “As shorthanded as we are.”
Griffin nodded. He hadn’t anticipated losing three on the Moon; that damn security man. But Knecht took care of him.
“I know,” he said. “How’s the navigation?”
    Knecht started to relax. She enjoyed computers and the challenges of navigation. O ne uses computers, they don’t use you , she thought. And they didn’t hurt you, at least not maliciously. Everything a computer did was logical, even if their