"Don't you see," she asked, "how important it is that you write this book? Don't you understand?"
Sutton shook his head.
Important, he thought. Important for what? And whom? And when?
He remembered the open mouth that death had struck, the teeth that glittered in the moonlight and the words of a dying man still rang sharply in his ears.
"But I don't understand," he said. "Maybe you can tell me."
She shook her head. "You write the book," she told him.
XIX
The asteroid was enveloped in the perpetual twilight of the far-from-sun and its frosty peaks speared up like sharp, silvery needles stabbing at the stars.
The air was sharp and cold and thinner than on Earth and the wonder was, Sutton told himself, that any air could be kept on the place at all. Although at the cost that it had taken to make this or any other asteroid habitable, it would seem that anything should be possible.
A billion-dollar job at least, Sutton estimated. The cost of the atomic plants alone would run to half that figure and without atomics there would be no power to run the atmosphere and gravity machines that supplied the air and held it in its place.