The Seeds of Time

The satellite’s day was too short for convenience, and its night, lit by Callisto, and sometimes by Jupiter as well, almost as bright; so they disregarded it, and lived by the calendar-clock which kept Earth time on the Greenwich Meridian setting. At first much of the time had been occupied in disposing of the freight that the ship had left. Some of it into the main dome-necessities for themselves, and other items that would store better where there was warmth and air. Some into the small, airless, unheated dome. The greater part to be stowed and padded carefully into cylinders and launched off to the Callisto base. But once that work had been cleared, the job was certainly soft, too soft….

Duncan drew up a programme. At regular intervals he would inspect this and that, he would waft himself up to the crag and check on the sun-motor there, et cetera. But keeping to an unnecessary programme requires resolution. Sunmotors, for instance, are very necessarily built to run for long spells without attention. The only action one could take if it should stop would be to call on Callisto for a ferryrocket to come and take them off until a ship should call to repair it. A breakdown there, the Company had explained very clearly, was the only thing that would justify him in leaving his station, with the stores of precious earth, unmanned (and it was also conveyed that to contrive a breakdown for the sake of a change was unlikely to prove worth while). One way and another, the programme did not last long.

There were times when Duncan found himself wondering whether the bringing of Lellie had been such a good idea after all. On the purely practical side, he’d not have cooked as well as she did, and probably have pigged it quite as badly as his predecessor had, but if she had not been there, the necessity of looking after himself would have given him some occupation. And even from the angle of company-well, she was that, of a sort, but she was alien, queer; kind of like a half-robot, and dumb at that; certainly no fun. There were, indeed, times-increasingly frequent times, when the very look of her irritated him intensely; so did the way she moved, and her gestures, and her silly pidgin-talk when she talked, and her self-contained silence when she didn’t, and her withdrawness, and all her differentness, and the fact that he would have been Ł2,360 better off without her…. Nor did she make a serious attempt to remedy her shortcomings, even where she had the means. Her face, for instance. You’d think any girl would try to make her best of that-but did she, hell! There was that left eyebrow again: made her look like a sozzled clown, but a lot she cared….

‘For heaven’s sake,’ he told her once more, ‘put the cockeyed thing straight. Don’t you know how to fix ‘em yet? And you’ve got your colour on wrong, too. Look at that picture -now look at yourself in the mirror: a great daub of red all in the wrong place. And your hair, too: getting all like seaweed again. You’ve got the things to wave it, then for crysake wave it again, and stop looking like a bloody mermaid. I know you can’t help being a damn Mart, but you can at least try to look like a real woman.’

Lellie looked at the coloured picture, and then compared her reflection with it, critically.

‘Yith-okay,’ she said, with an equable detachment. Duncan snorted.

‘And that’s another thing. Bloody baby-talk! It’s not “yith,” it’s “yes.” Y-E-S, yes. So say “yes.” ‘

‘Yith,’ said Lellie, obligingly.

‘Oh, for-Can’t you hear the difference? S-s-s, not th-thth.

‘Ye-sss.’

‘Yith,’ she said.

‘No. Put your tongue further back like this-‘

The lesson went on for some time. Finally he grew angry.

‘Just making a monkey out of me, huh! You’d better be careful, my girl. Now, say “yes.” ‘

She hesitated, looking at his wrathful face.

‘Go on, say it.’

‘Y-yeth,’ she said, nervously. His hand slapped across her face harder than he had intended. The jolt broke her magnetic contact with the floor, and sent her sailing across the room in a spin of arms and legs. She struck the opposite wall, and rebounded to float helplessly, out of reach of any hold. He strode after her, turned her right way up, and set her on her feet. His left hand clutched her overall in a bunch, just below her throat, his right was raised.

‘Again!’ he told her.

Her eyes looked helplessly this way and that. He shook her. She tried. At the sixth attempt she managed: ‘Yeths.’ He accepted that for the time being.

‘You can do it, you see-when you try. What you need, my girl, is a bit of firm handling.’

He let her go. She tottered across the room, holding her hands to her bruised face.

A number of times while the weeks drew out so slowly into months Duncan found himself wondering whether he was going to get through. He spun out what work there was as much as he could, but it left still too much time hanging heavy on his hands.