She knew Sean Probst by his reputation, by his signature on her paychecks, and by the emails he sent her at three o’clock in the morning of whatever time zone his private jet had most recently taken him to. Sean yielded to no one in his knowledge of all things space related. When he walked into a space station and called bullshit, things were about to become entertaining.
One of the few appealing things about him was that he had figured out that his personality was a problem and, in classic “get it done” style, had hired a coach to make him less of an asshole. She could see that working in his face.
“Not your part of it—that’s awesome,” he admitted.
“I figured you would have said something earlier if that were not the case,” Dinah said.
Sean nodded. Done.
His arrival at the space station had been unconventional, and roundabout. There was no docking station to accommodate the Drop Top. There couldn’t possibly be, since the Drop Top didn’t even have a port or an airlock. So there’d been no way to attach it to Izzy. He had brought the little convertible in under manual control, tapping the thrusters one at a time, spitting bullets of spent propellant into space, then pausing for one, five, or ten minutes to ponder the consequences. Space nerd that he was, he knew perfectly well that orbital mechanics did not obey the rules of earthbound physics. He had enough humility, and enough spare oxygen, to take it slow. Eventually he had drifted close enough to Amalthea that a three-Siwi train with a Grabb on its head had been able to reach out and grapple a fitting on the edge of his cockpit. He had then ejected himself from the vehicle, floating free in space, and gone on a little tour of inspection, firing off occasional messages to Dinah so that she could know where he was. Since there was no direct radio connection, these had to be relayed through a server in Seattle.
He was in a tubesuit: a tourist product that in some ways was less capable, in others more so, than the government-issue ones used by cosmonauts and astronauts. It had no legs at all, since legs were pretty useless in space. It looked like a test tube with a pair of arms and a bubble-shaped dome on the top. The arms had shoulder and elbow joints, but no hands as such. Gloves were notoriously the most troublesome parts of space suits. Instead, the tubesuit’s arms terminated in rounded-off stumps. Projecting from each of these was a skeletal hand consisting of a thumb and three fingers, actuated by steel cables that ran through airtight fittings into the arm-stumps. The occupant could slip his hand into a glovelike contraption inside the stump that would pull on the metal tendons as he moved his fingers, thereby actuating the external digits and enabling him to grab things and perform a few simple operations. There was nothing about it that couldn’t have been built by a tinkerer in an inventor’s lab in 1890, or 1690 for that matter. People who had used them reported that they worked surprisingly well—better in some ways than conventional space suit gloves, which were stiff and fatigued the hands.
There was plenty of extra room inside the stumps, and so when not using the clawlike hands he could pull his fingers free of the internal glove and let them rest on internal touchpads and joysticks where he could type and swipe to his heart’s content. The suit had some tiny thrusters that enabled the user to “fly” it around. Sean had put these to work at some length, wandering around the outside of Izzy and inspecting the work of the robots, the modifications made to the truss, and other curiosities.
Finally he had found his way to an airlock at the aft end of H2, where Dinah had let him in, and he had blurted out his opinion.
He looked like any nondescript thirty-eight-year-old nerd at a graduate physics seminar or a sci-fi convention, with stringy dishwater-blond hair stuck to his head by sweat, and a few days’ darker stubble. In his official photos he wore contacts, but today he wore thick-lensed eyeglasses. He pulled one arm, then the other, out of the suit and then pushed himself up and out through the big opening at its top where the head-dome had been attached.
“I’ve been having trouble seeing the long-term sustainability angle,” Dinah admitted. For she was not above dangling bait.
“Ya think?!” he shouted. “Has anyone done even the most basic mass balance calculation on this Cloud Ark concept?” Sean was from New Jersey.
She wasn’t sure what he meant, so she stalled for time. “People have been pretty distracted. I wouldn’t be the first to know.”
“They wouldn’t tell you!” he shouted. “Because you would see right away that it is bullshit!”
“What is?” Ivy asked, floating toward them with an interested look on her face. “And who the hell are you?”