"The husband or the wife? Both of them honkies, man. Screwin' white folks is the best part of life."

Kinsman could hear Colt's happy chuckling.

"Frank," he asked, "have you ever thought that by the time you're ninety-nine there might not be any race problems anymore?"

Colt's laughter deepened. "Sure. Just like we won't have any wars and all God's chillun got shoes."

"AH right, there it is," Captain Howard told them. The three space-suited men hovered just above the open clamshell doors of the payload bay, looking out at what seemed to Kinsman to be a stack of giant beer bottles. Except that they're plastic, not glass.

Six empty propeHant tanks, each of them nearly twice the size of the orbiter itself, were hanging in the emptiness in two neat rows. From this angle they could not see the connecting 58 rods holding them together.

"You've got three hours," Howard told them. "The booster tank linkages that hold it to the orbiter are built to come apart and re-attach to the other tanks . . ."

"We know, we know," Colt said impatiently.

Kinsman was thinking, This shouldn't take more than an hour. Two at the outside. Why give us three?

"Pardon me," Howard was saying, acid in his voice. "I should've remembered you guys know everything already." He grabbed at his tether and started pulling himself back inside the payload bay. "All right, you're on your own. Just don't panic if anything goes wrong. Panic kills. Remember that."

Almost an hour later, as they were attaching the empty propellant tank to the other six, Colt asked:

"How many times we practice this stunt in training?"

"This particular business?"

"Naw . . . just taking pieces apart and reassembling them."

Kinsman looked up from the bolt-tightening job he was doing. Colt was floating some forty meters away, up at the nose end of the fat propellant tank. He looked tiny next to the stack of huge eggs, each of them as big as a ten-room house. Sunlight glinted off them and the Earth slid by below, silent and serene.

The hardest part of the job was over: maneuvering the huge mass of the tank to the place where it was to be bolted to the others. Weightless though it may be, the tank still possessed mass, and in the frictionless vacuum of space, once a body starts in motion it keeps on going until something or somebody acts to stop it. The thrusters on their MMUs were pitifully inadequate to the task. The tank had its own thrust- ers installed at its nose and tail especially for this task.

"Well," Kinsman replied to Colt's question, "we did so much of this monkeywork in Huntsville and Houston that I thought they were training us to work in a garage."

"Yeah. That's what I was thinking. Then why's Howard so shaky about us doing this? You having any troubles?"

Kinsman shrugged inside his suit, and the motion made him drift slightly away from the strut he was working on. He 59 reached out and grabbed it to steady himself.

"I've spun myself around a couple of times/' he admit- ted. "But the tools work well, once you get used to them."

Colt's answer was a soft grunt. "The suit heats up," Kinsman went on. "I've had to stop work and let it cool down a couple of times."

"Try to keep in the shadows," answered Colt. "Stay out of the direct sun. Makes a big difference."

"Maybe Howard's worried about us being so far from the orbiter without tethers."

"Maybe." But Colt did not sound convinced. "How's your end going? I'm almost finished here." 'T got maybe another twenty minutes and I'll be through.

Three hours! This damned job don't take no three . . . Holy shit!"