First thing in the morning, he'd unpack that trunk and go over all those
maps. There were half a dozen spaceports and maintenance shops and
shipyards within a half-day by airboat, none of which had been looted.
He'd look them all over; that would take a couple of weeks. Pick the
best shipyard and concentrate on it. Kurt Fawzi'd be the man to recruit
labor. Professor Kellton was a scholar, not a scientist. He didn't know
beans about hyperdrive engines, but he knew how to do library research.
They came to the edge of High Garden Terrace at the escalator, long
motionless, its moving parts rusted fast, that led down to the Mall, and
at the bottom of it was Senta's, the tables under the open sky.
A crowd was already gathering. There was Tom Brangwyn, and there was
Kurt Fawzi and his wife, and Lynne. And there was Senta herself, fat and
dumpy, in one of her preposterous red-and-purple dresses, bustling
about, bubbling happily one moment and screaming invective at some
laggard waiter the next.
The dinner, Conn knew, would be the best he had eaten in five years, and
afterward they would sit in the dim glow of Beta Gartner, sipping coffee
and liqueurs, smoking and talking and visiting back and forth from one
table to another, as they always did in the evenings at Senta's.
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