By the time we reached the comet, Dillard and I had spent fifteen months together inside the two-man GUTship; and, although we’d respected each other’s privacy as far as possible, I’d come to know him as well as I’ve known anyone. And I believed that his Holistic faith was as well-founded as it was possible to be.
So, when his faith crumbled before the ancient images we extracted from the comet core, I was profoundly shocked.
I was the pilot of the GUTship while Dillard was the mission specialist, with special responsibility for the Berry archaeological imaging process. The ship itself looked a little like a giant parasol: a stem five hundred yards long tipped by our lifecell, a fat disc some fifty yards wide, while the ‘handle’ of the parasol, at the other end of the stem, was a block of asteroid ice within which the GUT drive was embedded.
The lifecell was cluttered with communications banks, with living equipment such as a galley, shower and Virtual tank, and with lab equipment. Thus, much of the lifecell was of necessity common ground to Dillard and me—but it also contained two precious privacy booths into which we could retreat, with books or vision cubes, in order to make-believe we were somewhere else. We decorated the booths in styles of our own choosing—I fixed mine to match my fancy of the sailing ships of old Earth, with blackened ship’s timbers, a narrow bunk and creaking floorboards (I never found out what Dillard did to his; I liked to imagine a bare stone cell containing a jug of water, a hard bed with a single blanket, and a few books—but this was whimsy: the Holistics are not renowned for their asceticism).
