"Oh, Tom!" It was pure disdain this time. "It isn't the money! You should have a ship. You should be out doing things. They can't make you into a glorified slug monkey on the moon!" She pulled away from my arm and looked at me again. The solemn expression on her face was somber now, or maybe sullen; anyway I didn't like it. "For six thousand they can do worse than that," I said. "It's more than the captain of a liner gets. And, anyway, Translunar's ships are all staffed. There wouldn't be a place for me even if I wanted one, and I'm not sure I want one. Maybe there's more glamour in being a deep-space man, but you can't call the job the engineers do trivial. The idea of being a slug monkey doesn't bother me at all at that pay. It's better than being a swamp hog on Venus." "But it's such a waste, Tom! Anyone can be an engineer. You should be in research or exploration, and you know it. It's a crime to waste your talent in a dock job. You belong out on the Edge." "Look, Betty--there are three sorts of Edge jobs: in the Patrol, on some sort of an expedition, or as a space-rat. The first two don't pay and, as for the third, even if I liked the idea of prospecting the planets, it takes money to outfit for it, and it took all I had to finish Tech." "But you have the Aspera, and the Translunar prize would be enough to get her into shape again and buy supplies." "I was given to understand this afternoon that it would be considered very unconventional to take the money and not take the job. And anyway, what would I do then--hunt for thorium in the asteroids? No thanks. I'll take the slug monkey job and the salary. And I think you ought to do the same. You could get a job closer in that would pay a lot more than going off to the Belt on a wild goose chase. When you graduate first in your class at Tech you can take your pick." "Wild goose chase!" She sniffed. "We are going out to get data on the Warp at close range. We might even find out the way to get around it and open up the outer planets to exploration." * * * * * The Warp was supposed to be a sort of fourth-dimensional wrinkle in space somewhere beyond the asteroids that swallowed ships and accounted for the fact that out of three expeditions that had tried to reach Jupiter, three had not returned. I knew better. "There isn't any Warp," I told her. "My father proved that eight years ago when he made the swing around Jupiter." "But he never published any proof, Tom."