One step ends a multi-billion kilometre journey. Taken in squalor, its backward-working gloss colours what has gone before.
Not that the low-level mono-rail from Western Metropolitan Space Port was uniformly squalid. Commander Grant D. Kirby was seeing it with a disenchanted eye.
It ran below angled, striding legs of continuous building blocks. Daylight fell coldly on a chequer board of pink and grey paving thirty metres below its hurrying shuttles. Litter swirled in spirals and sank as the cars passed. Foreshortened figures of unscheduled-class vagrants moved on aimless missions over its concrete deserts. Filling in time between subsistence handouts.
After twelve month's absence it was an aspect of Earth which was hard to reconcile. Even knowing that they were worthless to themselves and the towering stratified society above them made it no easier to take.
Light had something to do with his mood. After the clear Umbrian day of Triopus, this mixture of harsh, natural daylight and glare from spaced-out ceiling ports was clinical and depressing.
Kirby felt that ever since Europa Nine had blazed down to its designated pad, he had been in a long tube. Nor was that only physical fact. His mind was blinkered, so that he could only see one way and what he saw he liked less and less.
Six seats in the VIP compartment. Four faces that he knew too well. Even in counterpoint time, the mission to Triopus had taken over a hundred days each way. Together with three months on the green planet it was more than enough to bring personalities into head-on confrontation.
Facing him, Dr Boris Martinez, high-shouldered and urbane, was leaning back, stroking four long sinewy fingers across his spreading forehead in a habitual gesture which now grated on Kirby's nerves.
He had seen it too often as a prelude to some compromise which pleased no-one. As titular head of the expedition, Martinez had been too much inclined to bow to pressure groups inside. Probably not corrupt; but making it very easy for the commercial interests to push dangerous policy.
Next to him, Mark Hadden sat erect. Sideburns, black moustache, very neat. Large brown eyes meeting Kirby's with a query which was plain enough, "What are you going to do about it, then?" Another element too, which could be simple malice or prior knowledge of something Kirby did not know, but which was definitely against his interest.
Kirby recognized that he had never liked Hadden. Competent enough as a civil engineering specialist, but basically a creep. Dangerous in this instance. His manipulation of Martinez had been very successful.
On his own side of the car, Glen Watkins and Sally Maloon talking together in low confidential tones. Not quite in secrecy, but definitely a personal, one-to-one net. Classic yes-men. Not an original idea between them. Solidly behind Martinez right or wrong. The Maloon, as the doctor's personal assistant, perhaps owed him that much loyalty, but Watkins as the expedition's resident headshrinker ought to know better.
That left Gary Ward, physicist, an unlikely ally for a military man; but the only member of the hierarchy to see it his way.
Between them though, they should be able to swing it. Ward was well known and his opinions had to be heard. Their minority report could not be suppressed and was sure to get enough support to put in a veto on plans for any large-scale population moves to Triopus.
Kirby checked his time disk. Only three or four minutes at most before they reached the Department for Extra Terrestrial Colonization. There would be a reception lined up no doubt. Triopus was big news. Eventually though, the crunch would come and Ward's unwelcome words would be spoken.
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