"Mas; of the time?"
Kinsman said, "I got the feeling he enjoyed watching the Earth just as much as we did."
"H'mp- Yeah. I forgot about that."
As Kinsman disconnected the hose from Colt's backpack he glanced out at the Earth again. "I wonder if you ever get accustomed to that."
"Sure is some sight," Colt agreed.
"Makes me want to just drift out of here and never come back," murmured Kinsman. "Just go on forever and ever."
"You'll need a damned big air tank."
"Not a bad way to die, if you've got to go. Drifting alone, silent, going to sleep among the stars . . ."
"That's okay for you, maybe. But I intend to be shot by a jealous husband when I'm ninety-nine years old," Colt said firmly. "That's how I wanna go: bareass and humpin'."
"White or black?"
"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."
