As he led her after the others toward the Hilton, she kept up an endless string of prattle about Earthside entertainers and Tri-V programs and school friends and the two weeks she’d just finished “back home in Montana” riding horses and rock-climbing and how she’d been looking forward to coming to the moon for two years and how it was going to be hard to go back to high school after this—and she kept bouncing, bouncing, bouncing, as if she couldn’t believe that a world existed where she weighed only one-sixth of what she was used to and she had to prove it to herself with every step. Scott grimaced, and wished he was back in the observatory comparing starplates, doing something useful instead of wasting his time with this...this girl.
He glanced over his shoulder at her as she paused by o
