I went back to the problem of setting our sixteen thousand tons of ship onto the rock.It wasn't much of a rock. Jefferson is an irregular-shaped asteroid about twice as far out as Earth. It measures maybe seventy kilometers by fifty kilometers, and from far enough away it looks like an old mud brick somebody used for a shotgun target. It has a screwy rotation pattern that's hard to match with, and since I couldn't use the main engines, setting down was a tricky job.Janet wasn't finished. "Roland Kephart, I've told you about those songs.""Yeah, sure, hon." There are two inertial platforms in Slingshot, and they were giving me different readings. We were closing faster than I liked."It's bad enough that you teach them to the boys. Now the girls are—"I motioned toward the open intercom switch, and Janet blushed. We fight a lot, but that's our private business.The attitude jets popped. "Hear this," I said. "I think we're coming in too fast. Brace yourselves." The jets popped again, short bursts that stirred up dust storms on the rocky surface below.
